Mirror Moments

I first see Anne Hathaway’s shoulders in the Amazon romcom, The Idea of You, just before the two leads have their first kiss. She’s wearing an oversized vintage blazer paired with a bohemian skirt and heeled booties. It’s a specific embodiment of Laurel Canyon chic, and it’s aspirational in all the ways that serve my demographic (artsy middle-aged moms). It’s the outfit of a woman who strolls through life without haste or hunger. 

And then she takes the blazer off. 

You see, it’s hot in the Glendale studio where she’s showing art to Nicholas Galitzine, the boy-band hunk that recently fell into her charmingly chaotic life. It’s so hot that she takes her blazer off and must reveal her birdlike clavicle, arms and shoulders. They seem to float above her electric blue tube-top in a disturbingly disembodied way. 

My LA- trained brain does the math. I know that if she looks this thin on screen, she looks at least ten pounds thinner in person, and I know exactly what that looks like. 

I get obsessed with The Idea of You. I watch it on my laptop in bed in Berlin and text with my sisters in LA about how skinny Anne Hathaway looks. We dissect her wardrobe and her hair. We are harsh critics raised to be ruthless in our self-judgment as well. The Idea of You is a manual for our self- reflection. Each of us will project onto it differently. For me, the movie is about a single mom finding soul restorative love. 

I’ve been on Hinge for three months after several years alone. I am newly queer and celibate and unsure how to proceed. I match with shy looking men and trans-men. I am afraid of matching with anyone else. My first date is with an Italian who looks like a hipster version of Pacino. He spends most of our time together talking about how much he hates Germans and how hard it is raising his autistic son. At one point I will rub his shoulders because he complains so bitterly about non-stop screen work. He’s a videographer for a news agency, but he used to be an aspiring filmmaker. He name-drops Bruce La Bruce and tells me his short film from twenty years ago won an award at Cannes. When we split from each other at the edge of Goethe Park, I say, “see you soon,” and he says, “We’ll see.” I realize the next day, going over it, that he never asked me a single question. 

I spend a lot of time looking in the mirror and wondering if anyone I’m attracted to will ever be attracted to me. I am sixty pounds overweight by LA standards. My clavicle is meaty and sun- damaged. My neck has moles and skin tags and wild hairs sprouting out of fat folds. My shoulders are broad, hunched, and masculine. 

I want to be Anne Hathaway. I want to be in her body and flirt with Nicholas Galitzine. I want to be on set and hand my giant water bottle to an assistant and be so thin that it makes children uncomfortable. I want to fall in love with a British boy band superstar. I want to live in a world where these exaggerated power dynamics are plausible, where my age and his fame have brought both of us world weary wisdom. 

There is a scene halfway through the film that breaks into my fantasy and fills me with contempt. Anne Hathaway and her beaux are gallivanting around Europe for his tour, and they rent a house in the south of France with a cadre of twenty-somethings. Anne spies the group by the pool. She clocks the young hotties in their bikinis and decides to change out of her bikini into a more demure one-piece. She stands before the mirror and cups her breasts mimicking fullness and lets them fall flat again. She looks supernaturally beautiful, but she is pretending to be searching for flaws. 

Fuck Anne Hathaway and her lowland sad eyes and her faux insecure lip biting and her bird shoulders. You broke the fourth wall, bitch. I can buy the meet-cute in a trailer bathroom, the success of her “inclusive” Silver Lake gallery space, and even the post-sex lip-sync to Dance Hall Days. But I can’t buy this self-conscious mirror moment. 

At that moment, I left the film and started thinking about the director, Michael Showalter. He used to be on MTV’s The State, which shaped me deeply. I had a crush on him. He was thin and his nose was amazing. Later on, he got fat. He carried his weight like an addict, like someone actively losing their battle with self- destruction. I wonder what it was like for him to shoot this scene. Was he telling Anne Hathway which parts of herself to point out as flaws? Was he thinking about his own experience facing the mirror? 

I matched with an Egyptian in his mid-thirties. He is a financial auditor, but he dreams of being a porn star. It’s hard to tell in our brief chat if he’s joking or serious. He’s not that cute in his pictures, but I want to see if there’s banter. If there’s banter, maybe I can get more excited about meeting him. Our chat keeps coming back to the porn thing, and I don’t feel comfortable meeting him. My sexuality is a tight complex knot in my solar plexus. Best case scenario—best case—I meet someone who adores me and is extremely patient and is willing to spend months helping me overcome trauma until I feel ready to be intimate. The Egyptian porn star won’t ever be that person, so when he asks me on a date, I text back, “I think we have different appetites but good luck.” He writes back a few minutes later. I read the words a few times without really absorbing what they say.

“It’s cool. I thought I’d give dry old meat a try but I’m gonna stick to fresh young peaches.” 

I delete him and report his behavior as inappropriate to Hinge. I’ve never had to do that before. I questioned whether to do it at all. Maybe I’m overreacting–sticks and stones and so on–but I report him and Hinge sends an automated message saying they take safety seriously and then never follow up again. 

In the movie Civil War, Kirsten Dunst plays a combat- hardened war photographer documenting the unfolding war in America. She’s introduced in Cinéma vérité fashion, with no makeup or soft lighting. The camera makes no attempt to capture her best angle and seems, instead, to be intentionally capturing her worst angles, a’la Charlize Theron in Monster. Dunst appears grim, dead-eyed and weather- beaten. Her shoulders are hunched, and there’s a dowager’s hump in her back. She wears ill-fitting t-shirts and khakis. Her hair is pulled back from her jowly chin. She’s really leaning into the ugly. I’m proud of her on our behalf. I know how far she’s come. The darling of The Virgin Suicides, the sex symbol of sensitive, intellectual 90s teens; the hottie that smashed Jake Gyllenhaal and Garret Hedlund. She let herself age and harden. 

Civil War is overwhelming and probably bad. I don’t know. I wasn’t really watching it. I was watching her and comparing myself to her and wondering if looking sort of like Kirstin Dunst in Civil War is good or bad. She looks like she doesn’t give a fuck how she looks. On women, that can either read as badass or despairing. 

There’s a scene where Dunst and her posse enter a boutique in a safe zone, and she tries on a fancy green dress and gets her picture taken. It’s not a movie where she’s allowed to teleport the idea that she’s self-critical because It’s fucking war people!  As far as I can tell, she’s supposed to be thinking something like…These days of frivolity and dress-up are behind us and may never come back. The moment at the mirror is quickly overtaken by another photographer, a young female protege, who takes her mentor’s picture and tells Dunst that she looks pretty when she smiles. It’s a weird scene that is toying with flirtation but never makes a definitive choice. Still, I wonder whether there’s a version of Civil War where Dunst has hot wartime sex with her protege? Whether there’s an alternate reality where both Dunst and Hathaway get to experience spontaneous May/December romances? 

None of this will matter in a year. Both of these actresses, who I studied as a girl and continue to study as an adult, will shed the skin of one film and enter another. It makes me feel grateful that my body is hidden. I don’t have to watch myself on screen. I don’t have to answer to fans who want me to stay the same. I can change quietly and hope that one day I’ll be able to face my own image.