There’s been a lot of talk lately about “main characters,” and whether or not you might be one. Spend five minutes scrolling through TikTok and you’ll come across teens joking about whether or not they’re the protagonist in their own lives, defining this role with “personality traits” that were once assigned to Manic Pixie Dream Girls, like “listens to The Smiths” or “wears clothes from Urban Outfitters.” If you’re not quirky enough, you’re not the main character, you’re a side character. If you’re lucky, you get a two-episode story arc. Your sole purpose in life is to exist for the benefit of the main character, whoever that may be.
Like virtually everyone else on the Internet, I’ve taken to going on walks through my neighborhood since we all got locked down at home due to this coronavirus thingy. Lucky for me, the weather warming up coincided with me getting over my fear of leaving my apartment. Back in April, I decided to celebrate a month in quarantine by breaking out of my apartment and walking down to the sprawling cemetery by my apartment, where I reacquainted myself with the outside world amongst the tombstones. With a space that big, it’s easy to socially distance yourself from other walkers with the same idea you have, and it’s even easier to feel alone, floating through life and swallowed up by the trees that canopy the green. One of my new favorite hobbies is going for long walks in that huge cemetery, encountering no one except the tombstones and trees, and sometimes the occasional groundskeeper. I play music in my headphones that I feel fits my mood for that day (it’s usually something introspective), and for a moment, I feel like I’m living inside of a movie.
About a week before we all hunkered down and started taking COVID-19 seriously, I got sick with some kind of stomach bug. It forced me home from work for two days, where I dedicated all of my time to sleeping so I would have enough energy to run to the bathroom and make it to the toilet in time to blow chunks everywhere. Like most people, I like to revisit comfort food movies when I’m sick. Anything familiar helps ground me and takes my mind off of my body at war with itself. Having a stomach virus is no time to finally check some Scorsese films off my watchlist. After a tearful rewatch of Lady Bird, I chose to watch one of the more decadent movies in my sick movie arsenal—Sofia Coppola’s French new wave confection, Marie Antoinette. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that it’s not very heavy on substance (I say this from a place of love), and instead focuses on Kirsten Dunst, dizzied by the new luxuries afforded to her now that she’s a French monarch, with lingering shots of sugar-encrusted patisserie and pink high top Converse strewn across a floor of less anachronistic footwear. All of this is soundtracked by songs you’d hear playing in a too-cool record store, like Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Strokes. Instead of feeling like a movie, Marie Antoinette plays off more like a feature-length music video. It feels pulled from the pink mind of a teenage girl who still spends her Friday nights
Despite its source material being the literal French Revolution, Coppola manages to zoom in on one of the Revolution’s key players, telling the made-up story of her personal foibles and the killer parties she threw for her rich friends. The reasons critics pointed to as downfalls for the film are what make it one of my favorites. It takes a large and looming figure and distills her down to the parts that make her the most like us: despite seeming to have it all, she still feels alone in the world.
This is what’s always drawn me to Sofia Coppola—she has a unique ability to convey loneliness on screen the way it feels in the real world. She doesn’t go for the cinematic, weepy moments of loneliness that we like to think evoke the loneliness we experience in real life, but instead portrays loneliness in a way so familiar, it almost goes unnoticed on first viewing. Those brief moments where it’s just us and our thoughts, forcing us to take stock of everything we’ve got going on. In Somewhere, it’s when Johnny Marco, newly insulated by fame, must sit alone in silences as he waits for a plaster mold to form on his face. In Lost in Translation, it’s Bob Harris staring into space while sitting on his hotel bed in Tokyo, a fading star seeking out someone, anyone, that’s willing to listen. They’re perfect snapshots of imperfect lives, the brief moment of isolation causing them to bare their souls to the audience.
The word ‘isolation’ carries new meaning to us now, despite its definition not changing. I can already see myself 20 years from now, hearing the word used in a context having nothing to do with our Great Quarantine of 2020, and having a fight or flight response kick in. But what does it mean to truly isolate oneself? More importantly, what can be gained from doing so? I think when most of us think of isolation, we think of what we’re doing right now—sandblasting our Netflix queue, discovering a new craft or skill that we’ve always promised ourselves we would master, powering through the books that have sat on our shelves for years, or just saying we’ll eventually get to these things and more while spending every waking moment just scrolling on our phones—when the corners of isolation I’ve been able to find in quarantine have been on the walks I take around my neighborhood, or when I’m driving back from a trip to the grocery store with the windows down, my favorite music blasting.
To borrow one of my least favorite terms from what feels like every email I’ve received since March, our uncertain times have made it more difficult to seek out stories that we identify with. While it’s something we would do on any other day, in or out of a pandemic, the virus and the domino effect it creates in society makes us crave those stories more and more. Somehow, seeing people who are sad and lonely get to wallow in those feelings gives me permission to do it myself.
Since fully embracing our new normal, it’s been kind of fun to pick out pieces of culture and media that have changed meaning or have a higher potency in lockdown. It’s still startling to watch TV shows and see characters congregate in bars, or go to concerts, or even swim in a pool together. I revisited Groundhog Day recently and sure, I’m not stuck in a time loop per say, but it is getting harder and harder to distinguish months from days and weeks from hours. Some of it is darker than others. I finally listened to Phoebe Bridgers’s latest Punisher, where she wraps up the 11-track album with the lyrics “The billboard said ‘the end is near/I turned around, there was nothing there/Yeah, I guess the end is here.” To hear it for the first time was surreal and almost gutting. But there’s something a bit more simple about Sofia Coppola and her menagerie of movies, each one portraying loneliness like a well-weathered feeling that, like a jacket, we can take off and put on when we choose, but it’s always hanging there in the coat closet, ready to be worn again.
So yeah, maybe we all do get to be the main characters in the movie of our lives right now—introspective, lonely ones. Sitting in my bathroom and plucking my eyebrows, or laying in bed at night to write feels different now than it did in February when the world was still spinning as it always did. Now, everything feels a bit off-kilter. I don’t know when it’s going to feel like how it did before all of this again. It might not be for a long time. But until we do return to the (misty watercolored memories of the) way we were, I’m happy to exist in the lonely movie of my life, where I can safely say that not only is Sofia Coppola sitting in the director’s chair, but yes—I’m the main character.