Call Me Charlie

Issue 269

You guys,

When I was a junior in high school, I sat in front of the living room television, on my knees on the gray carpet, my face close to the screen, and watched the final kiss scene of Miss Congeniality over and over. It was one of my favorite movies.

Sandra Bullock plays Gracie Hart, a “tomboyish detective” who doesn’t wear makeup, wears unflattering clothes with her hair teased and matted into a ponytail, and snorts when she laughs. She is undesirable to all the men she works with, barely seen as a woman, especially in the eyes of her coworker, Eric Matthews, played by Benjamin Bratt, who is tall and fit with dark eyes, dark hair, and dark skin contrasting against his dazzling white smile. But then, Gracie needs to go undercover as a contestant in the Miss United States Beauty Contest. She gets a makeover. She’s beautified. She learns etiquette, very My-Fair-Lady-esque. And suddenly, she starts to get attention from men, from Eric.

The final kiss happens right after they’ve solved the case, and have just put the bad guy in the police car to be taken away. Eric approaches Gracie.

“Listen I was thinking,” Eric says, “you know, when we get back to the city, after we write up our reports and you get all ugly again, I don’t know, maybe we could have dinner, you know?”

“What, you’re like asking me on a date?” Gracie says, a sly smile on her face.

“No. Just a casual dinner… If we happen to have sex afterwards so be it.”

They turn and look into each other’s eyes. A beat, then Gracie begins to sing a silly made-up song that she sang to him earlier in the movie.

“You think I’m gorgeous, you wanna date me, you love me, you—”

Gracie puts a playful hand on his chest and Eric turns to her, and they kiss.

It was the most romantic moment I’d ever seen. I couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted this to happen in my life.

In

Jami Attenberg

’s memoir, I Came All This Way To Meet You, she wrote a few pages about the movie Singles. She’d seen it when she was twenty years old and related to the lead character, Janet. “She was young and single and worked in a cafe and wore vintage dresses and black dresses and Doc Marten boots and she dated dumb guys in bands who were shitty to her and I was about three years from being her and I didn't quite know that yet.”

Jamie went on to describe Janet’s relationship with her boyfriend, Clif, and their eventual breakup in such detail that I felt like I was watching the movie. I kept coming back to these pages in the book, so riveted by the story and the parallel to her own life. She wrote what happened in the movie, then wrote about what happened in her own life. And then, she came back to the movie one more time, now reflecting on how it felt different to rewatch it in her forties:

“The final scene of Singles is Janet and Cliff standing in the elevator of her apartment building. She's given him a polite, friendly cold shoulder for months, when he realizes that he should have never let her go. He's tried, unsuccessfully, to woo her back, while Janet has gotten her act together, enrolled in architecture school, moved on without him. We are proud of Janet. Janet will be fine without Cliff, the flower deliveryman whose musical performance is reviewed in the Seattle alt weekly as ‘More pompous, dick-swinging swill from a man who has haunted the local scene for much too long.’ Janet, stay the course, I find myself saying now while I watch it. Be single. Or find a nice architect to marry. Janet sneezes in the elevator, and Cliff says, ‘I bless you,’ and she rewards him with her entire mouth, and they start making out, and at the time I am sure I thought it was a worthy love story, but now I find myself mildly furious that the grand prize of the film is making out with someone with an actual soul patch.”

I wondered, are there any movies I could dissect as they related to my life? Where in my writing could I reference a movie I used to love, but show how my perception has changed in adulthood? I decided to revisit my own blast from the past, Miss Congeniality.

I watched the final kiss scene, curious about my obsession with this moment. I was looking for a clue. What was it that gripped me so much? But instead of leaning forward in my seat, smiling at the romance, I felt uncomfortable. I found the exchange awkward and immature. When Eric asks Gracie on a date he doesn’t even look at her. The two of them avoid eye contact, smile coyly, tease each other—it’s a game.

When Eric says, “After we write up our reports and you get all ugly again…” I don’t find it funny or charming. When he says, “If we happen to have sex afterwards so be it,” I find it assuming and inappropriate. This was how two consenting adults who cared about each other acted? It felt more like I was watching a pair of insecure teenagers on the screen.

But in the year 2001, when I was sixteen years old, this was my blueprint for how to act, and became my approach to dating for the next sixteen years. I used these tactics in all my initial interactions with love interests—make jokes, tease, avoid eye contact, avoid real connection—and it worked. I caught them like fish, then held them in my hands and smiled proudly for the picture before they slipped from my grip and swam away as fast as they could.

I let the movie continue playing and watched the final scene. Eric, who I always found so handsome and dreamy, is walking with Gracie and she says of her experience as a beauty contestant, “I’m suddenly very aware and proud of my breasts.”

Without missing a beat, and without looking at her, Eric says, “It’s funny, me too.”

I turned off the movie, suddenly very aware that, until I met my husband at 32 years old, I was only attracted to Erics.

—

Until next week,

Charlie