A Sorta Vibe
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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?”
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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.
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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
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← 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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