Gadabout Town: Ships in the Night
For this Gadabout Town, we asked some lovers to write about something that’s always fun to debate at a love-themed party: two people who should have ended up together, but didn’t. We left the question completely open to interpretation.
David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was meant to be the start of something. The first part of a trilogy that never came to be, the American rendition of Steig Larsson’s bleak, aughts-defining airport paperback uses the horrific reverberations of sexual violence as the backbone for a lurid but unfinished Hollywood romance.
The sweethearts in question are androgynous hacker-chick Lisbeth (played by Rooney Mara) and perrenial gen-X surrogate du jour Daniel Craig as Mikael. Lisbeth was the pinnacle of pre-trans tipping point gender depravity: decorated like a butch, mannered like a man, fucked like a woman. Mikael, for his part, is not just the self-aggrandizing dream of a staunch, sexy male feminist; here is a man so liberated with his desires that even queerness could be attractive to him, accepted without expanding his sexual palette whatsoever. This tension between the acceptable and the taboo is what makes their dynamic so compelling. What is hotter than Rooney Mara ordering Craig to put his hand back up her shirt?
Larsson’s book rests on the fantasy of being desired by a desire without a name. But Fincher’s devotion to source-accurate sequelbait denies the audience the resolution of an otherwise perfect courtship. The film ends with Lisbeth tracking Mikael from afar, their future together unclear.
Despite being marketed as “The Feel-Bad Movie Of the Year,” such a dour coda doesn’t fit. The fixation on sexual abuse is merely the means to an end for a deceptively gentle story of righteous comeuppance and intuitive expressions of affection. Despite all Fincher’s aesthetic warning signs to the contrary, I refuse to accept Lisbeth and Mikael as doomed lovers.
It’s been 14 years since this travesty, and I’m still irritated whenever I think about it.
So, there was this infamous British teen drama called Skins that ran for several seasons from the late 00s through the early 10s. I was a massive fan of the show ever since it first aired, back when I had to download episodes after school from sketchy websites I was certain would give my computer a virus. Every two seasons, we follow a new group of teens in a sea of debauchery. Most people only care about the first gen (seasons one and two) and second gen (seasons three and four) of the show, but I maintain that the third gen (seasons five and six) was never given a fair shot by fans and is somewhat underrated as a result.
And yet, I have a pretty big complaint.
Season five sets up a deliciously contentious relationship between this leggy, blonde mean girl named Mini and this androgynous, gender-fluid girl named Franky. Mini initially bullies Franky—gay panic?—but over the course of the season, we watch their interactions grow more tender and increasingly intimate, to the point where anyone in their right mind is left wondering if they’ll either hook up or become endgame by season six.
Well, season six came and went, and all we got was Franky pivoting to a conventionally femme look and never again questioning her gender identity while Mini gets knocked up by one of the other main characters and decides to keep the baby. All that sexual tension, all those fiery stares… it’s like it never even happened. Why? It literally makes no sense. Admittedly, I’m a sucker for opposites attract, and there was something about a high-strung bitchy girl with a jock boyfriend and an eating disorder realizing that she has a thing for the weird, quiet girl who wears suit jackets that just hits. But this wasn’t merely wish fulfillment! I know what I saw, and I also know that the writers abandoned a juicy plot and, instead, pivoted to the most hackneyed heterosexual plotlines imaginable for both of them. Cowards!
I meant to write about something doomed and sexy—Christopher and Adriana, Roger and Joan. I thought of the expected literary heavyweights: Anna and Vronsky, Newland and Ellen. I even considered something stupid like Larry and Leon from “Curb” or any two SpongeBob characters.
Instead, I kept coming back to my first memory of true romantic devastation from a young adult series called His Dark Materials. I don’t remember basically anything that happens in the books; I vaguely recall that animals were involved? I think each person had a little spirit animal that followed them around and represented their soul. And maybe those spirit animals were also openings to other universes? The details are fuzzy, I left them behind.
What I kept was the memory of a kiss, and in its aftermath, a horrible tragedy. Over three books, I felt I’d grown up with Lyra, the protagonist. I was nine, maybe ten, and she was eleven, maybe twelve, when in the third and final novel, she fell for a handsome, lonely boy from the real world, Will Parry. I tracked their love across the multiverse as they fought sorcerers and dust and the magical end of time. In the closing chapters came the moment I’d been praying for—hallelujah, rejoice! They kissed, and I remember she fed him some fruit, and his lips tasted like marzipan, and some secret door opened inside her and probably in me as well. When they were forced by the magical laws of the space time continuum to return to their respective worlds, I cried inconsolably for three days. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. There should have been an exception to the rules or a blip in the galactic fabric. If only they’d realized their feelings sooner—they would have had so much time. Instead, their short-lived love was confined to my spotty memory, and as Will puts it, bidding little Lyra farewell: “memory’s a poor thing to have.”
In an attempt to be someone who goes to Nowadays on Halloween, I went to Nowadays one Halloween. I’d left my phone in the Uber and had a mini meltdown and things were generally a mess, but I was with my friend who sees delight everywhere, and she quickly found the best costume of the night: a guy in a sheet with eye holes, a charmingly classic ghost. She briefly fawned over him and I took a photo, flash on, her beaming and him engulfing her in his folds. When we looked at it later, after I’d admittedly had a good time at the club, we were stunned to find that he was really hot. You can just tell by the sliver revealing red-eye and a dark brow that he is so hot and handsome. And the cradling pose — it’s so intimate! They look like they’re young hot parents answering the door to trick or treaters!! A photo you’d put in your wallet and take to war!!! I wanted her to find him. To post on Craigslist Missed Connections, if we lived in a different time. She never did. It’s okay. Now she’s in love with a guy she met at Nowadays on a Sunday afternoon. She just might be whimsical enough that it will eventually be revealed she’s dating Mr. Ghost.
Let me preface by stating that Persuasion is, on most days, my favorite Austen novel.
However, I was persuaded by my first read, and convinced by my first re-read, that Captain Wentworth does not deserve Anne Elliot. As evidence, I will cite these two particular paragraphs that occur midway through the couples’ conciliatory walk in the penultimate chapter:
“‘I was six weeks with [my brother] Edward,’ said he, ‘and saw him happy. I could have no other
pleasure. I deserved none. He enquired after you very particularly; asked even if you were personally altered, little suspecting that to my eye you could never alter.’
Anne smiled, and let it pass. It was too pleasing a blunder for a reproach. It is something for a woman to be assured, in her eight-and-twentieth year, that she has not lost one charm of earlier youth; but the value of such homage was inexpressibly increased to Anne, by comparing it with former words, and feeling it to be the result, not the cause of a revival of his warm attachment.”
So … Captain Wentworth’s valuation of Anne’s “charm” and “qualities” depends largely on the current state of his, admittedly changeable, emotions?
No, thank you. This will not do for me— I do not wish Anne to spend the rest of her life with this man. The heights alone to which he was carried off on the wings of irrational jealousy, upon seeing Anne in society with Mr. Elliot, would be enough to secure my ill opinion of him.
Now, I realize many deliberators stand before me in the hierarchical order of who gets to decide Anne Elliot’s fate—Anne herself, of course, from an abstracted context, and Jane Austen from a realistic one, for starters. But—hear me out on this one—oh, how I wish Anne could somehow end up with Colonel Fitzwilliam, Mr. Darcy’s cousin whose unfortunate status as a younger brother prevents him from pursuing a suit with Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.
The events of Persuasion take place only a few years after the events of Pride and Prejudice, and, if Colonel Fitzwilliam can range from Derbyshire to Kent, certainly at some point in the intervening years his travels must take him southwest to Somersetshire. If he were to cross paths with Anne Elliot there, I am sure they would, to use that post-Austenian phrase, “hit it off.” I have no trouble imagining they would appear in the same social circles, and bond over a shared fondness for music, books, and theater. Perhaps, if the Colonel were to arrive before too much of the Kellynch fortune were squandered away, the couple would not even need to overcome a dearth of inherited fortunes— Colonel Fitzwilliam, as the second son of an Earl, would soothe Sir Walter’s vanities enough to insinuate himself in recovering the estate from (mis)management before financial ruin descended.
Anne and the Colonel would be happy together. I do not make this argument lightly– many comfort (re)reads have contributed to the proposal of this ship. I feel strongly, though, that they are compatible characters, and—more importantly—my headcanon would love to indulge the inevitably ensuing Anne Elliot–Elizabeth Bennett friendship.
There is a special kind of fawn that eats tears. If it sits in your lap, which it will, and you can hold it like a baby, and you can rock it like a baby, and when you start sobbing, the fawn, attracted to the liquid sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, will lick the tears off your face, and if your face is too far away, the fawn will pat at your neck with its hoof, the way you might reach out tentatively to rap on an unfamiliar door.
The fawn and your tears were meant to be together.
The tear-eating fawn and the Dik Dik, a tiny breed of micro South African antelope, were meant to be together, since the Dik Dik marks its territory with tears.