The Kirsten Dunst Connection: How Character and Face can Alter Feeling.

Since I was eleven years old, and 1994's Interview with a Vampire was screened at the old Hillsborough Eight Cinema, which is now a used car lot, I have had an affinity for Kirsten Dunst. Her tiny, doll faced, Claudia, hugging her mother's diseased body in the back street slums of New Orleans, even then, felt like the greatest tragedy before the dark and creeping beauty of an eternal world set the scene. At that moment, it was all I wanted to be.

And this is not about idolization; no, all my idols are dead. It just seems that at most every point of Dunst's career, she was playing, in that exact moment, a part of me.

1999's The Virgin Suicides was seriously, the best film I had ever seen. At the time, I was sixteen. I was a projectionist in a movie theater; I had just transferred schools, and I only talked to the most untrustworthy people because I just wanted to be alone. In the projection booth, I would chain smoke out the back door, on the third floor, and watch the lights shifting along the expressway. I stayed in the dark rooms alone, all night, laying across the velvet cushions that covered the concrete floor, their only function as fractured movie seats. I wrote, nonstop—I wrote love letters, poems, I wrote everything, and most of it I did not mean.

Coppola's film felt like me. The golden light, the sound of strings and longing. The plucked cords, the old newspapers stacked high, keeping the house behind a screen— the feeling of always looking at the world through glass, as something that kept moving beyond me, felt like things that were true. And there were other things. 

That year I went to Homecoming at a factory that was decorated like a rain forest, a carnival; parts were decorated like Halloween, and we dropped acid, and I sat on a bench all night talking to a stranger, in Santa's North Pole, laughing at the audacity of Santa Claus and what he has gotten away with for so long. That Homecoming too, I started the night at a Chinese restaurant, with a blonde boyfriend, and at some part of the night, I ended up with a dark haired one that liked music, and to have fun and laugh at everything. 

I could write about Torrance in Bring It On (2000) and my long term stint as a competitive cheerleader, or how Nicole in Crazy / Beautiful (2001) and Mary in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) represent absolute pieces of my psyche and personal history and lunacy and sense of longing, but mostly, at this point, Kirsten Dunst was still on an upswing, and her film choices were frequent and diligent. Her characters swayed between strength and fragility, which most teenagers and girls in their early 20s feel, so

 

for this, I will focus on the physical dynamics, and that no matter where I was working (the concession stand during Bring it On, the jewelry shop during Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the bookstore/cafe during Marie Antoinette), I was asked out on numerous dates due to my physical similarities to Dunst. I received anonymous phone calls, mystery love letters; I went out on a date with a boy that kept calling me Mary Jane and attempting to convince me to dye my hair red. Once, a group of Japanese tourists asked for my photo, and another time I was on someone's scavenger hunt list. None of these things ever bothered me because at the time, I could not take one thing seriously.

I saw Marie Antoinette (2006) three times the first weekend it came out, and each time it was with someone else. Despite the intricacies of sound and silence; the brightness of light and scene versus the weary, fading feeling of becoming a shadow; the longing to see the world outside of the same glass frames that were present in The Virgin Suicides, but more refined, more designed and put together, all framed something very much the same in my life. The dreariness of Dunst's Antoinette when she was alone, completely a stranger to her new family, resonated with me. It was the dissolution of the self in order to fabricate something new for everyone else, and even still, that was not fine enough, but Marie Antoinette, despite the cultural shift it caused, was pretty much panned and pulled through the streets, ravaged entirely.

  There was Dunst's Lolita photo shoot in Lula Magazine, which hit stands when I was obsessed with Nabakov, and talking to Vincent Gallo, quite frequently, about similar things;

then the "Non Plus One" film for the fashion house, Opening Ceremony, which she made with Jason Schwartzman, which I saw in my little, yellow apartment in Omaha, and I so badly wanted my relationship to reflect the same thing.

Katie Marks' in All Good Things (2010) exemplified the worst part of making the worst mistake and disappearing completely, and Dunst's Justine in Melancholia was one of the greatest, most beautiful apocalyptic dramas that I have ever seen, and her role in the film was almost as beautiful as the ultimate tragedy— the great finality of life— no literature, no trees, which Justine was acquainted with, already, so intimately. But even that film had a terrible run and limited release because Lars Von Trier said some pretty horrible things and was pulled from Cannes for his personal beliefs.

There is art and characters and print and film that are created at points in history, which connect so seamlessly to our universal subconsciousness, and seem as if they were always meant to be. Then there are names and faces, hair colors and dispositions, the universality of personal experience that can so easily be played out on the screen, and seem so similar in their expectancies, their heartaches and beliefs.

A Review of Z: a Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald &How Female Writers &Historians are Making Feminist Heros Out of Remembered Villains.

When I first began studying literature, the two most profound concepts that I became obsessed with are as follows:

one. Czeslaw Milosz's idea that the purpose of a writer is to create a space for the dead.

two. Jorge Luis Borge's insistence that everything is fiction.

 Each point is not only sound, but productive for both the writer and the readers; however, these opposing ideas insist, together, that one must always, always question the reliability of the narrator, which is why, when it comes to historical tomes about women— women that were misrepresented and mislaid out in history— I always question the goal of the narrator.

Furthermore, in recent years, it seems that numerous other women feel this way too, which is why it seems that so many female writers and historians fall back into those tomes and letters and histories to unveil the truth; and these volumes do not go unnoticed. For example, Antonia Fraser's 2001 biography, Marie Antoinette: the Journey, not only permanently disassociated Antoinette from the moniker of a self righteous queen with a "Let the eat cake!" mentality, but Fraser also disassociated Antoinette from the cause of the French Revolution completely, turning Antoinette into a scapegoat. Fraser's biography was not only a national best seller and on numerous Book-of-the-Year lists, but she caused an entire resurgence of art, fashion, literature and film that all focused on Marie Antoinette, the front runner being Sofia Coppola's 2006 film, Marie Antoinette, which Coppola wrote the screenplay for that was created from Fraser's biography.

Likewise, Therese Ann Fowler's 2013 biographical fiction, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, carries the same weight that a new manifesto of an old figure needs; however, Fowler needed to cut through a tremendous bit of rumor and memory before she could even get to the heart of the Zelda Fitzgerald's story.

In American literature, Zelda Fitzgerald is remembered much in the way of Marie Antionette, as Zelda Fitzgerald is seen as the guiding force of her famous husband's, F. Scott Fitzgerald's, inability to write, absolutely ability to drink, and ultimately, his untimely death. She is associated to a world of torment for her husband; however, most of these accounts come from F. Scott Fitzgerald, somewhat, through numerous novels, which he credits lifting completely from Zelda herself and her journals, and Ernest Hemingway, who was not only a famous drunkard himself, but most of his knowledge was based off of his nights out with F. Scott, where the complaining came between the party. Not to mention, F. Scott was at his peak of popularity when he brought Hemingway into the literary circle by endorsing Hemingway's novel and sending the copy to his publisher, which soon became Hemingway's publisher, and sent Hemingway into literary stardom.

If there is anything that has occurred throughout history, it's the literary boys' club, and Fitzgerald and Hemingway were established members. Besides their drinking, the only thing these two men couldn't control was Zelda herself, which Fowler proves. The Roaring 20s and Flapper Movement were not only built around prohibition, but the women involved in the movement themselves: the rebellious, partying, intelligent, take-no-prisoners flappers, which Zelda had invented. Furthermore, she maintained her status as the figurehead, and it is virtually impossible to topple a figurehead; one can only chip away at it. And throughout history, Zelda is known for these parts that have broken away and defined her, which was mostly found in Hemingway's 1964 autobiography, A Moveable Feast, which Fowler all but toppled herself.

If Zelda Fitzgerald's status as a feminist figure has ever been questioned, Fowler moves Zelda Fitzgerald's relevance into sharp focus because she moves past Zelda's emblem as a party girl, and focuses more than half the tome on who Zelda became after giving birth to her daughter, Scotty. In a culture that defines motherhood as the end-all-be-all of coolness and sexuality, Fowler proves that Zelda became even moreso in her own right. 

While F. Scott sunk deeper and deeper into alcoholism and depression, Zelda became a writer, a ballerina and a painter. However, there are things the movement could not do, and most of Zelda's stories were published under F. Scott's name, not only because F. Scott was paid a higher sum, but also because he saw it as embarrassing that Zelda was publishing when he could not write a thing.

More so, as a ballerina in Paris, Zelda was not only dedicated to ballet, but she shined, and she was offered a position with a ballet company in Italy, which F. Scott refused to let her take, and instead, Zelda was sent to a sanatorium for months on end, and mostly, she was there because F. Scott saw her as uncontrollable, and Zelda saw her life as unlived. It was in the sanatorium that Zelda took up painting.

Fowler's Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald builds a new manifesto to the memory of Zelda Fitzgerald. Not only is the story itself intriguing, but the language and descriptions create a sense of being steeped in reality, and that sense of reality is why the book is classified as a historical fiction, despite the years of research. And though Fowler discredits F. Scott Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's accounts, she still gives parts of them relevance, and she brings all the negative to light, which not only creates a place for the dead, but questions the relevance of truth in history and memory.

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