After sunset is the blue hour. The sun is just below the horizon, and on a clear day, the remaining light scatters through the air, turning everything blue. At some point, you must have pushed out of a door, rolled down a window, or dragged a trash bag to the driveway and suddenly felt that blue air plunge into your lungs. You can taste the difference like you can smell a storm before it arrives.
At the beginning of 2021, I was home in Beijing, taking my first university classes online, living with my parents for the longest time since I was 14, and feeling confused about everything. I decided I couldn’t stay home forever, and that I would come to Brown for the summer semester, even if it meant uncertainty regarding Covid and my visa status. In the few days after that decision, I started taking more evening walks around my neighborhood. I told my
Have you ever tried the artisan vanilla yogurt from Narragansett Creamery? This particular little carton offers a whole gastronomic experience: The light airy freshness of tangy vanilla yogurt is perfectly enhanced by a thin layer of sweet cream that’s reminiscent of soft serve. I’ve been told I use certain words too loosely, but the experience really was transcendental—the cream-yogurt combination makes you experience dairy anew. What’s more, it didn’t take me to Hokkaido or Switzerland necessarily, but grounded me right here in the charm of Rhode Island. Inspired by yogurt, I took this long weekend to experience the colorful seaside pastel, rustic cuisine, and coastal walks, and it’s everything to write home about.
parents that these walks alleviated the headache that arose from staring at travel documents, which was not a lie. Mostly, though, I was using those walks as a way to process the approaching goodbye.
On those walks, I started listening to Sigur Rós again, an Icelandic band whose music sounds like long train tunnels, whale songs, the end of a movie, and the beginning of something new. Svefn-g-englar, one of my favorite songs, seemed like it was tailored for the blue hour. The chime, the long droning sounds, and the low murmuring were the perfect texture on which to layer the sounds of wind, traffic, kids chasing down the sidewalk as the lights went up, and the city turning in for the night. Submerged in the blue hour, the streets that I grew up on became strange but cinematic. The neighborhood convenience store, which, in my memory, was crammed
In an issue that could be compared to a mouthful of pop-rocks this week: in Feature is a reflection of the blue hour , an elusive time of day that holds special significance for the writer. In Narrative, one writer discusses her experiences with insomnia and how white noise has provided her with comfort through this struggle; the other comments on the importance of the highly coveted "perfect" going out top and its transformative power in instilling confidence. In Arts & Culture, one writer addresses the claims that Fleabag presents a dangerous anti-feminist protagonist; the other reflects on a love of films that romanticize Hollywood and why the recent Babylon is one of the best examples of this. In Lifestyle, the first installment of fashion advice from a writer studying abroad in Bologna.
to the point of becoming a fire hazard, was now growing empty. Its windows were covered with bolded sale signs promising a final move-out at the end of the month, a fate that foretold my own. Through the windows above the convenience store, the apartment lights flickered on and off as people returned from work, shuffled the contents of bags, walked in and out of rooms, and tucked children into beds. I pictured myself with my family framed by a similar window, and a premature sense of nostalgia tinged those images as I thought about saying goodbye. It was a nostalgia that I only knew how to process by looking at it from a distance, so I walked again and again in the blue hour, until my neighborhood felt like a reproduction of itself in a dream, where the details grow more vivid and bizarre the closer you are to waking up.
This was not a new feeling. For me, the blue hour
Head to the Blue Room for a side to your salad or sandwich, Jo’s after a night out and about, or Gourmet-to-Go anytime during the day to experience the yogurt for yourself. Or, even better, rent a zip car and get the goods right from the animal. This is all to say, think of Narragansett, Newport, Mystic, the locales on our doorsteps, and lest they be overlooked in our search for flavorful experiences.
Wishing seaside sunsets were edible, Kimberly Liu Editor-in-Chief
has always been conducive to strangeness and unreality. Before I was in Beijing, I spent much of the beginning of the pandemic in Massachusetts with extended family. During the evenings, I walked the dog in suburban streets and glanced at lit-up windows that looked like scenes that Edward Hopper never got to paint. As a child, my favorite thing about America was the suburban houses. They seemed like the real-life version of a two-story wooden dollhouse that I received on a birthday, a familiar lens through which to see the culture that baffled me for most of my time in the United States. Unlike the dollhouse, which I knew inside out and could rearrange however I wanted, American culture remained frustratingly out of my grasp. But in the blue hour, houses turned into large dollhouses again, so when I wandered down the street and caught glimpses of half a person, the evening news, a small photo frame, or just the front porch light that stayed on throughout the night, I could feel like I was a part of them, and that I was someone who understood their significance. Once I went back inside one of those houses, I was again overwhelmed by confusion, but out in the open blue air, I could walk on as if I understood.
In many ways, the summer of 2020 brought me back to those days of relying upon distance and pretense to process culture shock. Not only had I returned to the same house, but I was also once again completely bewildered by my surroundings, thanks to the changes brought about by the pandemic. Day-to-day quarantine life passed by hazily, but out in the clear blue air, strolling through empty streets dimly overcast with spotted shadows of maple trees, for a fleeting moment, I could escape to an alternative universe where everything was normal, and the days were simply rocking towards a known destination like the trains that pass through after midnight.
A year later, a friend would send me an essay collection by Rebecca Solnit called A Field Guide to Getting Lost . In the essays, Solnit repeatedly goes back to the idea of “the blue of distance”—the mysterious blueness that tinges distant sceneries. She talks about 15th century European paintings that tried to create the illusion of depth by drawing small blue worlds in the distance. Looking at those paintings, you can almost imagine that if you took a walk in them, you would eventually arrive at a blue world with blue houses, blue fields, blue sheep. But Solnit’s point is that, in reality, the blue of distance can never be reached. It is a romantic idea whose appeal lies in its unattainability.
It seems that the blue hour brings the blue of distance—or at least the illusion of it—to us. Walking in the blue hour is the closest approximation of arriving at the small blue worlds in 15th century European paintings. If I can believe I have reached the unreachable destination, I can also believe I have comprehended my surroundings, resolved the emotions about a looming
departure, and peacefully accepted the unpredictability brought by a world-wide pandemic. For 20 minutes, this blue illusion drags me out of the tangle of emotions and fills me with a feeling of perching on a side of a hill that overlooks the unending rooftops of my city. From this distance, it is hard to not think about how small and inconsequential everything seems, and when the dayto-day becomes stifling and sticky, seeing things in this distanced light is a much-needed respite.
But distance cannot always veil the turbulence in my surroundings or smooth over the edges of my emotions. After a few months of preparation and clinging to the blue hour for respite, I set off to the United States for college. During my stop in Singapore, I found myself sitting with a new friend on a hotel rooftop in the blue hour. It was not a particularly tall building, so we were surrounded by city lights and humid summer air that smelled very different from home. Across the street, we watched a man shuffle slowly between his car and an apartment entrance, his shoulder weighted down by plastic bags on each trip. I stumbled through a description of my feelings towards the blue hour, then asked if evenings like these also made my friend feel detached but peaceful, to which she answered: “Not really, I’m mainly wondering if that guy had a nice day.” I took a harder look at the man, then at my friend’s face illuminated by the city lights.
In the end, I arrived in Providence, and by the winter of 2021, I had already completed two semesters at Brown. I spent my winter break in my dorm room, sitting quietly with my books, taking long walks in the snow, attempting to replicate my family’s home cooking, and taking care of plants that my friends left me with. Alongside the little garden of potted plants that occupied my windowsill was a UV lamp with a bright violet-pink light bulb that they had left me, so when I walked back to the dorm at the end of each blue hour, my window stood out unmistakably in the view from the street. As I grew more accustomed to wandering around a quiet campus, that violet-pink color of my windowsill also seeped into a corner of my blue hours. It became a kind of connection that eased my distant blue world into a real, vibrant one that contained my friends, their potted plants, and the smell of my improving cooking. When I returned to the dorm with my lungs soaked in blue and my fingers frozen, my violet-pink window gradually closed the blue of distance in my mind, and I was back to being one who gazes into the distant blue haze in a painting, rather than someone who walks in the small, imaginary blue world. At the top of the steps leading to the front door, I am again enveloped by my immediate surroundings, my confusing, uncertain surroundings. Then, when I go up to my room, I am greeted by the same light on my windowsill, signaling as brightly as ever into a dimming sky.
Maybe I’m sitting at the dinner table, feeling the warmth of the tea mug and the crumbs on the tablecloth. My brother might be beside me, still eating—methodical as a surgeon. My mother is probably ribbing him for sleeping until the afternoon, and between bites, he defends himself: “It took me so long to fall asleep last night.” Or maybe it’s approaching bedtime, and there are people talking outside my room, with errant lilts sneaking in under the door. What if they aren’t quiet soon?
Insomnia is always in the background. It causes a rush in my chest, distracting me from the surrounding banter. (Soon I’ll need to brush my teeth, which feels like putting on battle armor.) The word loses meaning as I repeat it over and over in my mind. By dissolving it into nothing, maybe I can weaken the word so that sleep will dissolve me into nothing too. -
Inhabiting myself has consequences. As I prepare to go to sleep, I arrange my surroundings with care. First, I turn on the big white box fan, positioning it so the airflow is parallel to my body (its low-pitch hum masks cars-stopping-at-stopsign sounds). Then I roll earplugs between my fingers and slot them into my ears. Finally, I play white noise through noise-cancelling headphones that go over the earplugs, artfully arranging a blanket around the bulky headphones so I can sleep on my side.
But auditory control measures aren’t always beneficial. The more you block out unexpected sounds, the more sensitive you become to them, even to the unobtrusive ones. My defensive layers are the logical conclusion of an arms race with the heating-turning-on noise and the footstepsoverhead noise and the what-the-hell-is-that noise. And, when it’s naturally silent and I try to sleep without my armor, the room remains charged with the potential for sound— even if it’s just the insidious drum of my own heartbeat in my ear. This is why I like white noise: It’s beautifully predictable, full yet empty.
-
For me, sounds cause insomnia, and insomnia is selfperpetuating. Leafing through the past four years of awakewith-the-owls journal entries, I recognize this cycle. My handwriting falls off the lines in most of the pages, bearing descriptions of frustration, and the pursuit of comfort despite it. In a moment of inspiration, I search for the words “sleep” and “tired” and “insomnia” in my text history, and look through messages sent at all hours. I bore myself. Every insomnia-long night is a journey of frustration and despair and clarity; with it come roughly five changes of location, an
“You don’t have bitch-on-bitch experience.”
“I didn’t appreciate it, I was just there to hit the quan.”
hour of sleep here and there. And it’s always the same.
Naive text sent on September 2, 2019 (three days after freshman year move-in): “I haven’t managed to sleep past 7 yet.”
When I started at college, I journaled about how the bright New England morning light shone in too early through my window, and how the garbage trucks were all beepy and vroomy outside. Even with my small black fan drowning out common-room-laughing sounds, I was often up at night. I tried not to disturb the sleeping roommatelump as I read Plato’s Republic, my phone flashlight tucked partly under the covers to make it even dimmer.
Online questionnaire completed hastily at 4:30 a.m.: do you have problems with sleep onset, sleep maintenance, or early morning awakening?
Answer: all of the above.
During sophomore year, I thought I would sleep better in the predictability of my quarantine routine. I found “11 hours of sleep sounds” on Spotify, a playlist of two- and three-hour tracks of white noise. You can hear the gap between the tracks if you’re awake, a small but startling break. And I was awake, with a looming physics midterm, and my dorm-room-centered life providing no distraction. I did practice problems for hours—the same problems day after day, failing to remember how I’d done them before.
Midterm grade: C.
Attempting to deal with the fallout of insomniainduced irritability: “Okay so I feel like I tried to apologize during the call but then just made an excuse. So I’m sorry and will do better.”
Come summer, I was working in a lab. I wanted to use my early mornings to get ahead on experiments, but the lab building wasn’t always unlocked then. I circled its periphery, tugging on inscrutable doors in the cool quiet hours, feeling an automatic bond with anyone else I saw (you too, huh?). Later, I walked home in crushing heat. My hair was greasy from days without showering, my lab jeans were chafing, and I was utterly spent. (Dear housemate who often washed
my dinner plates, thank you and I’m sorry).
A summer journal entry: “Today has much more clarity. Also, I’m so tired.”
By then I had learned to be afraid as new semesters approached, since reading on little sleep is difficult. You finally get your eyes set up so they’re aimed at the page, and then you’re Googling different species of monkeys, and getting angry that your attention span is roughly two seconds. It’s so easy to forget that it’s not always been this way.
(Still, I don’t want to mislead: Lots of good things can poke through a layer of fatigue. You can be really happy, a brain-dead Mona Lisa smiling and feeling incredibly grateful for the overwhelming abundance of her life.) -
Through the years, I have become a student of my insomnia. I am attuned to fine-grained distinctions between the haze of two, four, or six hours of sleep. Through observation, I have formulated rules that I wrap around myself like an extra blanket (things will improve once you just get through the morning; time can banish even seemingly immortal insomnia spells). And, staring at the fuzzy green lights inside my eyelids, I have devoted much thought to why being awake right now is unpleasant.
Maybe it’s because I’m divided within—by which I mean, often the only way to sleep is to trick myself. I will go and lie down in my friend’s room, feeling the hard floor through the poofy winter coat I’ve spread on the ground. I tell myself I’m just awake-resting: Wouldn’t it be embarrassing to fall asleep here? Then I doze off. Or, if it’s 5 a.m. and I can’t sleep, I get ready for the day. Shivering from the early morning temperature drop, I brush my teeth in the not-fully-night dimness and take clothes from my dresser, even though I can’t quite make out the colors. By the end of my morning preparations, sometimes I am emptied out of the intent to sleep, and am thereby insomnia-proof. I climb into bed, pull blankets over my day-clothes, and nap for a bit.
Amidst this outwardly invisible mental maneuvering,
I wonder, who am I? Maybe I am the one who thinks, “I’m trying not to fall asleep on this borrowed floor”; maybe I am the one who knows that’s the whole reason I knocked on the door. Maybe I am trapped in a night-watch body that won’t sleep; maybe my poor sleep-deprived body is trapped by my mind. Maybe I am the tired person who can’t always reign in her nonspecific seething; maybe I am the wellrested person who exists between bouts of insomnia.
This is who I want to be: an annotates-the-reading student who goes on runs in brisk air while the sunlight is still gentle.
And maybe there is a way to fit these pieces of myself together. Even if fatigue has material consequences, even if I keep waging my campaign against noise, maybe I can stop trying to cut my insomnia out from my being.
At the end of one of many tiring days in the lab-job summer, my family picked me up in the parking lot outside the lab building. At a table outside a restaurant, the world illuminated by the clarifying mellow light of sunset, I mentioned my sleeping problems. Looking reflective, my mother told me a story. “Once upon a time, when you were an infant, we couldn’t get you to go to sleep. We did everything we could—we carried you around the block for hours—but nothing worked until we played wave sounds on the battery-powered white-noise machine.”
Was this why I found white noise so comforting, all this time later? I could see baby-me, bundled up in a stroller in the supermarket, unable to sleep because all the shopping-cart-rolling noises were aimed at her ears. I could see her parents driving her home and refilling her head with the ocean as she drifted off, baby-drool oozing from her mouth.
The sameness of insomnia has long been frustrating; every time I thought it might be over, the saga began anew. But, the sameness can also be relieving. As I listen to white noise, even if I’m lying awake, I remember that my sleeplessness has persisted within me since my infant days, and—in a way—that is comforting.
Mysterious and alluring, it is one of the rarest creatures in the world. Only spotted on the most unlikely of nights, it constantly evades capture at the last minute, coming tantalizingly close before dancing away once again. Despite its slippery nature, it entraps the world's attention as its depths hold secrets and promises about not only the natural world but also our true selves. This solitary creature, an apex predator in its own right, is none other than the most elusive animal of all: the perfect going-out top.
It's an inane concept, but one that so many of us subscribe to. The siren song of the perfect goingout top calls out to all who venture into the night, making us hope and dream for that instant fix, the panacea to all our problems. I can picture it: a daring little red thing with straps that criss-cross in mystifying patterns; or maybe a black leather piece, tight in all the right places yet classy nonetheless; or perhaps a flimsy, glittery monstrosity that incomprehensibly stays on despite all common logic. Regardless of what it looks like, I know it's there, daring me to find it.
Every weekend, as the prospect of another night out approaches, the idea of the perfect goingout top returns to haunt me. On Friday night, after the week's slew of classes is done, I come back to my humble abode, ready to shed my regular skin for my night-out persona. In a futile attempt to escape my reality, a familiar ritual of beauty potions and tiny tops begins, soundtracked by the yearning voices of Taylor Swift and Charli XCX. As they sing about unfaithful boyfriends and hopeless romances, I am transported to their world of heartbreak and drama, one that allows me to forget my own troubles. After all, vulnerability is so much sexier when it belongs to someone else.
And so the process begins: my desk turns from a repository of learning and scholarly pursuits to
an assembly line of various tools and products, producing yet another clone with perfect hair and immaculate makeup. My hair, already damaged and dry, is attacked with an inferno of weapons, every strand meticulously brushed and put into place as I attempt the paradoxical "casual blowout." Only once it's finished, when the impossible has been achieved, can I move on to the next phase in my metamorphosis. The array of bottles and creams stare me down with all the pressure of a chess game; it’s a tactical minefield where one wrong move can spell cosmetic disaster. The baby pink blush I pat onto my cheeks, a stroke of painterly deception, is only a faint echo of the flush of true excitement—a wild adventure with friends or a kiss from a beautiful lover.
Every application, every brushstroke of different paints and potions, is an attempt to bring these dreams to life, to recreate the thrill of what can only be described as a "good time." Despite the obvious farce, the intent, the fantasy of realization, rings true. I can't help but wonder if maybe this night will be different, if I can live out previous expectations of what going out in college would actually be like, the kind of experience the movies had promised me.
But, of course, all dreams must come to an end, and so I stand naked in front of my mirror, staring at the blank canvas that can only be my body. Why does it look like that? Why aren't they symmetrical? Is that normal? The only solution is the perfect top, one that will hide all the weird bulges and shapes that must be mine, even if they seem like a stranger's. Perhaps the right shirt—sexy but not too sexy, flirty but not too flirty—will hide them, will let me exist without constantly thinking about the body hiding underneath.
And so I dig through my closet, filled with countless dainty little shirts, all of them specifically
purchased for this purpose. The innumerable dollars and the endless hours I have spent shopping have come down to this pivotal moment where all my excess may come to fruition. Maybe this one, with its clever cutout could do the job, or this other one, boned and fitted, would work for tonight. But no, they don't fit right. None of them ever look right.
The top I'm searching for, the one that I'm convinced is in my closet, hiding somewhere behind my colorful collection of halter tops and my impulse-purchase corset, doesn't exist. It can't exist. Despite all my calculations, my formula for the perfect top—one that factors in the right amount of cleavage, a tasteful level of tightness, and a length that isn't too cropped but still shows off the right bits—is wrong. Even when I find a piece that hits all the right buttons, there's something missing, and when I look back at the girl in my mirror, it's still just me.
After all, the perfect going-out top is not merely cute; it is completely transformative. The girl with the perfect going-out top is not a mere woman. I see her moving on a crowded dance floor, easily waltzing between friends and strangers as she slinks through conversations without pause. Her outfit, casual yet so right for the occasion, is the exact combination of effortless and flawless, as if she mindlessly threw on whatever was lying on top of her bed without a care in the world. And she's beautiful—so beautiful that when I see her, the only thought in my head is that I would give anything in the world to be like her.
She doesn't only look the part, she is. She can party all night and still wake up at seven in the morning the next day, ready to run an easy mile at the Nelson. Her grades are perfect, even as she takes the most notorious of pre-med classes, easily completing a double concentration. When asked what she does in her free time, she rattles off the longest list of extracurriculars, and only when
pressed does she reveal she's the editor-in-chief of my favorite publication.
And of course she's not alone. She's the kind of girl who has the perfect group of friends, all of whom are just as gorgeous. Every weekend night, they convene to get ready to go out. My silly rituals are transformed in their hands, and the act of putting on makeup is consecrated. When they do their eyeliner, their blush, their lipstick, they are not painting their face in an attempt to look more beautiful—it is an exercise in womanhood and friendship. As they share different outfit options, the shirts that pass between their hands are holy garments, immortalizing their friendship as more than a mere relationship between friends. What is farcical in the solitude of my room is made holy in the presence of this group, as they elevate the simple routines of womanhood into the sacrament.
Despite what people may say, a going-out top is not just a simple article of clothing. It's the armor that will protect me from the night that lies ahead. Every face-pinching shot of vodka, every dignityconsuming frat party I go to, every grating song that always gets played—none of that matters when I have the right top on. The allure of the going-out top is not in how it makes my boobs look bigger or my waist look more snatched—it's in its ability to transform me into someone I'm not, someone I can't even recognize, someone who is capable of taking on all the challenges and dangers of the night. And in the light of day, when I take off my top and don my regular uniform, even if I wasn't changed, at least I looked the part.
So this weekend, when I get ready to go out again, I will look at my empty room, my drawer full of makeup, and my closet full of tops, with the knowledge that I won't find what I'm searching for, but that I'll try nonetheless.
In the very first episode of Fleabag , a beloved comedy-drama, the titular character and her sister Claire attend a feminist lecture together, in which the speaker asks the audience: “Please raise your hands if you would trade five years of your life for the so-called ‘perfect body.’” The rest of the audience stays perfectly still, but Fleabag and Claire raise their hands, exchanging sheepish glances. “We are bad feminists,” Fleabag whispers to Claire.
What is a “bad feminist?” A younger me thought it was a woman who was passive, submissive, or emotional—any diversion from the quintessential strong, independent woman. Having long since outgrown this opinion, it now feels impossible to answer.
A lot of critics seem to think that Fleabag , as a show, is “bad feminism.” The case against what people have been calling “Fleabag feminism” or “dissociative feminism” is that it moves away from complaining about or acting against oppression to passively wallowing in it, or laughing at it with deadpan humor. But this discourse is itself placing the burden on women to rage against the machine all the time—that can get exhausting. Fleabag presents a deceivingly radical alternative: the luxury of basking in your own uniquely feminine pain.
In the show’s second season, Fleabag meets Belinda, an older woman who has just won an award for ‘women in business.’ In one of the show’s most iconic speeches, Belinda tells Fleabag: “Women are born with pain built in. It’s our physical destiny—period pains, sore boobs, childbirth. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t. They have to seek it out. They invent all these gods and demons and things so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own.” I have recently started re-watching this scene every time I am on my period, curled up in pain and indulgently angry at the universe and god and my body for putting me through it. This simple acknowledgement of pain is incredibly powerful for many reasons—but for me, it is also just a comforting way to wallow.
Another point of contention is that dissociative feminism tends to center white, privileged, attractive women—Fleabag has often been compared to Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney’s characters. Emmeline Clein—who coined the term ‘dissociative feminism’—argues that although these characters seem ‘relatable,’ the virtue of their position makes them just the opposite. Granted, most women can’t escape their trauma by choosing to sleep through an entire year like Moshfegh’s protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation —but then again, nobody is claiming that these women are models for coping. They are all very explicitly and consciously self-destructive. They are clearly not demographically representative of women everywhere, but their emotional journeys have, at a very fundamental level, transcended these boundaries and resonated with audiences across the globe. Even in the one aforementioned scene from the show’s first episode, both Fleabag’s
unabashed admission and the embarrassment that seeps through her self-effacing whisper are undeniably relatable and universally feminine.
In two lines, Phoebe Waller-Bridge manages to express that her characters are deeply uncomfortable in their bodies while also ensuring that this does not pass as normalized or ideal. The honesty reaches another level: the very internalization of responsibility and pressure that seems to be reflected in the critics of “Fleabag feminism.” Her reaction does not hold the male gaze or the larger systems at play responsible for her instinctive choice; it instead prescribes accountability to herself and her sister. We are bad feminists.
Fleabag has been criticized for implicating all women in bearing the burden and accountability of their plight. But ultimately, this comes down to a misunderstanding of the story Fleabag is telling. It did not set out to be the next groundbreaking feminist media; it simply chronicles “one single woman’s existence,” a review in the New Yorker states. And the internalization of blame is a very real—and relatable—part of this existence. It is “ something we do very well on our own .”
So although it ends up being both anyway, Fleabag is far more concerned with being honest than feminist. The opening sequence of the first episode starts with Fleabag asking the audience a question: “You know that feeling when a guy you like sends you a text at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday night and asks if he can ‘come and find you’ and you accidentally make it out like you’ve just got in yourself, so you have to get out of bed, drink half a bottle of wine, get in the shower, shave everything, put on some agent provocateur business, suspender belt, and wait by the door until the buzzer goes—and then you open the door to him like you’d almost forgotten he was coming over?”
It could be anyone saying this, but it is also so specific that it could only be her. That’s part of the magic of Fleabag —the show toes the line between hyper-specificity, vivid interiority, and universality so adeptly that it becomes impossible to pin down emotions demographically. She is too particular to be representative of a category, and therefore, somewhat paradoxically, she cannot be confined to one.
While she’s flirting with a guy she is clearly not attracted to on a bus, she looks at the camera and says “I hate myself” before continuing anyway. “I’m not obsessed with sex, I just can’t stop thinking about it… the performance of it, the awkwardness of it, the drama of it, the moment you realize someone wants your body. Not so much the feeling of it,” she tells the audience in a different episode. The physical facts of Fleabag’s life could not be farther removed from mine, and yet as I watch, I cannot help but feel like it could just as easily be me.
In both these moments of unbridled honesty, Fleabag is speaking into the camera, directly addressing the audience. This is the “dissociative” part of “dissociative feminism”— it seems as though she is stepping out of her own body, hovering above or outside of it. It is her secret ritual throughout the show, and I see why this has been viewed as “dissociative” or nihilistic; in these moments of direct address, she is often delivering quips and deadpan jokes, clearly a coping mechanism to deal with the casual anguish and insanity of her life.
But it is also in these moments that she makes herself extremely vulnerable to the
audience—she pours out all her self-loathing, her need to feel desired, and her tortured loneliness to the camera, cutting through scenes where she continues acting unaffected in her real life. The duality of it, the interrupting of her ‘normal’ behavior to address the audience with admissions like “I hate myself,” make her all the more vulnerable for exposing the performance of her interactions with other characters. To me, it seems almost like a ritual of confession—not entirely unlike the literal confessional scene in the second season, where she truly opens up to the priest (as well as the audience) in a church.
“I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning,” she says. “I want someone to tell me what to eat, what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like… I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, who to love and how to tell them. I think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong.”
No matter how independent she seems, Fleabag has an impulse for vulnerability and dependence from the very first time she confesses to the audience—the church scene toward the end of the series only formalizes the ritual, maybe taking it one step further.
This is the most universal, relatable thing in the world—I imagine all of us as carrying around at any given time a secret desire to burst at the seams, break down, open up, no matter how many layers of irony and restraint it is buried under. There is an unexpected power in Fleabag’s admission of this desire, and in her realization of it.
I grew up idolizing the ‘girlboss’ characters who were completely in control of every room they walked into, who affected the world around them much more than they were affected by it. But I’ve always known I would never truly be one of them—I feel everything to an inconvenient degree, I can’t stop myself from crying when I’m angry or frustrated or even confused, and I get attached to places and people way too quickly. But as I got older, I found myself drawn to the vulnerable women in books and TV, the ones who felt everything in excess—from Jane Austen’s Marianne in Sense and Sensibility to Sally Rooney’s Marianne in Normal People. Like Fleabag, these characters appealed to me for their honesty: They seemed far closer to my truth than the completely independent girlboss, who is viewed as successful only at the cost of her “traditionally female” emotionality.
There’s a reason so many people swooned at the heart-breaking moment between Fleabag and her priest at the end of the series. Apart from the tragedy of tender love being torn apart by unavoidable circumstances, it is also where we see Fleabag at her most vulnerable. After a few moments of pause, she asks "Is it God, or is it me?" She knows the answer before asking, but he confirms her fate anyway. "It's God, isn't it?" In that moment, she is completely powerless—there is absolutely nothing she could do to be with him. But there’s a unique intimacy to this powerlessness, layers of trust, sincerity, tenderness, and courage as she makes herself even more vulnerable, returning to her ritual of confession: “You know, the worst thing is that I fucking love you,” she says. She stops him before he can respond. She wants to let the words settle around them, to bask in the emotion of it—which is all she can do as she sits there, waiting for it to pass.
My grandfather, a motion picture exhibitor, used to declare every film he saw the “best picture of the year.” I can still hear the natural inflection of that phrase in his voice revealing his pure, unadulterated delight. My grandmother would walk out of the theatre and tell him she couldn’t believe they’d both seen the same movie. She’d criticize the screenplay or say it was too slow, and most of the time, she’d be right. But my grandfather overlooked such cinematic flaws in favor of the relationships between characters and the settings in which the stories took place, especially in sentimental films that served as love letters to Hollywood, his home.
My grandfather nudged my father into his chairman position at the family company: a small chain of movie theaters on the West Coast. My father, who should have been a sports agent, loves to tell me what movies to look out for but never watches any of them himself. In 2016 he insisted that my musical theatre-loving, hopeless romantic 15-year-old self was going to love La La Land (2016). I thought it sounded gimmicky.
By age 15 I had a feeling I’d one day end up back in LA fighting for my own Hollywood pipe dream as a screenwriter, not necessarily as a direct result of the family business, though perhaps there was an ancillary subconscious link. I grew up alongside children of producers, writers, and showrunners galore who made it appear as though becoming a Hollywood creative was easily reachable if you had the ambition. In high school, I was not yet well versed in iconic love letters to Hollywood. I hadn’t seen Sunset Boulevard (1950) or Boogie Nights (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001). I had no nostalgia for LA because I hadn’t yet lived anywhere else and so hadn’t realized the paradise I’d left behind.
La La Land was the first Hollywood epistle I was able to appreciate during its craze upon release. It was the first love letter to Hollywood I received and the first indicator that I, too, loved film just as much as my father and his father before him. The romantic, flamboyant, visually delectable film defined some of my favorite high school moments. My friends and I listened to “A Lovely Night” as we hiked up to the Griffith Observatory, where the original scene that accompanies the song was shot. We blasted “Someone in the Crowd” as we did each other’s makeup for our 10th grade formal, each dressed in different primary colors, dancing down the marble staircase of my friend’s Californian home to Justin Hurwitz’s punchy beat.
When the infamous 2017 Oscars envelope mix-up went down and the announcers proclaimed La La Land Best Picture while reading the wrong category’s envelope, I was bummed to see a movie that meant so much to me not take home the trophy. But it took home 14 others that night, including one that made Damien Chazelle the youngest person to ever win Best Director. The signature artistry he incited with Whiplash (2014) was rewarded in La La Land ; the close audiovisual tie he creates between music and
stories of love and loss exists in all three of his feature films.
I already believed that awards shows were bullshit and that every nominee was deserving. At the time I had not yet seen Moonlight (2016), the real Best Picture champion, which I can now say was incredibly worthy of its win, as the first all Black cast to win Best Picture for a truly stunning and gut-wrenching film. Moonlight aside, I will never understand the polarization La La Land caused amongst viewers on its own; it still feels like one of the least controversial films of all time to me, but many friends of mine disagree. They thought Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling were miscast and unfit to sing in a musical, that it was designed as a safe bet to woo Academy voters, and that it did nothing revolutionary or new.
If my grandfather had been a voting member of the Academy, I don’t think he’d ever have been able to pick just one winner. Like him, I believe movies have the power to serve many different emotional purposes; they don’t always have to be revolutionary in plot or production to tug at our heartstrings.
Flash forward to 2022 and Damien Chazelle, now a long-time idol of mine, erupts back onto the silver screen with Babylon (2022). I couldn’t exactly tell what the film was about from viewing the trailer, which many moviegoers proclaimed as lazy promotion, but the unexplained chaos made it all the more enticing to me. On the day of its theatrical release, I rushed to see it with my friend.
Babylon is three hours, nine minutes long. Not only was I never bored, but I left the theater with dry eyes from how seldom I blinked. I didn’t want to miss a thing.
The entire first half hour serves as the film’s cold open and feels like a roller coaster ride. Chazelle opens with a giant elephant shitting on the camera lens, then guides you through the gates of a palatial 1920s Bel Air mansion into a party so loud and lavish it puts Gatsby to shame. The camera twists and turns and never averts its gaze. Then suddenly, the screen flashes black. “BABYLON'' in white block letters. The story has just begun.
Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a young Mexican
man with a big Hollywood dream becomes entranced with Nellie La Roy (Margot Robbie), a wannabe actress who fakes her way to the top while Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a silent movie star, experiences a swift fall from grace. Characters, fates, and fortunes intertwine and ebb and flow in this colorful, debaucherous, and epic tale. The film showcases more than 100 actors with speaking roles. Its opulence cost Paramount $80 million to make. The simultaneous beguilement and bitterness contained within each character’s tale is mesmerizing and truthful; the experience of chasing dreams transcends time.
All the while, a signature score by Justin Hurwitz, Chazelle’s longtime collaborator, blankets the chaos in melodies just mere notes from his La La Land themes. They’re darker— not as sunny—to reflect the at times sinister complexities unfolding onscreen. The camera enters and explodes from trumpet bells to mimic the motion of the sound the instruments create, closely weaving score and cinematography.
Chazelle concludes Babylon with a brilliant flash-forward homage to Singin’ in the Rain (1952), perhaps the most quintessential Hollywood love letter. Having now watched most members of the genre either in film classes or on my own, I have a much deeper appreciation for Chazelle’s contemporary contribution to the canon.
I still think Oscar winners are bullshit, but I at least had hope for the Oscar nominees. I was flabbergasted to see the 2023 Best Picture list include ten films that achieved nowhere near the feeling Babylon stirred inside me. I wouldn’t have expected it to ultimately win, but I could not believe it did not receive a nod, especially given some of the other selections.
I loved every minute of Babylon . My grandfather would have, too. It read to me as a grown-up version of La La Land ; I’ve matured as a viewer, and so has Chazelle as a filmmaker. All of his films carry the same heart. They’re for dreamers. He might have held back from displaying Hollywood’s full rainbow of true colors in La La Land , here he leaves everything on the table. Some might argue he does so too much— but the excess reflects the history and present of this magical paradise.
Here we are again in the dead of a seemingly neverending winter. But, hell, that’s what Februaries are for. I hope that you all are staying toasty and layered up, because I seem to have found myself overseas, some four thousand miles from home, and it’s just as fucking frigid. But, here I am, doing some old fashioned reportage for you old fashioned readers, on the city of Bologna, Italy and its denizens.
Studying abroad is an incredible opportunity to experience a new culture, see new places, and speak a new language, but that doesn’t mean you can slack on the language of style. I wanted to give you all some useful and well-needed style advice for a trip or semester abroad because, let's be real, a wardrobe consisting of Nike joggers, your smelliest hoodie, and your favorite pair of sandals might not cut it. Today, we’ll be taking a little tour through the Bolognese style and all its little quirks.
My first stylistic impression of Bologna was that there must’ve been some terrible accident right before my arrival because, as far as the eye could see, everyone was wearing black. Much to my surprise (I had already queued up the Gordon Lightfoot) there was no shocking and songworthy industrial accident— people just really seem to like the color, or lack of it. Every street is dotted with black-clad figures looking like out-of-focus extras in a Powell and Pressburger movie, though sadly Europe isn’t all in black and white. Black coats, black berets, black bags, it’s universal.
Beyond the black, which appears as a stylistic unifier throughout the city, Bolognese fashion diverges into three categories, generally based around age, that catalog the fashion seen on the streets.
First up: university students. In their constant presence around the Piazza Verdi and in cafés sipping on endless espressos, they contain by far the most
diverse set of styles seen in the city and also (sorry) probably the least interesting. It’s just about what you would see at Brown: puffers, beanies, sweatpants, with lots of slim-fit chinos and jeans carrying over from the last zeitgeist—timeless fashion indeed—the primary ethos being to keep warm, look stylish later. This hits men’s fashion the hardest, where the desire to look good clashes with the societal necessity to conform to an outdated idea of masculinity to create guys who care a little but not too much about how they look, only succeeding in looking boring and terribly uniform. Be it skinny tech fabric pants with a sweatshirt or dark sweater, or the (why, god, why) universal presence of slim-fit chinos in navy or charcoal, the menswear for the younger demographic in Bologna is very lacking.
The womenswear of the university, however, is much more interesting and stylish, and frankly has me looking to them for style points. I’ve noticed a definite preference for wrap coats—belted coats with no button closure—in very soft-looking woolen tweeds or cashmere textures. It provides a very carefree attitude (the tenor duende, to be sufficiently romantic) that I myself have been trying to capture in the spirit of the city. Such a spirit motivated my purchase of a mid brown llama hair overcoat, ulster-collared and belted, with unstructured sleeves, to give me the overall impression of getting back into bed as soon as I left it.
In general, the fashion of the university student is conservative in nature, following closely by the solid dark colors and traditional country patterns that make up most of their wardrobe but with some definite influence from modern trends (the puffer jacket and heavily tapered pants, for example) that are now bordering on obsolescence. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops as the warm season approaches.
On the other side of the style spectrum we have, the great, the not-yet-late, old-people fashion. As many of you know, looking at old people with drip is basically a national pastime for anybody who is interested in style enough to even acknowledge this sentence. Their steely command of style, generated from years of experience, can be a great source of inspiration for anyone interested in classic styles and silhouettes. The older people are carrying the banner for classic style, and boy are they doing it well. Big loden coats (perfect for keeping you warm and starting off your Austrian farmer era), wide brimmed hats, ancient yet beautiful derby and oxford shoes in addition to a smattering of old fur coats and rural patterns galore. The sheer style exuded by the everyday people of Bologna is amazing and something I have never seen before. In no way, shape, or form can I fit another coat in my suitcase, but if I don’t get my hands on an oversized tweed or green loden I might die.
The last, smallest category is the urban professionals, generally stuck between old and young fashion. This category is an avenue for me to point out things I don’t like about the outfits of the bankers I pass by on my way to class. It’s mainly a motley assortment of slim cut black suits, low rise pants, tie knots so garishly large it's a miracle these people are getting oxygen to their brain, and short overcoats that don’t even cover their knees (in black, of course). This is an expected development as us young people enter the doldrums of business life, especially in the realm of menswear. As mentioned before, outdated modes of masculine expression have rendered the attempt to pay attention to the tiny details of style “unmanly” or “effeminate.” This problem is amplified when businesswear and suits are required for the job, as the world of the suit is a world of tiny details (in which many young people are woefully inexperienced).
There you have it, folks. You are now an insider on the collective unconscious that is Bolognese fashion, a triumvirate of romance, the struggle of adulthood, and long swooshing overcoats that make you feel like a Parisian private detective. I’ll keep my nose close to the ground, dog pee notwithstanding, on the lookout for you, dear reader, and any more fashion tips I can find in the old city of Bologna. Mail me some cookies in the meantime.
SOCIAL MEDIA
“I want to melt down every moment, keep them in a heart-shaped locket around my neck. But time is like water between my fingers. The scene always ends, and a new one arrives, burning just as brightly.”
—Emily Tom, “Here and There” 02.25.2022
“You remind me that everything I encounter—buildings, door knobs, paperclips—can be broken down into little infinities, and be plotted, graphed, and analyzed. Despite your objective and quantitative methods I can use to understand you is nearly boundless.”
—Ellie Jurmann, “n+1 Reasons I Love You” 02.12.2022
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Kimberly Liu
FEATURE
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son-Schmich
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ARTS & CULTURE
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NARRATIVE
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LIFESTYLE
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