I like my women just a little on the trashy side.

Heiresses in terrycloth head wraps have nothing on waitresses in Dolly Parton wigs. Yes, that is a Confederate Railroad reference. What? You don't know (or care) who Confederate Railroad is? My humor is lost on the young and cultured.

Tonight's interest is in the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens directed by Albert and David Maysels. And, as I'm sure you all were wondering, they do have a fansite.

IMDB synopsizer Huggo sez:

Seventy-nine year old Edith Bouvier Beale and her fifty-six year old daughter, Edith 'Little Edie' Bouvier Beale, are Jacqueline Kennedy's aunt and cousin. Living alone with several cats, fleas and raccoons (the latter, wild, which live in the attic but who Edie feeds), the Beale's are discovered living in filth and squalor in Grey Gardens, their 28-room family mansion located in East Hampton, Long Island, the mansion which doesn't even have running water. Edie moved home twenty-four years earlier to care for her ailing mother.
[Hilarity ensues]

In my efforts to break away from the Jewish gentlemen's club I was backing myself into my newest attempt was to branch out and hear what the ladies had to say. But in doing so I was sucked back into the Maysles vortex; a vortex, I might add, that I never really wanted to leave (See the Maysles' link in the sidebar). They do a fantastic job, as always, but I'm not here to blabber on about them.

"The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration ... because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood" --Susan Sontag

Alright, I'll be out with it; I am terrified of the Edies and dread the day when my mother and I transmogrify into them. The first day I read about Grey Gardens was years ago in an article on the prolific careers of the Maysles and their remarkable cinéma vérité story of Jackie O's aunt and cousin living in near squalor with cats, raccoons, and in pools of their own detritus. It made me think of the basement in my mother's house (she's going to kill me for making this comparison, but it has to be done). Of course we never had their kind of money or self-righteous disdain for hoi polloi and having affairs with the rich and famous, but we are more than a bit on the odd-ball side and tend to be nostalgic pack rats who love cats and running around in our skivvies. We aren't full blown Bouviers, but are unhatched eggs of their psychological progeny. Watching those two felt like living the end of 2001: Space Odyssey. Horrified, I called the Moms to tell her to rent it immediately. She could only find the new Drew Barrymore, Jessica Lang version (still haven't seen it, but wasn't Drew Barrymore adorable at the Golden Globes? aside from her hair of course, I mean, blah!) Anywho, turns out, the Moms didn't see the resemblance as a problem. And why should she? The mother had it made: lounging in bed all day, freely disrobing as she pleased, and entertaining Jerry, the young handyman whom Little Edie called the Marble Faun. And as Big Edie asserts, "I haven't got any warts on me!" No warts! She was the complete package.

This is why I'm dropping the ax now, moving out of the state and leaving the cat (maybe). Am I afraid I'm squandering my potential? You bet. And this is what Little Edie partially represents to me: the harsh reality of letting go of one's ambitions. But she also represents much more; she was a larger than life character living on her own mad stage and for that I love her. Their entire existence in contradictory in this way; they live freely by their own rules, but are trapped by the lives they couldn't escape. Little Edie frolicked gleefully around the house, but also spoke of her hatred of confinement. Free, but emprisoned. Living, but dead. Post-aristocratic Schrodinger's cats. I also love this movie for that. And apparently so do gay men.

In 2006, the delightfully gay trio Doug Wright, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie adapted the film into a musical which went on to win several awards. In fact, while researching I found that Grey Gardens has reached an iconically gay stature. The Bouvier-as-outsiders and gay-as-outsider correlation swiftly brought the film into the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) cultural repertoire. In his essay "The Gayness of Grey Gardens", Matthew Hays quotes Albert Maysles:

"There was this weird kind of paradox about them being outsiders. They also became these ultimate insiders because they got to be in the film. So how did they do that? Outsiders often want desperately to be insiders. The women in Grey Gardens got both. I suppose that's true of homosexuals: they would like to be accepted for who they are, but maintain their individuality."

The gay cult following accrued by the film may also have its roots in a subject I've briefly mentioned in other blogs about the role and response of the audience. How the subjects are portrayed and how the audience reacts are manifest in several recurring ways in documentary films especially dealing with "eccentrics" or "outsiders." The bathetic moments are especially telling of the nature of the film. Even though I found the Edies hilarious and possibly insane, at no moment did I feel a sense of mockery. Little Edie was able to illuminate their absurd situation through freely choreographed dance numbers in their shambly old house. An air of camp lingers around those scenes--another issue used in Hays' gay attraction agrument. But for all the seemingly gay over/undertones Grey Gardens is relatable on an elementary humanistic level.


Now, please watch or rewatch Grey Gardens at your leisure and give a sheynem dank to the Maysels for making another fantastic film.



Your humble viewer,

erin d.





The performance on the Tony's.