Have you heard of Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret? Movie about a teenage girl whose casual flirtation causes a serious accident? Explores the world of adolescence?  Theatrical release held up for 5 years because of fighting between the director and the producers over what cut of the film to use?

Well, regardless, I'm going to assume that you haven't seen it, since it seems to have been shown in all of 2 theaters in America for a period of 12 hours, just long enough for every film critic in the country to see it and declare it the greatest movie ever made. The reviews read like this:

"God, this is such a good movie. It's just extraordinary. Everything about it was mind-blowing and Kenneth Lonergan, writer-director, is a genius. It's too bad you, dear readers, will never see it... oh man, are you missing out." Gee, thanks.

Anyway, I should preface this by saying that I also have not seen Margaret. What can I say; I was busy for those twelve crucial hours. Now it's out on DVD and maybe I'll get around to watching it... sometime in the next six years.

But I read the reviews, and I just listened to an interview with Lonergan on Fresh Air, and he said something I thought was very interesting. Namely:



GROSS: Since you went to a school similar to the upper-middle-class private school in Manhattan that part of the movie is set in, it made me wonder about how you felt about the teenage girls in your school who were beautiful and, you know, flirtatious and often inappropriate in how they used their sexual power. Do you know?

LONERGAN: Frustrated.

(LAUGHTER)

LONERGAN: I was very frustrated. I was very shy. I didn't have a girlfriend in high school. I felt sort of - I actually felt, I felt envious of them in a way because people were very attracted to them, and they did have this power, and I felt sort of powerless in that arena.

I went to a school exactly like the school in the film, which was an upper-middle-class school, not a super-wealthy school, but there was one kid whose father was extremely wealthy who had bought him a Porsche at 17. And I remember driving around with him in this - we would all pack into his Porsche.

And when the car would go by, all these guys, everyone's head would turn to look at the car because it was so beautiful. And I thought oh, gee, this must be what it's like to be a pretty girl.



Terry Gross goes on to ask Lonergan whether these "teenage feelings" affected the screenplay, and Lonergan, rather unsurprisingly, said yes - but then changed the subject away from his feelings towards teenage girls and towards a more general experience of adolescence.


So here is this piece of art - here is this movie - that explores, in great and intimate detail, the life of a teenage girl. Again, I haven't seen it, but my understanding is that it was broadly praised for its psychological precision and for the way it illustrates the worldview of Anna Paquin's character even as it rips that world apart. And she's very specifically an attractive young woman, exploring her sexuality for the first time.

It was sort of stunning to me to imagine a writer writing that kind of a piece inspired not by sympathy, or personal experience, or an unforgettable observation, but by jealousy.


Part of me wants to take this information, add it to the fact that Lisa, the main character, is essentially punished for an innocent flirtation, and dismiss this whole apparently-brilliant-movie-I-haven't-seen as a middle-aged man finally exacting reveng on the high school girls who wouldn't sleep with him.

Most of me, however, feels like that is unfair. And then I turn to another question: how hard must it be to imagine another person's inner life with any believability if you are envious of that person? Envy twists everything; reshapes every action into one of power and intention, every expression into an indication of some emotion inaccessible to you, attributes power and happiness where the object of envy actually experiences helplessness and feigned contentment. Do you overcompensate, imagine that they must be actually miserable (or do you just make them actually miserable, as a way to correct for your idealization?) When you imagine what it would be like to be a beautiful young girl, can you somehow get over the fact that you desperately want to be one?

At first it seemed like it would be incredibly detrimental for an artist to be jealous of his subject. Even hatred, I think, has more space for nuance than jealousy does; and hatred is at least directed to the subject, moving the attention outward, where as envy always comes back to "I." They have and I don't, they are and I'm not... You can imagine a painter who doesn't truly see the model, a writer whose depictions of others are really explorations of everything he or she lacks. How terribly dull.

But then at the same time, jealousy carries with it an obsessiveness that might be productive. Envy can drive us to watch for every tiny motion, every indication of the source of beauty or success, every crack in a facade, every minor tic of fleeting action. And that might be very fruitful raw material from which to craft a narrative; if you get the exterior perfectly right, maybe that's all that matters.

And now I've talked myself out of any stable position, and I just don't know.


If jealousy is a fruitful source for art, however, I'm going to start writing about circus performers. We saw this show in Montreal where three unbelievably strong and agile circus artists stood on top of a seven-foot building, lit by construction lights and watched by a rapt street-level audience. To the eerie sounds of a throat-singer and a single violin, they flipped their bodies around and above and on top of each other, with no props but each other (and no setting but the city; a stunning backdrop).

I was struck by an envy so intense it almost pulled me out of my awe. In those moments when they are inverted on one hand, that hand on another person's body, sixty or seventy feet above the street, they must be living more intensely than I am. They must be more aware, more in the moment, more themselves.

And to live in those bodies - able to move their weight on one wrist, hold themselves steady at impossible angles - it is not an easy grace, and that's its allure. It's a grace and a power that speaks to years of constant effort, gaining and refining skills, building and re-building muscles. They live in bodies they made themselves, intentionally, every muscle bent at a curve they made through repetitive actions. I work to keep my own body minimally competent, jogging my 11-minute miles so that I can climb stairs or bike to work. I control very little of myself. I live few moments with full awareness of any part of myself. I am so small and weak, my life so accidental.

And they have all this intentionality, all this power, that I lack...

(And watching, when my own self-loathing begins to overpower my admiration, do I not begin to think that I would feel better if I imagined a world where all this seeming power is the cause of their downfall?  I think I'm talking myself back into a position on Margaret...)