I made a list of 200 movies I've never seen before, and I'm going through them in alphabetical order. Check out the list HERE.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
1961
"Is she or isn't she?"
The most important thing to consider, at least from a film audience's perspective, is the character of Holly Golightly. (From a societal perspective, there's another character we need to consider, but we can do that at the end.) I can't think of another character from any movie I've seen recently—especially not from this project—that I've found so fascinating or so compelling. I did not expect this.
That's probably it though, right? Expectations. You go into a movie expecting one thing, and it ends up being a completely different thing, and you're flabbergasted. If you'd never seen the movie but you knew a girl in college who had a Breakfast at Tiffany's post in her dorm room, then you would expect Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly to be some combination of vapid and pretty and vain, a proto-Instagram influencer, perhaps. This is not the case.
At first, maybe you think that. She at first appears to be either a high-class prostitute with low expectations, or a bohemian type pretending to be a well-to-do. Either way, the audience and the characters who interact with her are right to question whether this chick is the real deal. But then the facade starts to crumble. Her past is a sordid one, having grown up ultra-poor and married at age fourteen(!) to a well-meaning but possessive Texas bumpkin.
When her agent calls her a "real phony," stating that she is a phony but she really believes in what she pretends to be, I don't necessarily think he hits the bullseye square. Yes, she is not really an affluent New Yorker from high society, but it's not that she wants to be one. It's that she needs to be one. Getting drunk on champagne and allowing wealthy men to give her $50 on the way to powder room is her way of putting up a wall between herself and what she is escaping from. It's not sufficient to say that she is who she pretends to be, because it's not true, and it's not sufficient to say that she is a phony either, because that's missing the point. It's the reason that she pretends that's important.
I'm not even making the case that she is a sympathetic character. She is rude and uncaring and I cannot imagine every hanging out with anyone who actually acted this way. But there's an argument that she is an empathetic character, because who among us has not struggled to figure out how to define ourselves? Holly Golightly had every reason to try to reinvent herself, and truly become someone she ultimately was not, and we can't let distract us the fact that she happened to inhabit the role of hopeless ice queen.
All this makes it so interesting to consider why the movie poster featuring Audrey Hepburn in a black dress and comically long cigarette holder (as seen above) is so ubiquitous in college dorm rooms. Admiring Holly Golightly seems like misconstruing her as a character. Like, you don't want to be her if you can help it, but hanging a poster like this might make it seem like you do.
I have a strong vision of this poster on someone's dorm room wall in my freshman year. But the vision doesn't capture the whole room, so I don't know whose poster it was. I have my suspicions. Here's the thing, though—none of the women I hung around with in my freshman year, either romantically or platonically, are women I would consider "a Holly Golightly type." My freshman year female pals were almost universally strong and smart and sure of themselves (at least as sure as you could be at age 18). I didn't get the sense that there was any phoniness at all, let alone a phoniness that was masking any pain. So who had the poster, and what did she mean by it?
More than likely, the poster was more superficial than anything—it looked cool because Audrey Hepburn looks stunning. I'm not passing judgment, even on the off chance that Holly Golightly's purpose as a movie character was misinterpreted. There is, after all, no obligation to consider any of this in the act of hanging a movie poster in your dorm. If I'm going to make that judgment, then we should probably talk about the thousands of teen boys hanging Fight Club posters on their wall and not thinking once about how the movie is about the mental health concerns of the frail masculine ego.
I merely stating that the poster gives the wrong impression. At least, I got the wrong impression from the poster. I certainly didn't think that Holly Golightly would become one of my favorite movie characters in a long time. That's on me for making assumptions.
Credit can be given to Audrey Hepburn, who brought all the necessary depth and groundedness to this role, when it could've easily floated off into the cartoonish. Yes, it requires her to act foolishly and lavishly and overact at times, but Hepburn also expertly makes it clear that it's all an act, and that there is real emotion coming from a very real place underneath it all. Another assumption—because the only thing I knew about Audrey Hepburn before watching this was that she looked great in a black cocktail dress, I assumed that there wasn't much more to her acting than that. Wrong, wrong, wrong. She brings it.
I mean, there's a reason I've spent the entire time writing about Holly Golightly, and not about Paul Varjak or whomever. That's the movie. It all revolved around Holly. She exists as everything at once—an intergenerational style icon, a cautionary tale, a means to self-deprecate, a hero, an antihero, an archetype. Breakfast at Tiffany's lives and breathes because the idea of Holly Golightly is infinite.
But that brings me back to the very first quote: "Is she or isn't she?" It's a conversation between Paul and Holly's manager/friend/? O.J. Berman, in which they are discussing whether Holly is real or phony. We've already talked about their conclusion and how it's wrong, but can we also talk about how icky it is that they are even discussing it in the first place? And if that's the case, then what does that say about me, that I'm so fixated on the ins and outs of Holly Golightly myself?
I'm torn. Yeah, I think if Holly was a real person, then it would be fucked up for me to discuss her in this way, as if she is an object. But Holly Golightly is fiction, a creation of Truman Capote and George Axelrod and Blake Edwards and Audrey Hepburn, and is thus an object. She's not real. Many real women can see their own existences refracted through hers, but she herself doesn't exist. She is both a real-seeming character and a figment of our imaginations.
I don't think anyone is going to accuse me of being sexists by thinking about nothing but Holly Golightly over the past three days or so. This is probably just my incredibly clunky way of transitioning to a completely different topic, one that has nothing to do with Hepburn, but needs to be said anyway. It would be irresponsible, frankly, if I didn't mention it while typing about Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Here it is—there is a very prominent racial caricature featured in this film. You might know about this already, since it might be the most famous/infamous example of racism in Hollywood history (at the very least, I'll bet my life on the fact that it's in the top five). In short, Mickey Rooney, a white man, portrays an Asian man by taping his eyes back and wearing prosthetic teeth and talking with an over-exaggerated accent. Not good.
This isn't the first aspect of a movie that I've come across during the Never Seen It project that doesn't "hold up," as they say. However, it is the most explicit because not only does it exist, but it exists so that the character in question can be the butt of the joke. It's not just that a white man is doing a yellow face routine, but that the routine is supposed to be comedic relief. Not good, not good.
I don't even want to elaborate any more because... well, it makes me uncomfortable that I have so many good things to say about Breakfast at Tiffany's as a whole, all the while it's a movie that features a very ugly racist aspect to it. I was going to say that I don't want to elaborate because the racism is not what's important in Breakfast at Tiffany's, but let's not even try to minimize it. Just because I'm a straight white male and I wasn't personally affected by the racism doesn't mean other people weren't. To many, many Americans, Mickey Rooney's character IS the most important part of this movie, due to the pain it's caused. I don't want to brush that under the rug.
I still don't necessarily know how to square my feelings when it comes to movies I enjoy
despite the shittiness of a certain aspect, either big or small. I'm not just posturing—I've already mentioned a handful of times in other movies how these types of decisions can tarnish a good movie (like
Ben-Hur), or make a bad movie even worse (like
Ace Ventura). But with
Breakfast at Tiffany's, there comes a reckoning, because I just unabashedly
loved this movie, and yet have to grapple with the fact that a large portion of it (anything with Mickey Rooney) is
so incredibly offensive.
You try to compartmentalize. You say to yourself, "Well, the part I want to talk about is Holly Golightly, she has nothing to do with Mr. Yunioshi." You try to rationalize that they are completely separate from each other, and that a racist caricature shouldn't affect the immortal legacy of the most fascinating female lead.
But they are the same movie. There's no getting around it. If anything, there's just a lot of fucking regret here. I wish I could say I love Breakfast at Tiffany's, because there's a lot to love. I wish I could recommend it to friends, because there's a lot to think about and discuss. But I can't in good faith say I love it, and I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone, because it completely implodes under the weight of Mickey Rooney's fake teeth.
I understand not everyone would agree with me here. Some people are able to compartmentalize. Hey, if you wanna hit me up and talk about Golightly, then I'm here (especially if you happen to be an ex-girlfriend of mine and want to cop to having a Breakfast at Tiffany's poster in your dorm room). But I don't think there's any room to discuss Rooney and Mr. Yunioshi any more than I have here. There's nothing else to say, and there's no way to justify it.
I could see an argument where Breakfast at Tiffany's earns a 5/5, and I could see an argument where it earns a 0/5, so let's split the difference, and pray to god that the next movie that completely floors me doesn't also feature some unquestionably painful material.
GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: We watch
The Bridge on the River Kwai, which is mentioned in an
equally questionable viral video from my youth—not that I'm going to discuss "Unforgiveable #2" in any fashion in my
Bridge on the River Kwai blog post, but just that it should be known that this is absolutely the only reason why this,
Dr. Zhivago, and
Brief Encounter are on this list at all.
