It happens in a moment. Her eyes flick down, she takes a quick peek, and I start laughing. My friend Brian is sitting next to me at the Angelika going, “What?
What’s funny? What?” I don’t expect him to understand.
It’s never happened to him, never will, the lucky bastard. Vivian Abromowitz has just gotten her period all over her father’s new girlfriend’s tapestry chairs. There are so few movies that get it right about being a girl; Slums of Beverly Hills , starring Natasha Lyonne as Vivian, absolutely does.
Her brothers are annoying, her romantic prospects dismal, and her body is totally freaking her out. As bad as things got for Molly Ringwald in the 80s, you never got the sense that she ever worried about smelling weird, or that she ever got razor burn from using an elderly disposable, or ran out of tampons and had to ask Ally Sheedy if she had one to spare. Since Molly was as close to a real girl as I ever saw on screen growing up, I didn’t stand a chance.
My daily life was definitely so much ickier than Molly’s. My greatest fear was that Everybody Would Know how gross I was, even though I went to a school with all girls, who were presumably just as gross as me. The only other period scene I’d ever encountered was the opening of , but the problem was that Sissy Spacek’s character was just too weird to relate to, girl to girl.
I empathized deeply with her desire to be loved and understood, but in that opening scene I felt the same revulsion that the other characters felt towards her, and I believe this was Brian de Palma’s intent. I didn’t want to inhabit a body like Carrie’s, monstrous and alien. Nancy Allen and PJ Soles would never have something like that happen to them, because normal girls aren’t icky.
I always did have the sense, however much I yearned for normal, for clean, that becoming a woman meant acknowledging that horror is intrinsic to life. Francis of Assisi called his body “Brother Ass,” which means almost the same thing, but adolescence for men, while fraught with its own perils, lends itself far more readily to comedy than to horror. There are humiliations, but there is no blood.
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