A Sorta Vibe · Daisy von Scherler Mayer), ... complains, the sympathetic dancer begins to clap a...

A Sorta Vibe

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A Sorta Vibe — Bright Wall/Dark Room http://brightwalldarkroom.com/issue-50/2017/8/5/a-sorta-vibe

1 of 15 8/10/17, 2:23 AM

all images © First Look International

by Brian Doan

“Classification provides a system for organizing the universe

of items, be they objects, concepts, or records.”

—introduction to the Dewey Decimal Classification Guide

“Where’s the spot?”

—pissed off club owner Rene, to dumbfounded DJ Leo, in

Party Girl (1995)

I. History and Biography

“So, what are you going to do now?”

Early June, 1995: Everything had been fine until that

question. The upper level of the Crazy Horse, a popular

Bloomington bar, had been warm and relaxed, with a pale

orange light filtering through the windows, coating the


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green lampshades and inky black shadows. I had graduated

from Indiana University a month before and was about to

head to Chicago; some friends were going away for the

summer and asked me to apartment and cat-sit Carmen and

Diego (so named because my friends would yell, “Where in

the world are Carmen and Diego?” every time they came

home). Armed with a highly marketable double degree in

comparative literature and political science, and with vague

thoughts of pursuing freelance film writing while exploring

the Midwest’s answer to New York, I was enjoying a

farewell evening with college friends, trying not to show

how homesick I already was for them all.

“So, what are you going to do now?”

I stumbled through a vague answer: “Well, you know, write

and look for work, and um, enjoy Chicago, and you know,

we’ll see…” before smiling and sipping my pint of Guinness.

It was a kindly meant question, but it cut deep. If there had

been a job listing for “Interrelationship of the Arts Expert to

Expound Upon Cary Grant’s Star Persona,” I’d have been all

set; as it was, I was headed to the Big City highly trained in a

set of skills whose practicality was questionable (they were

fun, but hard to pitch to employers). Six months later, as I

watched Party Girl’s Mary (Parker Posey) declare “I’m not

good at anything” and then sigh, it felt like a moment of

deep relation between me and the screen.

II. Philosophy, Psychology, and Logic

Party Girl begins with colorful, animated credits on a black

screen, intercut with shaky hand-held footage of a walk-up

apartment’s staircase, as a voice cries out “Dammit...Look

over there, because I heard it somewhere…” This is the

voice of The Lady Bunny, a drag queen looking for a lost

earring, and on her way up to the apartment of Mary, the

“party girl” of the title. Mary is the center of a downtown


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clique of DJs, drag queens, club owners, and fashionistas,

known for her style, wit, and fabulous (if sometimes

illegally staged) parties. Her latest shindig has caused noise

complaints and a stint in jail. Bailed out by her godmother

Judy (Sasha von Schlerer, mother of the film’s director,

Daisy von Scherler Mayer), Mary begins working as a clerk

at the public library Judy runs—both a way to pay rent and

penance, a nod to practicality. She’s also letting her goofy DJ

friend Leo (a scene-stealing Guillermo Diaz) stay at her

downtown loft while he’s supposedly “looking for another

place to stay,” something we pointedly never see him do.

Meanwhile, Mary nurses her friend Derrick (Anthony

DeSando) as he grapples with a crush on a man he’s only

met once, dodges her sometime lover (Liev Schreiber), an

obnoxious nightclub bouncer, and pursues Mustafa (Omar

Townsend), the Lebanese falafel cart guy that she flirts with

at lunch every day.

The key scene in Party Girl comes about 38 minutes into its

94-minute running time. Leo gets a gig DJing at hot dance

club Rene’s (owned by a character of the same name), on

the same night that Mary finally lands a date with Mustafa.

Unfortunately, a dressing-down at work from Judy causes

Mary to go on a bender and forget about both her friend’s

gig and her date. Instead, she drunkenly breaks into the

library and teaches herself the Dewey Decimal System, her

bȇte noire.

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s

passion borders on the chaos of memories,” Walter

Benjamin writes in “Unpacking My Library.” He continues,

“More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past

before my eyes are conspicuously present in the

accustomed confusion of these books.”

As Mary ecstatically absorbs the Dewey Decimal System, the

film crosscuts between her revelations in the library and


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Leo’s DJ work at Rene’s. As he’s spinning, a follow-spot in

the club reveals a beautiful dancer; Leo loses track of his

place with the record needle, which begins to scratch

aimlessly on the vinyl; as the restless crowd yells and

complains, the sympathetic dancer begins to clap a beat on

top of the record scratch, and the crowd joins in, jarring Leo

from his reverie. He recovers control of the needle, and as

Chantay Savage’s “If You Believe (Believer Mix)” plays on

the soundtrack, this mid-point moment in the film becomes

one of identity unraveling and re-threading, for Mary, Leo,

and the viewer.

“Where’s the spot?” Rene demands of Leo, just before the

beautiful dancer appears. It’s a line rich with resonance for

the film, and for the way the movie generates knowledge

without seeming to do anything “serious:” staged as a fun,

quasi-dance number (with Mary in the library, grooving on

tables to Leo’s beat, which she can’t logically hear), it sets

up Mary’s second-half transformation into someone more

responsible while making us laugh. It’s learning as a literal

dance.

This moment of movement between library and club is a re-

mix of image, sound, and character identity, in which “the

disorder of the crates” (Benjamin’s description of his

unboxed library, but also of Leo’s vast, milk-crated record

collection) becomes (to us a musical term) the bridge

between the supposedly disparate spaces of Mary’s life; the

night-club and the library coming together. “Where’s the

spot?” is Rene’s question to Leo about a literal light, but can

also be read as marking a place: The spot where the dancer

stands in the club, the spot where Leo drops the needle on

the record, the spot in the library stacks where Mary

discovers her new identity, the spot at which the viewer

situates him or herself amidst the film’s joyous cross-

cutting, like a DJ finding bliss in the scratch. Moving across

a text in order to find new sounds and rhythms. “These are


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the very areas,” Benjamin writes with both anxiety and

anticipation, “in which any order is a balancing act of

extreme precariousness.”

Five months after leaving the Crazy Horse, and three

months after moving out of my grad student friends’

Evanston apartment, I am living in a walk-up in Rogers

Park. My first post-collegiate job is at Video Adventure,

balanced literally, figuratively, and precariously on the

border between Evanston and Chicago. Designed as a VHS

outpost for connoisseurs, the space is best described as the

video equivalent of the record shop in Nick Hornby’s High

Fidelity, both staffed and patronized by cinephiles who

ignore the Milk Money and Forrest Gump boxes that dot the

shelves as commercial obligations in favor of talking your

ear off about the French New Wave, John Woo, Kenneth

Anger, the border between art and trash. I love it there,

even if the minimum wage doesn’t really cover my rent,

and even though one day I don’t realize the foursome that

I’m speaking to are planning to rob the place; my manager

does, hits the button under the counter, and politely lets

them know the cops are on their way. After they flee, he

pulls me aside, and like Party Girl’s Judy explaining Origin

of Species to Mary, lets me know what just happened. I’m

there for about two or three months, until I get a job at the

American Bar Association, working in their public

education division. I don’t know my exact path yet, but as

Mary says at the end of the movie—while dodging an exotic

dancer—I’m serious about graduate school. My apartment

is an echoey one-bedroom; one day I come home and all the

mailbox doors have been ripped off their hinges by a

drugged-out resident; my bathroom ceiling collapses

because another drugged-out resident, living above me, was

so high that they forgot to turn their bathtub’s tap off;

another time, shivering while watching Jules and Jim on a

Sunday evening, I realize the heater doesn’t work.


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But all that doesn’t matter. I may be cold, I may not always

get my mail, and my bathroom is a mess. But I have the

movies.

III. Fine Arts and Recreation

In 1996, I discovered Facets Multimedia, down on West

Fullerton in Lincoln Park, and it became my church. The

video store in the basement is excellent, and the theaters on

the upper level host both revivals of movies like Herzog’s

Nosferatu, and classes on cinematic topics (like “Chicago in

Film,” “Movies About the Movies,” etc.) taught by local

experts and filmmakers. I spotted the Party Girl box there

one day in late ’95 or early ‘96. I’d remembered reading

about the film that first summer in the city, when it was

playing at Sundance. The cover is atrocious. Parker Posey’s

neon clothing and clipped-up hair make her look like an

unholy mash-up of 90210 and My So-Called Life, and the

cover copy leans on the excellent, then-popular Clueless

(“Sassy, savvy, and definitely Clued-in!”) in a way that does

disservice to both movies.

I rented it, anyway.


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“I broke into the film business from being super scrappy,”

Daisy von Schlerer Mayer would remember 18 years later,

speaking to the Vimeo blog. “I had a theater background,

but my friend and I wrote the film for me to direct. We used

every resource we had available in our own lives, then

reached out to people that were way too qualified to engage

with us. But, they liked the script and so they worked with

us. It was at that point in the early 1990s where there was a

lot of fun, poppy indie film happening. Indie film was

making the transition from being more art house to more

commercial, lighter indie films. We were a part of that,

which was great.”

That “lighter indie film” world made Posey its Katharine

Hepburn, and Party Girl—which came for Posey after a

year on As The World Turns as “Tess Shelby,” and stand-out

turns in Dazed and Confused, Sleep with Me, and Tales of the

City, the regrettable Mixed Nuts and, um, Coneheads—would

make her a star. Mary is the perfect vehicle for Posey’s

gangly, slapstick physicality. She can be funny—as when she

dances with Natasha at Rene’s, and is all angular, a precise

silent clown—and touching, as in the choreography

between her and Mustafa when he pushes his falafel cart

across the street; they move slowly, tentatively, so as to stay

together (Party Girl often feels like a dance musical, even

when there’s no music). It also gives Posey an endless

stream of quotable dialogue that displays her verbal

ferocity. At one point in a brilliant monologue, she explains

to bouncer boyfriend (Schreiber) how he “lowers her

worth” with his behavior. Later, she rants to a patron about

how he’s mis-shelved a book—“We’ll just put the

books...ANYwhere!...We’ll just put the books ANY DAMN

WHERE WE PLEASE!” Her ups and downs in work and love

cause her to read Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,”

whose central figure’s existential struggle she takes as her

own. “I think I’m an existentialist,” she declares, Posey’s

deadpan-sincere line reading and follow-up nod making


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Mary’s appropriation of French philosophy even funnier.

What’s really notable, though, is what a generous star turn

Posey’s performance is, one whose dynamics and charisma

cast the spotlight onto the rest of the cast, and not just

herself. Guillermo Diaz, Sasha von Scherler, Omar

Townsend, Donna Mitchell (as the faux-confident wreck

Rene), Schreiber, and even smaller roles, like Anthony

DeSando’s wonderfully obtuse Derrick and L.B. Williams’

concerned library clerk Howard, are all given moments to

shine. The film also has excellent cameos from

aforementioned drag queen The Lady Bunny and Natasha

Twist.

Indeed, although von Scherler’s Judy initially seems like the

butt-of-the-joke straight woman, the film allows her its most

serious moment, when she angrily explains the sexism that

female librarians have had to face for centuries (“Melvil

Dewey hired women as librarians because he believed the

job didn’t require any intelligence. It was a woman’s

job…That means it’s underpaid and undervalued”) before

banishing Mary from the sacred space because of the

latter’s costly screw-ups. Von Scherler is superb here, and

the scene up-ends the movie’s sympathies in a way that only

the resolution (set at a party, naturally) can fix.

When I ejected the tape from Facets back in 1996, Posey

became my new cinematic avatar. The timing is propitious:

when it comes to Chicago movie theaters, Parker Posey was

everywhere, her image floating from screen to screen across

the city. Over the course of the next 18 months or so, she

seemed to have a new film at the Music Box every time I

check the listings—The Daytrippers, Waiting for Guffman,

SubUrbia—all of which I absorbed in that great Deco palace

on Southport Ave. I was living down in Wrigleyville now,

which made the 20 to 30-minute walk west to the theater a

snap. She’s not the only star I saw, of course. By now,


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applications to graduate programs in film studies were in,

and I was absorbing as much movie (new and old) as my

eyes, my time, and my bank account could handle.

It was a good moment for movies in ‘95 to ’97, and the spirit

of Posey—at once hip, knowing and modern, but clearly

drawing on the styles of Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Paulette

Goddard, and other great classic comediennes—felt at that

time like the indie movie equivalent of what F. Scott

Fitzgerald called “the whole equation of pictures.” She

keeps everything precariously balanced, and so does Party

Girl, whose structure blends blackout sketch aesthetics, pop

musicals, and earnest rom-com into a dizzying cocktail. It’s

ridiculous, but its ridiculousness hides seriousness, like

Mary herself. It’s a survival kit for Gen X hedonists with a

secret bookish side.

IV. Language (English, grammar, and dictionaries)

“So, what are you going to do?”

“Where’s the spot?”


10 of 15 8/10/17, 2:23 AM

Once Judy dresses down Mary for having sex with Mustafa

(in “the romance languages section,” he later reports), Party

Girl becomes more off-kilter, its narrative spiraling

downward like Mary herself. The final third of the film

wants to wrap up its several storylines—Mary’s journey to a

career, the central romance of her and Mustafa, the various

ancillary triangles between supporting characters—but

once the library is a banned space, it seems to lose a bit of

its pulsing center. While the occasionally awkward ellipses

of this final section work on a thematic level as

representations of the characters’ struggles to conclude

their transformations, and are often visually striking, they

also feel a bit rushed. There’s a jumble of narrative

resolutions as the movie gets to its concluding surprise

party, whose bright and earnest mise-en-scene includes a

piñata and a stripper, generating a light-hearted deus ex

papier-mȃché for everyone.

Still, the movie’s earlier jokes about “The Myth of Sisyphus”

play out, in the end, as a way of understanding the rom-com

forms Party Girl is exploring: “Boy meets girl” as a narrative

rock that’s always being pushed up the hill, and rolling back

down again in the same way. The movie acknowledges that

this is one of Mary’s dilemmas, as the central figure of such

a romance, and then at least tries to avoid that cliche by

shifting the focus in the movie’s second half to concerns of

professional, familial, and platonic love. If it’s not entirely

successful, it does offer a heartening way of broadening the

genre’s recurring concerns.

Shifting focus is on my mind at this time, as I think about

life after Chicago. The American Bar Association offices in

Chicago are an interesting place to work in the mid-’90s: the

people are very nice; I helped with writing, editing, grant

rewarding and conference organizing around issues of law

and the liberal arts; and there were enough pleasingly

surreal moments to keep everyone on their toes. But I knew,


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like Mary, that it was a temporary stopping place. Like her, I

was serious about graduate school, and headed south to

Florida in August of 1997.

The University of Florida was a space known for its

theoretical difference, for its interest in Surrealism,

Derrida, and Andy Hardy as models for academic film

writing. My mentor’s suggestion to his students about their

work was a quote from Dziga Vertov, but it could also have

come from Party Girl’s Mary: “Anything but the boring.” If

other film programs sometimes looked at us like godmother

Judy berating Mary-- “no common sense!”—we cheerfully

rejected the false binaries of a lot of academic cosplay

radicality: we knew how to throw a fun party, how to create

an atmospheric mise-en-scene for our work.

Even in Gainesville, amidst classes, research, and theory,

Party Girl would pop up like a talisman. Over post-Boogie

Nights drinks one evening, a fellow graduate student

mentions how much she identifies with Mary’s rant about

putting books back randomly on shelves. A friend’s Oscar

parties would use movie quotes as passwords, one year I

was given Mary’s cri de couer—“I think I’m an existentialist;

I really do.”—as mine. I would share my shitty Showtime

VHS dub of the film with friends, recruiting new members

to the cult. Posey’s movies continued to have a hold, even if

her late ‘90s/early ‘00s work couldn’t hold a candle to that

mid-’90s stretch. But the main thing was that, like Mary, I’d

figured out where my spot was, and what I wanted to do.

The cinephilia that functioned like a sponge in Chicago

—absorbing, keeping me liquid in a rough period—was

more ordered and focused now. Like Mary awkwardly

shoving the exotic dancer away while trying to prove her

seriousness, I didn’t need the movies to strip for me in that

way and didn’t need to emotionally strip for them. Like

Mary, I was ready for a different, more stable party.


12 of 15 8/10/17, 2:23 AM

V. Social Sciences

Returning to the film for this piece, in a moment when the

state of the world makes everything feel precarious again,

the rush I felt when I first watched Party Girl came back

with a vengeance. Its blend of styles and tones feels smartly

heterogenous, a winning blend of the professional and

amateur. Its jokes ping-pong in your ears, providing both

relief and one-liners for future use. There’s even an Ivana

Trump joke near the start. Party Girl actually premiered on

the internet in 1995, via Seattle’s Point of Presence

Company; Parker Posey introduced the film via a webcam.

Now, it feels less like a harbinger of a virtually real future,

and more like a series of after-images that linger, a

nostalgia that shimmers.

There’s real power in that, though. “Movies don’t change,

but people do,” Roger Ebert famously wrote in his review of

La Dolce Vita, and Party Girl—both the film and my shifting

responses to it—suggests that the movie’s lessons about

identity and escapism (and the open-ended, tentative

nature of each) are even more resonant than they were

when I was 23. Escapism, like Mary, gets a bum rap. For

many self-serious critics, the escapist pleasures of this kind

of pop are often derided in the way Judy approaches Mary

and their shared family history: “Your mother was a

woman with no common sense.” But of course, that’s Judy’s

shield, a way to protect herself from rejection and to hide

how much she wants to connect.

So, perhaps there’s another way to think about this, another

way to organize our universe of items. In 2017, Party Girl’s

escapism—the frisson that comes from its balance of the

cartoonish and the earnest—feels less like an escape from

reality than an escape into a different mode through which

to view our current reality. It’s a vision of nation-as-library-

as-dance club, a party where everyone is invited, and like


13 of 15 8/10/17, 2:23 AM

← Though I Do Not Know the Way Serenity: A How-To-Live Manual by Joss

the clubbers when Leo’s record scratches, the movie’s

audience learns to clap along—creating their own beat, a

community out of which pleasure arises. Its joy teaches us

how to find our spot.

Brian Doan is a freelance

writer living and working

in Oberlin, Ohio, where he

binge-watches Murdoch

Mysteries with his wife,

and dreams of a

Midwestern grocery store

that will carry good boudin

(he is also an Affiliate Scholar in Oberlin College's Cinema

Studies program). He received his Ph.D. in English from the

University of Florida in 2010, where he wrote a dissertation

on "The Anecdote and Classic Hollywood" that he is

currently revising as a manuscript. He's a contributor

atRogerEbert.com and has also written essays on movies,

comics, and popular culture for various academic

collections. If you're so inclined, you can read his musings

on pretty much everything at his blog, Bubblegum

Aesthetics.

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