Turn and Face the Strange
How The Worst Person in the World made me think a lot about ch-ch-changes
I’ve never had an easy time with change. I’ve lived in Ohio my whole life and, even though I don’t live in my hometown, I’m only an hour away. I’ve known many of my closest friends since kindergarten, and some of them from before kindergarten. My favorite song has been the same since I was 14 (Last Christmas). It’s not that I don’t like trying new things, but I love routines, tradition, and comfort.
But there’s a reason there are so many cliches and quotes about change being the only constant. I accept that change happens. I know it’s normal. I even understand that it’s often good. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a full on mental and physical freak out every time I’m dragged, kicking and screaming (metaphorically…maybe), into a transitional phase. Change just brings up so much anxiety for me, and when things change, I feel unstable, unmoored, and way too vulnerable. Even the change in seasons (which, you know, happens four times every year) sends me into a funk for weeks as I’m forced to recalibrate what I need to wear when I step outside. This isn’t something I like about myself, or something I could justify to you as being reasonable. It’s just yet another aspect of my freakishly stubborn personality.
Basically, I’m the pigeon.
Having a kid, though, is like exposure therapy for the change-averse. Because you know what kids do? They change, constantly and rapidly. And one of the most symbolic and obvious changes is starting school.
As an avowed change-hater, I always hated the first day of school. Getting used to a new room or building, teacher, schedule, subject, and vibe? No thank you! And that’s not even mentioning the ice breaker activities, one of the true banes of my existence. I wasn’t prepared, however, for my kid starting school to bring up those same bad first day feelings. I felt stressed and on edge for weeks as we got closer to his first day. While he was going through an arguably much bigger change, it was still a huge change for me. I was transitioning out of the little kid years. The “having a buddy on all my errands” years. The “no real outside schedule” years. Six years flew by in the blink of an eye, and all of a sudden all I could think about was how close I am to my eventual death.
Because that’s what the fear of change is about, of course. Change is nothing but a reminder of my own mortality, of the fact that the years are flying by as my human body ages (frankly, not always gracefully!!), of the sometimes-easy-to-ignore idea that, as Sufjan Stevens says, we’re all gonna die. I spent the weeks before school started randomly bursting into tears when we visited parks we used to go to when my son was a baby. I tried bargaining strategies in my mind (maybe if I have another baby this will feel better? Maybe I need to homeschool him?), trying to find any solution I could to make this uncomfortable feeling go away.
But that’s the thing about change. It doesn’t go away, and the real kicker is…it’s often pretty dang good. My kid starting school is an unquestionably good thing for both of us. He loves it. I get time to work. For the first time in six years, I have actual time to focus on my career, on exercise, on occasionally putting away laundry. I’m even tossing around the idea of starting therapy (“Please do!”-anyone who reads this newsletter). It’s exciting and it’s good and it’s finally starting to feel normal, because that’s what always happens.
And while I was dealing with this internal struggle to accept something very normal and positive (story of my life!), I kept coming across books and movies that directly spoke to what I was feeling. One such movie was The Worst Person in the World, which I think every person in the world besides me has already seen. But I love to watch an Oscar nominated film months later when the buzz has died down.
Somehow, even though this movie was very buzzy, I missed learning anything at all about it. I thought it was going to be one of those “wow, this lady sure is messy!” movies. Basically I thought it was going to be the film version of this meme.
As it turns out, it was not.
The Worst Person in the World is classic Nothing Happens Cinema in the best way, but it’s about a lot of things. I should note, however, that if you think this is a rom-com…listen, I’m all for a broad definition of the term, but I’m not sure what’s going on in your head! I saw someone on Letterboxd describe it as a rom-traum, and I think that’s a more accurate description.
That being said, all it made me think about was my current twin obsessions: change and death. Our main character, Julie, is absurdly beautiful. Somehow she looks different in every scene, but she always looks great. I’ve seen some Dakota Johnson comparisons, and she does look like DJ sometimes. Mostly she just has bangs like half the time.
Julie doesn’t know what she wants…or rather, she does know what she wants, and it’s a fresh start. She studies medicine, then realizes it’s not for her. She switches to psychology, then realizes it’s the same thing. She tries photography, while working at a bookstore. Each time, it’s new haircut, a new boyfriend, and striding purposefully into a room while a killer song plays. Julie is not just surviving but thriving on change. Julie and I are polar opposites.
She meets Aksel, a controversial cartoonist (one of the funniest and most clever parts of the film is how it shows and talks about Aksel’s work, such as his insistence that his main character, a cat, has a visible butthole). Even though he’s older than her, they have a connection and they end up moving in together pretty quickly. But because Aksel is older and not possessed with Julie’s need to change her entire life with the seasons, he wants stability. And kids. Julie doesn’t, or maybe she does…but someday, not now. Because a baby would be the one thing she can’t run away and get a fresh start from—you can’t simply get a new haircut, play a banging Christopher Cross song, and forget about your kid.
Speaking of Christopher Cross, the music in this movie is incredible, by which I mean I often felt it was expressly chosen for my personal enjoyment. Christopher Cross, Art Garfunkel, not one but two Harry Nilsson songs, and this absolute weird joy of a Todd Rundgren track that plays in the film as Julie stares at various things (Aksel’s friends, Aksel with kids, Aksel’s work) and contemplates the idea of marriage and children.
There’s a lot of contemplative staring in this movie.
(Okay, I’m starting the serious spoilers here, although I think you would still really enjoy the film even if you know what happens.)
But Julie’s never met a decision she can’t run from, in this case literally. In a fantasy that’s one of the movie’s best scenes, she runs across the city to be with a new man, then decides to leave Aksel. The dreamlike quality of her new relationship contrasts with the bleak, realistically drawn out ending of her relationship with Aksel—there are tears, negotiations, and a very detail-oriented conversation. But there’s nothing Aksel could say to convince Julie to stay—she’s already gone.
It should be noted that Aksel is much more of a catch than the guy she leaves him for. Sure, he’s writing a possibly sexist controversial comic, but he has an established career and he’s way better looking (my brother Alex said that Julie’s new man, Eivind, looks like a Wallace and Gromit character, and he wasn’t wrong). That’s not the point, though. Julie’s making a change.
She keeps working at the bookstore, and she keeps dating Eivind, until one day she runs into a friend of Aksel’s who tells her that Aksel has cancer, and he’s not expected to recover. She visits Aksel in the hospital and they have excruciating conversations that made me cry a lot. This isn’t a movie about a woman breaking up with men and failing to commit to one thing—or I guess it could be that too, but it’s a lot more. This is a movie about how the changes find us, whether we want them to or not.
“I always worried something would go wrong, but the things that went wrong were never what I worried about,” Aksel says in one of his last conversations with Julie. He says he wishes he could stay alive, that he doesn’t want to be a memory. He wishes that they were together. He wishes his life, his interests, his most important relationship weren’t all in the past.
And it’s clear (I think) that Julie wishes those things, too. Maybe all that time she spent running, looking for the perfect new choice or the perfect new man, didn’t really matter. Maybe there’s no point in searching for the perfect choice, because life makes changes for you, no matter what you choose.
The ending is a bit vague, but I saw it as Julie giving herself the chance to have a life that’s more than regret. She’s older now, and more experienced, and getting a chance that Aksel didn’t get: to keep on living.
Also the movie just looks great. It’s funny, it’s smart, it’s weird, and I’d say it’s pretty perfect! I don’t want to bring it back to Dakota again (just kidding, I always want to), but she loved it too: “It’s so brilliant and it wrecked me. I was crying in a way that was like, weird. I don’t remember the last time I wept in a film.”
It made Dakota cry in a way that was, like, weird. Like, weird. I don’t know what else I can do to convince you to see it! When Dakota cries, I cry!
It’s very possible that you’ll get something entirely different out of this movie. It seems like a bit of a Rorschach test of a film. That’s what I really love about movies, though…and about books and music and all kinds of art and entertainment. They’re there for you to project your own life onto, to find meaning in when you’re going through something. I mean, not all films and not all the time. But sometimes watching the right movie at the right time can feel a little bit like pulling a Tarot card—an encouragement, a confirmation, a push to consider something. *
“The only constant in life is change,” the philosopher Heraclitus apparently said, according to Google. The only constant in Julie’s life is that her hair looks great and she has an amazing soundtrack. And the only constant in my life is that I’m gonna freak the hell out whenever anything at all changes, even if it ends up being a fantastic change that I’m so, so grateful for. This movie is a nice reminder of our own mortality, and of the importance of taking charge of your own life, and of the power of Todd Rundgren. It’s a lot of things, and I hope you watch it if you haven’t seen it yet. The Worst Person in the World is streaming on Hulu.
*I actually know nothing about Tarot but I just read a book that featured it, so it’s been on my mind.
Thanks for all the kind words and lovely posts about Just Another Love Song over the past three weeks. Launching a book is weird—yet another one of those good changes! It’s so exciting to put a book into the world, but also it’s very vulnerable and kinda makes me feel crazy. But hearing from you guys is the absolute best part.
I hope to be on sort of a normal schedule now with No One Asked, but I also have a whole other book due soon (yikes! exciting!) so who knows! Either way, see you soon.
I remember this feeling from when my five year old went to kindergarten. I hated it because the school was basically a cookie cutter copy of one I went to as a kid and I HATED school. Every year. Every hour. Every minute. I found sending my son to school traumatic for 13 years, and dropping him at college was a bit of a relief.