Graphic by Isa de Leon
I watched “Garden State” for the first time with my family two weeks after I moved home after college graduation. I thought it was okay. We got to the scene where Andrew Largeman and Sam are sitting in the bathtub where Andrew’s mother drowned a few days earlier. As Sam was collecting Andrew’s tears in a cup, my mom — ever the comedian — turned to me and said, “You’d probably attract a man like that Raegan … he’s a little fucked up.” And I laughed, because what she said was objectively funny. “Garden State” is low on my “watch again” list, though.
And this isn’t about me hating the movie “Garden State,” by the way. I didn’t think it had much of a plot, but Zach Braff is a multi-millionaire who’s dating Florence Pugh and I can’t open Linkedin without crying, so what do I know? This is about me hating the fact that my mom was right. This is about hating the fact that I am that girl — and that I have known so many versions of that boy in my short 22 years of life. This is about the generation of boys that movies like “Garden State” and “500 Days of Summer” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World” and —
I’m getting off track.
You’re going to have to remember four words to finish reading this. Four words first strung together by film critic Nathan Rabin to describe Kirsten Dunst’s adorably quirky turn in “Elizabethtown”: manic pixie dream girl. The manic pixie dream girl is defined by Rabin as a female character who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
Despite everything I’m about to say, I believe that the guys in my life so far have had mostly good intentions. Call it my fatal flaw, but I don’t think a single one of them took a look at me and decided that my piercings and tattoos meant I actually liked getting hurt. Besides, my first real boyfriend was someone I knew before any of that. He was one of my high school best friends — we met through theater. A real film buff. He asked me to prom by paying a friend of his, who worked at the movie theater, to play a recording of him after the credits of a movie we saw together, and we weren’t even dating yet. He ended up going to school to make movies. I haven’t watched any of his shorts, but I’m sure they’re good — his always were.
I used to sneak desserts from the restaurant I worked at and drive them to him when he worked later than me. For one of his birthdays, I made him a book of blackout poetry out of his favorite play: “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder. Our dates took place in a lot of back rows of movie theaters or thrift stores. Those things were really good, but in his head I was just like those girls in the movies we watched together: free-spirited, mysterious, alternative. But in real life, I was a mess. I was insecure, I was confused, I was anxious all the time — all the things a high school junior has a right to be. I was me, but I wasn’t his idea of me.
But that I understood. That was high-school-aged misunderstanding of people and relationships — I’ve since figured out that there was a lot I misunderstood back then too. But what I didn’t understand for a while after was why it kept happening that way.
I dyed my hair blue at the end of my freshman year of college. Nothing crazy, just the ends, with two different boxes of dye that made a deep, beautiful indigo. I did it because I found out the deadbeat from my home town who I was talking to at the time, who showed me an inch of kindness after a year that nearly broke me, still had a girlfriend. He wanted to use me to cheat on her. It was a game to him, and I was a pawn. So, I called a girl from acting class who I barely knew, my best friend now, and we drove to CVS and she came to my very poorly lit college dorm and we dyed the ends of my hair blue.
That was the beginning, I think.
“Broodingly soulful young men.” I’ve met a lot of those. They were guitar players, filmmakers, wannabe writers, soon to be dropouts — but they all fit that core demographic. And I was all of life’s infinite mysteries and adventures, wrapped up in a thin, blonde, 5’ 4” package.
Why did my boyfriend sophomore year of college decide that he had the strength to start going to therapy only after we’d been together a few months? Why did the guy I was convinced I was in love with at the very end of the next year — the one who would pick me up at 11 pm to drive around and listen to pop punk music for hours into the morning — disappear from my life without a word a month after he graduated? Why did the tall, skinny, fluffy-haired brunette who I sat with for hours stargazing in Fairmount Park get back together with the girlfriend he asked me if he should break up with only a few months after we had slept together?
It feels selfish to complain about being desired in any form. And fair enough — in all of these beginnings, things were bliss. They were the happy montage part of the movie before the big twist. And yes, the poetry, and the thoughtful gifts, and the contraband desserts are a part of me. But what the great indie romances fail to show — or rather what they succeed in hiding — is that they are not all there is to me. Women are not just the nurturers and the caregivers, the solid walls with soft eyes. Yet that is what we see time and time again. And when writers allow women to have problems, they are not real or raw, they are light and airy insecurities that “broodingly soulful young men” can fix with a smile. But I don’t need you to tell me I’m beautiful — I need Zoloft.
Why are we demonized and called two-dimensional for things that specifically make us our whole and complete selves? Why is our empathy constantly taken advantage of, our weaknesses exploited as tangible and solvable puzzles for sensitive boys? Why is it so important and special that we are “not like other girls”? I love other girls! I strive to be as truly good as many of the “other girls” I have had the pleasure of meeting throughout my life.
The only thing I’ve ever been sure of about myself is that I’m smart. I must be at least somewhat pretty to even have all the material to write this essay, and I consider myself decently funny; but I’ve spent all my life being told that I am smart. Every man who has had the privilege to know me and then leave me must know it too, because I am constantly treated as a source of therapy and big, soothing words. Yes, tell me about your mother and how she mistreated you, or your father who never recognized your genius. Tell me about the girls from high school, who saw through your act — who knew better than to waste their emotional labor on you. Let me rationalize with you, desperate to hold on, like I don’t know that you’ll leave once you hear what you want to. The most harmful part of all of these things by far? They’ve made me doubt the one thing about me I have always known to be true.
This essay isn’t going to have a nice wrapped up conclusion, by the way. There is no music swelling as the credits roll. This is simply the stream of consciousness of someone who has been hurt a lot and doesn’t understand why. What I do finally understand though, is that it’s not my job to live up to the person I am in anyone else’s head. I don’t exist solely in fevered imaginations — I exist right here, right now, and I want to use all my existence being the main character of my own story, not a magenta-haired, tattooed plot device in someone else’s.
Did you know Zach Braff never bothered to give Sam a last name? I wish I knew it. And I wish I could kiss her forehead and look into those big, doe-like eyes and tell her that it would be okay if she wanted to curb stomp that boy who made her nothing more than a therapeutic footnote in the story of his life. But again, this is not an essay about hating the movie “Garden State” — this is, for once, about me.