what's a beautiful girl?

Last night I watched the film Beautiful Girls. I've been hearing about this movie for years, courtesy of my friend D. He loves it - it may even be his favourite of all time (no Citizen Kane for him, obviously) - but it's not a film that ever registered in my consciousness. In fact, I'm not sure I'd ever heard of it until he started to rattle on about it. But in my defense (or maybe his), it was released in 1996, which was not a fruitful film-viewing period for me (for reasons that I'm sure I'll blog about one day). Because D. periodically quotes from it, and because I like and respect the guy, I felt a certain sense of responsibility to finally see the damn movie. (In the same way my friend P. in Singapore got me jazzed to see one of his favourite films of all time, Apartment Zero. Say this about my friends: they're out-of-the-box when it comes to faves...)

Beautiful Girls was ... ok. It's your fairly typical mid-1990s independent film - think decent script, quirky casting, small epiphanies. I'll grant it one victory: it's better than any Ed Burns film I've seen. (He represents the worst of 1990s independent film, at least for me.) But it got me thinking as to why D. enjoys the film so much. If one will allow me to play dime-store psychologist for a brief moment, it's because D. is lonely and unhappy. More to the point, he's forever attracting himself to women that are, for lack of a better term, unattainable. (I use this word with hesitation - my explanation would involve a whole new post.) As long as I've known him, he follows a familiar pattern: he attracts himself to women that are outgoing, somewhat "arty," outwardly confident, but also aloof. When I query him about his attractions, it's usually the same response: he insists he likes women that possess qualities he feels he doesn't have.

There's a monologue from the film that basically encapsulates everything D. sees in these "beautiful girls": (This is not from memory, but cut and paste from imdb.)

"A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you've been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high full of the single greatest commodity known to man - promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow. This particular aura can be found in the gait of a beautiful girl. In her smile, in her soul, the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like it's going to be okay."

It should be noted that that bit of dialogue is spoken by the biggest loser in the film.

I feel for D. because he's a good guy with bad taste in women. Ok, "bad" is not the right word. How about "misguided"? I think part of his attraction pattern has to do with fear: he becomes slightly (I put this modifier in here to not make him seem like a total leech) obsessed with women that he knows are not going to reciprocate his feelings, thus saving him from having to potentially engage in a real relationship with a perfectly wonderful and "normal" (again, not a great word) woman. Or, attracting himself to these "unattainables" is a defense mechanism - it basically allows him to never have to confront real rejection.

As Lucy from Peanuts would say, "Five cents please." (I've decided to give a 50% discount on the dime-store psychology.)


Listening to: Keith Jarrett's Standards Live
Watching: Beautiful Girls (see above), Raptors Game in an Hour
Reading: The Killing Circle