So I think one of the things that really drew me in to Frances Ha was Frances’ physicality. I wrote about this briefly in my review. She literally stumbles on the screen, constantly looking and acting out of place. In the film, Frances always wears these great, heavy leather jackets.
The jacket became my favorite part of a film that I already knew I loved. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but my love at least in part stemmed from the way she wore it, the way it hung off her limbs, the way it countered the grace she needed as a dancer and instead gave her an assuredness in place and self outside of her artistic goals. I started wearing my black leather jacket again after letting it sit for more than a month hanging off of the back of the orange chair in my living room.
I loved the jacket so much that I created a GIF framing it, trying to capture its essence on Greta Gerwig’s form.
While watching the movie, I kept thinking, “God, she’s so tall. She’s so tall. She’s like me. She is there. She is present. She is.” That’s a tall person thing, a tall woman thing especially. We are given attributes based on everything we can see, the amount of space we take up.
Women are taught to take up as little space as possible. It is not an explicit teaching. Rather, it’s something you learn and start to adapt to the older you get. Tallness rattles this; it laughs in the face of this stereotype. You can’t diminish me. I am here.
I started wearing heels again.
On the bus to go see Before Midnight earlier today, I thought about an interaction I had the day before at the Printer’s Row Lit Fest. I thought about another interaction I had at a good friend’s birthday party. I thought about a lot of interactions I’ve had with people I’ve just met who know me from my work online.
“You are a lot taller than I imagined,” they’ll say. Even though I talk about my height, people forget this.
To write openly about your emotions and insecurities on a blog, especially one like this, is to be vulnerable. And in turn, to be open is to be small. That is what I think others see. That is what they see in these words. To be closed is to stand tall. It is as if the world is saying you are strong enough to not share your thoughts. You are stoic. Emotions are weak and feminine and small. To share them is to embody that.
Emotions then represent a weakness in the self and to be emotionally weak is to be physically weak. We are putting characteristics of the mind onto the body. You can’t literally see above others and still feel lost, they say. To take up more space is to dominate the world and to dominate the world is to not be small, in any way, shape or form. My writing makes me small, despite what I want.
But I don’t know if I believe in this. I certainly don’t want to believe in this. There is strength in vulnerability and earnestness. I’ve been obsessed with the idea of radical vulnerability in black women. We do not see this kind of emotion. Tears are a public rarity for us. I am not trying to perform vulnerability. But by sharing it, I am promoting it. And by promoting it, I am trying to show that it is real, that it gives us a realness and completeness that doesn’t speak to size or race or ethnicity or gender, but to our complete humanity.
I think then to assume size based on words is to diminish the power of words. These thoughts can and do exist in all of us. They are happening. This is happening.
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