they put a panera in the margaret (2011) victoria's secret
do y'all mind if i get existential for a minute or two?
They put a Panera in the Margaret (2011) Victoria’s Secret.
I kept saying this sentence to anyone who would listen, kept saying it in the way that stating a fact is intended to be heard less as a fact and more as a joke, as if one seemingly spent chain replacing another was a travesty, as if a depressing and dirty Upper West Side Victoria’s Secret was some sort of untouchable cultural landmark by the simple virtue of a fleeting appearance in a coming of age film from 2011. But the more I kept saying it, the more I realized that it was just the kind of sentence that sums up living in New York. They put a Panera in the Margaret Victoria’s Secret; one thing dies, and another thing takes its place, mercilessly and with little fanfare. That’s New York; to live here is to live alongside death. Within it, between it, behind it, even.
Loving anything is so embarrassing, but loving a city is the act of a true clown, because to love a city is to love something that, in a sense, doesn’t exist. At least, not for long. Loving a city is humbling and humiliating, a constantly forced concession that what you love is temporary, impermanent, and, in part, a fantasy. What you love can never remain fixed and immutable, the same thing you encountered and first fell in love with—however many weeks or months or years or decades ago that may be—for all of eternity, frozen in time. Everything changes, of course. Why should New York be any exception? I know that’s part of the thrilling appeal, part of the lore: That this city is constantly changing, and not always for the better; that the erratic unpredictability keeps you on your toes; that rather than outgrow your surroundings, your surroundings outgrow you; that there is nothing in this world you can count on, not even your own home.
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Margaret is a movie about a horrible accident, about how one moment you could be waiting for the light outside Fairway, thinking about whatever people think about after they’ve bought their groceries—what they’ll make for dinner that night, where else they have to go before home, whether or not they should just order out, how warm the sun feels today—and the next you could be lying under a bus, dead. Or, well, it’s about that in part.
To simply call Margaret a coming of age film, as I did a few paragraphs above, is to do it a disservice. To call the cult classic1 a masterpiece would be to rely upon an overused cliché, but that’s exactly what it is. Kenneth Lonergan’s three and a half hour long epic2 is a coming of age film, yes. Allison Janney gets hit by a bus outside the Upper West Side Fairway barely ten minutes into the picture, yes. And our teenage protagonist Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) has to grapple with her role in distracting the driver who killed her, and will come of age as she attempts to seek justice but slowly discovers how casually unfair life really is, yes. But it’s more than that. It’s a sprawling story about New York, and how small and inconsequential the people who call this city home really are. It’s about how, while we will always be the main characters of our own stories, our lives aren’t dramas. Other people in our lives are not our supporting characters (as Jeannie Berlin’s character so stunningly scolds); other people in the city are not our extras.
Margaret, above all else, is a movie about how fragile and meaningless our lives are. Our crises are minute in the grand scheme of things, even when they’re gigantic to us. A woman gets hit by a bus, but the world does not stop spinning. People gawk for a moment, then continue on with their days. A bus driver is responsible for an accident, but the buses keep running. A girl discovers how corrupt the city is, but the city continues to hum on. A tourist will still stop in the middle of the sidewalk to point at Lincoln Center, a barista will close up the coffee shop for the day, an actress will feed her children dinner before going to work. The people who are stressed about their bills or their jobs or their families are still stressed about their bills and jobs and families. We’re all living our own little dramas, in our own little bubbles, and struggling to see the dramas of others when our own take center stage. We’re connected, but we aren’t. The place we call home is big, but we are small within it. In a city of millions, we’re alone. We’re having one conversation at a diner while everyone else has their own, and the noise converges, one big mess of indistinguishable voices.
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There’s a joke I like to make about how, at any given moment, dads love to point at some random building and tell you a story about what it used to be, about how it was some place they went to maybe once thirty years ago but still remember. They do this all the time; there is no geographical boundary to the behavior. They’ll take a random exit off the highway in another state to stop for lunch at a restaurant they’d been to once, before you were born, some place that likely doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t existed for at least ten years, which they’d know if they looked at Google Maps, which they never do. So you’re stuck with them, a passenger on their nostalgia trip, an unwilling participant in a ghost hunt, a reluctant explorer looking for something only a rip in the fabric of time could make visible.
I used to think this particular affliction only applied to fathers but lately I fear I’m starting to come down with it, too. Maybe that just happens when you’ve lived somewhere long enough, when you’ve seen the place transformed, like a beloved book whose pages aren’t allowed the dignity of yellowing and are instead torn out to become something new and depressing and unnecessary, an imitation of what it was to those who loved it long enough and a novelty for those who don’t know any better.
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On the single day in which it did not rain last week, I walked from Central Park to Chelsea, all the way over by the river. At first it was just an excuse to stretch my legs further than the dash across the street to the bodega would allow. Without longer strolls in the park they grew restless; after a few days, being stuck inside your home no longer feels comforting and an unmoored unease settles in. But whenever I decide to take the scenic route, take my time and get on the subway a stop later than I normally would, I more often than not end up walking the entire length of my trip.
I realize this makes it sound as if the choice is something unusual, something unintentional, but it never is, not really. I just can’t seem to ride the subway lately without digging the fingernails on one hand so deep into the flesh on the other that I almost draw blood. I have always disliked the subway (is anyone actually fond of it?), though not for fear of crime or germs, like so many delicate TikTok transplants, but for the same reason I dislike planes: I’m trapped, a sitting duck, with my life in someone else’s hands. Really, there’s no mode of transportation that doesn’t give me intrusive anxiety (the plane will go down, the train will derail, the car will crash, the Uber will traffic me, the bike will get hit); walking, an act which I hold control over, possesses the lowest risk.
I meandered my way downtown, through the area by Port Authority that only seems to grow more desolate as time passes (it seems to be one of the few remaining places in Manhattan where I can pretend I’m living in its gritty Koch-era past) and the shimmering sterility of Hudson Yards, a place which I had actually never set foot in before despite ruthlessly mocking online on many occasions. I thought it was nice, this place clearly meant for tourists and gentrifying, ultra-wealthy transplants, and then I felt bad for thinking it was nice. But that’s the kind of change I expect from New York: The terrible parts will either grow more terrible or become transformed into a kind of sickeningly sweet Disneyland I can’t bear to stomach for too long. Things will change, of course things will change, but nowhere and nothing that touches your normal life. Nothing that you take for granted. It didn’t matter if I could not remember stepping foot in the Margaret Victoria’s Secret since at least 2015, didn’t matter if I could not recall anyone I knew ever making a single purchase there. That a Victoria’s Secret had improbably remained open in that location for that long meant, to me, that it would always improbably remain open. Sometimes things exist, against all logic, for so long that their inevitable change feels all the more impossible.
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I’m trying to not be mad on the internet anymore, or call anyone stupid even when it’s deserved, but every day g-d tries my patience. Every day I’m given a new reason to feel stupid about ever feeling like I’m stupid; there are so many people who are smarter than me, but there are just as many who are much dumber, or at least willingly say dumb things. (I’m inserting a pause here for many of you to say “actually, girl…”). But when I say I’m trying to not be annoyed or condescending on the internet anymore, the internet I am talking about is the clear confines of social media; in this silly little essay I can be as dismissive about a dumb take as I want.
This is a positively broken brained assessment for so many reasons, one made even more broken brained for presenting something obvious (LCD Soundsystem shaped themselves on Talking Heads?! No! Really?) as some insight or observation never made before. But more: it’s such a fundamental misreading of music to serve a cynical view. I get it, of course. I myself am a recovering over-earnest millennial. I understand how easy it is to view earnestness with disdain, to think that everything is calculated and nothing is genuine, to assess anything that shows any emotion, or is beloved by a larger swath of the general public, as pure saccharine drivel. But I also know that no song belongs in any kind of category unless it is put there by someone else; no song is something until we attach a value to it, until it becomes what we perceive it to be rather than what it truly is.3
“This Must Be the Place” may not be Talking Heads’ biggest hit—you don’t need me to tell you it’s not their biggest hit—or even their best song—you don’t need me to tell you it’s not their best song—but it’s certainly become one of their best known. Look no further than the New Yorker article “The Talking Heads Song That Explains Talking Heads,” chronicling its proliferation in pop culture in the mid-to-late aughts (albeit datedly—the piece is already a decade old). It’s true that “This Must Be the Place” is millennial starter kit Talking Heads, the well-worn crowd pleaser, more accessible and sentimental than the majority of their skittish and cerebral art rock-funk fusion. A love song from the time of trickle down economics, perhaps it speaks more to the children who cannot afford to even rent an apartment these days than it does to the home owning boomer parents who heard it first. How can it not?
“This Must Be The Place” is a love song, but it’s not about love, not really. It’s about the idea of love, about infatuation. It’s all fantasy, no reality: a desire to be loved so much it kills you. No wonder it speaks to those searching for partnership through a screen, shopping for a boyfriend as if shopping for a new miniskirt. Here, everything is a projection; you can tell yourself a million different stories from looking at one single pixelated photo behind the glass you tap tap tap upon. Where no one and nothing can be truly known, what choice do you have but to say less, to make it up as you go along, to rely on the fantasy until reality settles in? At a certain point, the passing of time is something less to be loved and more to be feared; it becomes something that no longer gives, but takes.
Here is where I could say that “This Must Be The Place” is not a song about love, but a song about home, but isn’t that the same thing? It’s the same kind of infatuation, the same kind of longing for a romanticized idea of a thing that doesn’t actually exist in reality: The dream that there could be, on this earth, a single place in which you truly belong, a home built with someone who loves you and you love back, neither needing anything more than that single untouchable emotion. But that isn’t real. It doesn’t happen like that. You can’t make homes in people just as much as you can’t convince people to love you. Even then, the song is less heartfelt certainty than it is uneasy questioning; “this must be the place” is more a searching need for affirmation than it is a confident declaration. To file it into the category of “we were infinite” songs would be for all the wrong reasons. It doesn’t fit the category out of earnestness; there are no heroes here. To feel infinite is to be delusional, and what better song about living in a delusion than this?
I realize that saying all of this sounds terribly cynical even in its rejection of cynicism, all analysis and no emotion. I say all of this as if I’m not one of the many millennials who chooses delusion, who chooses the misread—deliberate or not—of it all. I love “This Must Be The Place.” Of course I love “This Must Be The Place.” I’m not so sure I can trust anyone who does not. It’s a perfect song—you don’t need me to tell you it’s a perfect song—no matter how you choose to hear it.
There’s a joke that goes around the internet that mocks anyone who dares be so full of enough earnest self-importance to proclaim “last night was a movie.” We are so desperate to be main characters that we can only see our lives with grand, dramatic narratives; the events of last night rarely hold any passing resemblance to a feature film, with a full exposition and climax, a meaningful character arc and compelling finale. Our lives are little more than the content we seem to be increasingly focused on making out of them; last night was a TikTok, last night was a YouTube Short, last night was a screenshot of a text message posted to Instagram Stories—take your pick, they’re all lame and unimportant. But that’s the point, right? The point is that our lives aren’t supposed to resemble movies. Our lives are supposed to be gloriously small and unimportant. We’re not infinite. We never were. We were just as boring and mortal in our wild, romanticized memory of youth as we are now.
But it’s nice, sometimes, I must concede, to have moments in which we feel limitless. It isn’t so bad. I miss, sometimes, the days when I could feel that more effortlessly, the days when I didn’t know enough to be as jaded as I can become now when I’m not careful. It’s nice to, every now and then, turn the stereo on loud and remember that you are alive, that there is beauty in this world, that there is love waiting right outside your door, in any one of the strangers that pass you by, if you just look closely enough for it. It’s nice to forget, even if for just four minutes and fifty-six seconds, the impermanence of it all, the Panera in the space that was once a Victoria’s Secret, the first apartment that is now a luxury condo, the diner that became a bank, the street on which you used to live now completely unfamiliar, and instead feel suspended in time, weightless and infinite, the main character of your life for a moment. Last night may not have been a movie, but sometimes it’s nice to feel like it was.
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okay that's it that's the end thanks love u bye
The film earns that descriptor not by virtue of being so-bad-it’s-good but by falling victim to a lengthy battle between Lonergan, the studio, and a producer that bungled its release.
It’s this version, Lonergan’s extended cut that I will be speaking about here!
Obviously, I am not talking about art that is deliberately emotionally manipulative, calculating and contrived in the ways in which it is engineered to hit specific beats in order to provoke an intended feeling from its audience. That shit sucks!