Grey Gardens
We just finished watching the Drew Barrymore/Jessica Lange biopic, Grey Gardens. For anyone who hasn't seen the original documentary, I'd recommend it. Ms. Havesham has nothing on the Beales. Basically, they began their lives as Park Avenue debs and wound up as crazy cat ladies: the media picked up on the story in the seventies because Big Edie and Little Edie were Jackie O's aunt and cousin respectively.
The movie attempts to uncover the backstory and find out some of the whys from the original film: how could they have fallen so far? How could they have wanted to live in such isolation and squalor? It's like watching a trainwreck you know is going to happen. Just decades of neglect and overspending and passive attempts to manipulate their circumstances that didn't ever work for long. Think cats and no cleaning for decades. It's no wonder the house was condemned--and yet they still refused to leave.
Clearly there are elements of batshit crazy, but it's complicated by the dynamics of the mother/daughter relationship, which is so hard to describe.
I'm going to watch the commentary tomorrow and see if that makes it any easier to talk about, because the movie and their relationship in particular hits me with such an emotional wallop, I don't know how to begin to process the thing. There are definitely elements of manipulation that are familiar to anyone I think with a big, close family, which are just taken to such perverted extremes.
And the lack of critical gaze also gets me: how could these people not see how they looked from the outside! Which is a lesson too--because you never see your own actions the way that outsiders do.
The movie attempts to uncover the backstory and find out some of the whys from the original film: how could they have fallen so far? How could they have wanted to live in such isolation and squalor? It's like watching a trainwreck you know is going to happen. Just decades of neglect and overspending and passive attempts to manipulate their circumstances that didn't ever work for long. Think cats and no cleaning for decades. It's no wonder the house was condemned--and yet they still refused to leave.
Clearly there are elements of batshit crazy, but it's complicated by the dynamics of the mother/daughter relationship, which is so hard to describe.
I'm going to watch the commentary tomorrow and see if that makes it any easier to talk about, because the movie and their relationship in particular hits me with such an emotional wallop, I don't know how to begin to process the thing. There are definitely elements of manipulation that are familiar to anyone I think with a big, close family, which are just taken to such perverted extremes.
And the lack of critical gaze also gets me: how could these people not see how they looked from the outside! Which is a lesson too--because you never see your own actions the way that outsiders do.