Heavy Relationships: On BFFs, Girlfriends and Breakups
This International Women’s Day, we’re celebrating the platonic lovers of Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends, and our very own Contributing Writer Anahit Behrooz – her first book, BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship, celebrates these women and so many more, in their expansive and emancipatory understanding of female intimacy through friendship. Here’s an exclusive extract from the boook.
Perhaps what unsettles me most about Frances Ha is the sense that we should be past what it shows, that this old story – the relinquishing of childish ways for an accomplished life – belongs to a different, unenlightened time. Didn’t we already do this? I think, as everyone fragments into tidy units around me. Didn’t we devote decades to fighting this? Didn’t we decide that this isn’t what we want? I spent my childhood reading the classic novels of English literature, arrogant with the birth right of my modernity. Jane Austen, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell... their narratives were flush with a passion I yearned for, but the demands of their marriage plots, I felt with relief, would not, could never, concern me.
I was so naïve, and so unprepared for the ways in which these things still deeply matter, the ways they still structure both our society and what we consider important. I had foolishly assumed that feminism, whatever abstracted understanding I had of it, had undone all this, that it had wiped the slate clean. That love could come without conditions; that we could dictate the open terms of our intimacies. I have spent years now in a state of irreconcilable desire, caught between stability and independence, subsumption and equity, entanglement and freedom.
In Claudia Weill’s 1978 film Girlfriends, a direct predecessor to Baumbach’s Frances Ha, such tension forms part of the self-determining struggle of second-wave feminism – a victory I had once assumed well and won. Exploring the fallout in friendship between two roommates after one abruptly leaves to get married, Girlfriends is a gem of American independent filmmaking, made at a time when very few women were given opportunities to direct. Much like Frances Ha, which stays on its eponymous heroine, Girlfriends spends most of its time with Susan (Melanie Mayron), an aspiring photographer living in New York, rather than her married writer friend Annie (Anita Skinner).
Susan, with her enchanting Nan Goldin hair and easily stung sensibility, seems hardly to recognise either her friend or herself in the aftermath of their separation. She sits quietly in Annie’s new home, uncertain around the sudden, foreign presence of a husband-of-the-house; she is alternately charming and prickly at parties, slipping away from a one-night-stand only to apologise months later. “I was just coming out of a heavy relationship,” she sheepishly excuses herself. When, in a rare moment of togetherness, Susan and Annie sit looking at photos on a projector, it isn’t until moments later that we learn they are not Susan’s but snapshots from Annie’s honeymoon, given sudden, exhibitive pride of place. Watching Susan’s mounting sense of rejection, I am reminded violently of Mira Mattar’s novel Yes, I Am a Destroyer, and the vignette in which the nameless narrator speaks of her friendships. ‘Suddenly it eats at tables,’ she writes, ‘wedded, and looks askance at the broken, the unhinged, wielding a screwdriver.’
It is the same kind of rupture, the same kind of grief, that Frances experiences – “You left me,” Susan tells Annie desperately during a fight. But it is a rupture that is also an inquiry into what kind of female life we find legible, or important. Susan and Annie’s breakup materialises many of the struggles of second-wave feminism, articulating urgent questions that were being asked at the time (that it seems we are still asking): whether it is possible to engage in heteronormative monogamy and retain the unstructured, queered entanglement of platonic companionship; whether economic and creative freedom are reconcilable with domestic demands; whether it is possible to be truly independent and married. The two women’s circumstances are fiercely political precisely in their unexceptional nature: Annie’s husband is kind, her baby sweet, Susan’s boyfriend irritating in the harmless way so many artsy boys are. There is nothing traumatic or brutally undoing about their situations. They are just inherently limiting.
Annie leaves, and Susan loses not only a partner to do dishes and delightedly make home renovation plans with, but the intimacy that comes from two people both striving for the same thing – untrammelled freedom and creative expression. “You don’t need anyone to take care of you, Annie,” Susan confidently pronounces at the beginning of the film as the two gossip about men, only to tell her now-married friend much later that she no longer knows what is best for her. This new Annie – married, unwriting – is an unknown quantity, a being with desires and needs that Susan cannot peer through the wifely, maternal facade to access. For herself, meanwhile, Susan is certain of what independence signifies. “I like me when I don’t need you,” she tells her boyfriend flatly after an argument.
Yet, perhaps she dismisses her friend too quickly. A room of one’s own, a white picket fence: the lives they represent are so wildly apart, yet what they house is so often the same – a woman negotiating impossible circumstances, trying to make her way through the world. Annie is still trying to write, still struggling to carve out her own interiority within the demands of marriage, and Susan recognises this eventually; she returns to Annie, who missed Susan’s exhibition opening to recover from an abortion she had in an attempt to cling onto independence.
Annie wants to continue her studies, she wants to be married and have children, she wants love and creative fulfilment – a life of wide-open, improbable fullness. The structures that have swallowed her up do not make these desires any less true. Girlfriends ends with Susan and Annie sitting childlike on the sofa, throwing sweets into the other’s mouth. It is open-ended whether the two will be able to reconcile the diverging pull of their lives; whether marriage and domesticity are, in the end, compatible with such irresponsible intimacy. But it is enough, maybe, to have discovered the want is still there.
BFFS: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship is out on March 9 via 404 Ink.
