The Julia Roberts post
It's really about Lilith
OK don’t ask me why, but this has been brewing for years. I suppose ,as I’ve come to know and love the dark demoness Lilith, avatar of exiled feminine sexuality, the archetypal banished first woman straight outta Elena Ferrante’s Naples, one figure has loomed over the proceedings. Her hair is lustrous, her lips supple, her body dangerous. Both on the screen and off, she seems to thrive off of rejection, banishment, and the chance to bite back. She is Lilith incarnate.
Let’s do a Julia Roberts post.
It could only start with Mystic Pizza. This movie isn’t necessarily good, but I have watched it multiple times at 2am, in Bushwick, after a rough night at Elsewhere (remember Elsewhere?). It has a specific quality which warrants celebration, which is that every man in it is smoking hot. This could have been an Issa Rae joint, really. Look, Annabeth Gish and Lilli Taylor try their best, but when Julia emerges, at her most Venusian and voluptuous, it’s over. She’s the girl from the wrong side of the tracks (I think it’s supposed to be a Czech family? Who cares?), who plays pool at the dive bar and picks up the worst kind of men. Her sister will go to Harvard in the fall, but Julia’s going nowhere.
She’s so hot in this, you can smell her perfume through the screen. And the hair, the lustrous, devastating hair, bounding down and cascading, ever-multiplying like the Hydra. This is why the Orthodox force women to wear wigs. It really is that devastating. The local authority would warn women: Lilith will climb into your man’s bed and steal his seed in the night, entrancing him with her sultry locks. Beware the harlot!
Julia’s hair carries the dark majesty of the eons, the annihilating mystique which all major religions have come to fear. It is, as the Dark Phoenix says, “fire and life incarnate.” Any movie which features a Chi-straightened Julia Roberts will have attempted to spay her, and by extension the biological autonomy of women everywhere. Julia is Woman. And I still think Closer sucks.
OK, we have to stay a little longer on Mystic Pizza, because this does give us a perfect Lilith arc. Julia falls for a preppy WASP whom she knows will drop her at summer’s end. So she lets him have it, dumping buckets of raw seafood on his fancy car. That’s our girl, and that’s Lilith. You thought you saw the last of me?
Now, to go further, let’s remember that Julia Roberts is a Scorpio. As I explained in my Scorpio NYLON explainer, if Eve embodies Libra, tending to her Stepford garden, than Lilith — the scorned hag who has returned to burn down the village — is Scorpio. As a rule, Scorpio women should never try to be likable (Hillary Clinton). They draw their power from truth, from fury, from fire. Who wants to see them in a charming romantic comedy? Rachel McAdams gave it all away when she stopped playing the villain; Anne Hathaway has only recently returned to her throne in hell by proclaiming: I’m a movie star, I’m wearing head-to-toe Versace, I am in fact better than you. I don’t have time to talk about Emilia Clarke, save to say that I watched Me Before You in theaters, alone, and have still yet to experience a long-term relationship.
So yes, I will always choose Erin Brokovich over Runaway Bride. Fucking spare me. I need Julia to excoriate me, to savage me, to enter a room and flip a table. As I stage my own overblown, codependent situtionship meltdown (currently ongoing!), I need to know where Lilith is in the sky (she’s in Leo and I wrote about it, as you know), and I need to know that true legends can scream in the chiseled face of Aaron Eckhart and walk away triumphant in the end.
I am not an expert on Pretty Woman — head to You Must Remember This for the real analysis — but I will say that for the fourth grade talent show, Shawn Segal did a “performance” to the song “Pretty Woman,” which no amount of EMDR can excise from my mind.
Melissa Rich has long campaigned for my surrender to My Best Friend’s Wedding. It finally happened this Saturday morning, after an extremely late night dancing at Kok Shok. In my crystalline delirium, I came to celebrate Julia’s next incarnation of Lilith. Cameron Diaz is a perfect Pennsylvania Eve, a vestal Virgo sublime in her restraint. And then comes the meddling terrorist Scorpio. I respect the ending, which doesn’t offer Julia some trite reward. But in true Scorpio fashion, we understand: only by throwing your life into the pyre can you begin anew.
OK, moving on, I promise. Julia Roberts was payed $25 million for Mona Lisa Smile, which is tragic for her, because while she’s trying to be “inspiring,” the other Liliths — namely Taurus Kirsten Dunst and Scorpio Maggie Gyllenhaal — come for blood. See below, as the character actresses wreck shit; and for Kiki and Maggie (my favorites of all time), this is just a day at the office!
When my mother took me to see Stepmom in theaters, I cried so hard that we physically couldn’t leave. As the employess shuffled into scrape popcorn off the floor, my mother had to console her weeping faggot chid, whose only means of dealing with real mother trauma was through the work of Susan Sarandon. This movie finally gives Julia a worthy opponent; on one end of the ring, we have the Libra Susan, commanding her upstate suburban idyll. And then steps in the Manhattan photographer power-bitch Julia, the mommy nobody asked for, a new career-woman evolution for Lilith, who isn’t punished for having talent and taste (Jena Malone is also a Scorpio).
I know we are approaching novella length, but let me just say: I have seen Eat Pray Love multiple times, and, as of this year, am a true fan of the book. There is a Lilith quality to Elizabeth Gilbert; she’s the raspy, wandering woman, adrift and unbound by the standards of her gender. The book contains tales of self-deception, delusion and pain. But in triple-Scorpio Ryan Murphy’s abysmally sentimental adaptation (which, again, I have viewed multiple times) Liz is a nonexistent Manhattanite writer looking for something, learning shmaltzy lessons from charming characters in strange locals. It’s like how they misused the Scorpio Tilda Swinton in Benjamin Button, all over again!
Some notable mentions: Pret-a-Porter is fucking fabulous; August Osage County is unforgivable (and Meryl Streep will be held accountable for what she has done); and if you want thoughts on The Pelican Brief, please contact Lulu.
The point of all this, if there is a point, is: God is cruel, man is mediocre, and our best option, sometimes, is to unleash hellfire and devastation. As I have recently learned, in the throws of another codependent blowup: stop striving for sanity and stability. She’ll be back. Believe me. She always comes back. So you might as well let her rip.
