Читать книгу Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies - Hadley Freeman, Hadley Freeman - Страница 14

It took me a long time and a lot of inappropriately overdramatic dialogue before I realised that real life is not how it is depicted in the movies, and, to be fair to movies, they never claimed otherwise. To be fair to me, they just insinuated it.

In retrospect, I should perhaps have realised that, already by the age of twelve, I took movies too seriously when I woke up the morning after being voted prom queen of my summer camp (George W. Bush is not the only American to have attained power through possibly dodgy vote counting) and felt … disappointed. It didn’t make any sense: how could I – not a popular girl ever, and certainly not at summer camp where popularity could only be bought by the double and, to me, foreign currencies of athletic prowess and sluttiness – be anything other than ecstatic after, against all odds, beating the far sportier and sluttier Tiffany Feiglestein? Even better, winning meant that I got to dance to a cassette of the Dirty Dancing soundtrack in front of the WHOLE CAMP (attention – ha!) with dreamy fourteen-year-old (older man!) Alex Zimmerman (call me!). But that was precisely the problem: that moment – me looking into Alex’s eyes as the speakers blared that we were having the time of our lives, him looking over my shoulder for Tiffany Feiglestein with whom he would spend the rest of the night making out under the gym steps while I chatted with my arts and crafts counsellor about my planned future career in papier-mâché – was the perfect climax, the point when the end credits should have rolled and a power ballad should have struck up, sung by Jennifer Warnes, Peter Cetera and Christopher Cross, three singers whose presence on a soundtrack guarantees a quality film.

It’s not that I consciously wished for death after the prom (I am more Molly Ringwald than Sissy Spacek); rather, on some level, I just didn’t realise that the slog of life still continued after the triumph, especially after an achievement that is so frequently touted as the end goal in movies. Personally, I’m surprised more divorces don’t happen the day after the wedding. Wait, you mean there’s still more to this story? And it involves me having to go to the supermarket and pay taxes and wait for the bus? But I thought everything was supposed to be sorted and perfect now! Mother FUCK!

There is a soul-crushing number of differences between reality and the cinematic version thereof. I’m not even talking about the sad lack of musical montages in one’s life; nor the rarity of someone (a kooky new friend, a romantic interest, a mystical old person, a wise child who will tell you where you have been going wrong all along) turning up in your life at the exact moment when you need them; nor the fact that you are probably separated by many more than six degrees from Kevin Bacon. But rather, the certain tropes movies lazily rely on that have, through overuse, become such clichés that they are part of popular culture and become a given so that they become the prism through which you see your life and, in doing so, ruin it. Let’s un-ruin your life!