You look like a perfect fit
for a girl in need of a tourniquet.
But can you save me?
—Aimee Mann, “Save Me”
1
Magnolia was my favorite movie of all time before I’d ever even seen it. I don’t know why.
I mean, I can tell you why I love the movie itself—I could write entire volumes about individual characters, favorite scenes, lines of dialogue and shots that still have the capacity to ruin me, fifteen years later. But what I can’t tell you is why, beforehand, I decided that a movie I’d never seen by a filmmaker whose name I didn’t yet know would be my thing, an inseparable part of my identity, the cryptic, incantatory title—“Magnolia”—a sort of talisman I’d use to define myself to the outside world for years to come.
I don’t know why there was so much at stake for me in that first viewing. There just was.
I knew next to nothing about Magnolia going into it, except what I’d been able to glean from the trailer. The trailer doesn’t do a very good job of sketching the film’s famously unwieldy plot—how could it? Instead, it merely feints at the dizzying interconnectedness of the narrative by summoning the characters one by one and having them speak into the camera—“My name is Stanley Spector,” “My name is Quiz Kid Donnie Smith,” “My name is Frank T.J. Mackey,” etc.—while Ricky Jay briefly sketches their relationships to one another in voiceover. The whole thing is set to one of the jauntier of the Aimee Mann songs on the soundtrack, and gives the false impression that the movie is some sort of star-studded dramedy. But then the tone abruptly shifts, the music changing to something with a bit more gravitas, suggesting that the whole mess might come together and culminate in some kind of epiphany, some moment of near-spiritual transcendence.
It wasn’t a very good trailer. But it gave me what I needed. I had an affinity, back then, for narratives of interweaving, for big stories made of small connections. My love for such stories was, at that point, mostly theoretical: I was a teenager, and I still hadn’t experienced much of what the world of film or literature had to offer. But I liked the idea of people trapped in their individual subjectivities, their petty dramas, unaware that they were caught up in something bigger, something of grander significance. To read or watch such a story, I thought, would be an almost religious experience—proof of some design in what so often seemed to be a fragmented world. And that, I thought, is what Magnolia would offer me: a religious experience, proof of some design in my own fragmentary, unsatisfying existence.
There was also the small matter of what was going on in my life at the time. The summer before my senior year of high school, I’d moved with my family from the small town where I’d grown up to another, larger town. What happened next I find difficult to describe, except to say that I simply checked out of life. In my hometown I’d had friends and was modestly popular at school in my own nerdish circles; but in the new place I for some reason decided to empty myself out, to make myself nothing, and to matter to no one—at least until the year was over and I could escape to college. At the same time as I was deleting myself from life, I was downloading myself into art, pouring books and movies into the place inside myself that I’d hollowed out, making a monk’s cell of stories and never coming out. And Magnolia was one of the first stops on this self-denying pilgrimage to the shrines of high art.
Here, then, was another reason why I might have latched on to Magnolia so feverishly: at the time, I was looking for something new to pour myself into, something new to be. I thought Magnolia might be that something, and it was. It became more than a movie to me—it became an identity, a way of being. Magnolia became a kind of cocoon: the outer shell I put on to shield myself from the world, the armor I wore into the next phase of my life.
2
Not that that first viewing went off completely without a hitch, mind you.
To begin with, I never saw Magnolia in the theater. There was no movie theater in my hometown, and the theaters in the middle-sized Midwestern cities nearby were not the kind that would show independent films, even for a weekend. Besides, I was 16 when Magnolia came out, and the ticket-takers where I grew up tended to be scrupulous about carding for R-rated movies. So I had to wait until 2000, when I was in the new place, to watch Magnolia—on rented VHS, in my darkened bedroom in the basement of my parents’ new house. My first viewing would not be a communal experience, but a private communion.
Also: Magnolia was not exactly what I’d so foolishly expected it would be. I’d hoped for a story of interconnections and intersections that built to some big and satisfying climax. That’s not what Magnolia was—though it seemed to be, for a while. The film’s justly famous prologue, for instance, quickly sketches three stories of coincidence: a robbery in which the names of the assailants match the town in which the crime took place; a scuba diver accidentally deposited in a tree by a pilot who assaulted him just days prior; and a failed suicide that becomes an accidental filicide. Paul Thomas Anderson pulls out his entire bag of cinematic tricks to convey the shock of these coincidences to the audience. The first segment visually evokes a silent film; the other two are a dazzling progression of whip-pans, jump cuts, and freeze frames. At one point, the Ricky Jay narrator is implied to pull out a piece of chalk and actually sketch on the screen, explaining the more complicated mechanics of one of the stories.
The effect of this prologue on me, that first time, would be hard to overstate. I’d never seen anything like this before. The prologue was dizzying, and exciting—and I settled in for the movie’s three-hour runtime confident that I was in good hands, that this tapestry of disparate lives would be woven together in some kind of decisive way.
But as the movie drew to a close, it gradually became apparent that no such culmination was on offer. There was no decisive climax, no epiphany. I’d expected to be blown away by Magnolia; instead, I was merely perplexed by it. I went to bed that night confused—but I didn’t write the movie off. It had lodged somewhere in my brain, like a piece of grit stuck in my eye that I wanted to blink away, but couldn’t. I lay in bed and didn’t sleep. I simply thought about the movie—turning it over and over again in my brain, trying to find some way into its mysteries.
Then, sometime during the night, I sat up. It must have been two or three in the morning, but I was wide awake. Somehow, the dangling threads of the film had come together in my mind in my state of half-sleep. I don’t know exactly what my epiphany was. I can no longer recall the nature of the sudden realization that made me get up in the wee hours of morning. What I do know is this: I rewound the tape and watched Magnolia—all three-plus hours of it—again. As the credits rolled, the light of dawn began to creep its fingers through my bedroom window.
I was hooked. Obsessed. Magnolia had me.
3
I couldn’t see it at the time, but there was an irony in my using Magnolia as a kind of armor, a mask I showed to the world in place of my actual self—because the film itself is, to some extent, a testament to the dangers of armoring oneself against the world in this way, of constructing masks to shield oneself from real human connection.
I’m thinking, for instance, of Frank T.J. Mackey, the motivational speaker and pickup artist who teaches other men how to manipulate women to attend to their every sexual need. He’s played by Tom Cruise, an inspired bit of casting on Anderson’s part, as every bit of the actor’s public persona becomes part of the armor that Mackey presents to the world: his physique, his sex appeal, his smarmy charisma, his almost comically inflated self-regard, his hair, his clothes. Mackey’s poisonous misogyny, his twisted view of sex and power, is a thin mask lying atop a sea of psychic torment; when the mask breaks down at his father’s deathbed, Frank is reduced to a helpless ball of rage and fear and naked vulnerability. “Don’t die, you fucking asshole!” he screams—like an angry, desperate child.
Or there’s Linda Partridge (Julianne Moore), whose self-hatred and self-flagellating devotion to her dying husband Earl have themselves become a kind of mask, an outer shell that shields her and protects her from true vulnerability, true love. Linda spends most of the film in near-hysteria, a jumble of nervous tics and repeated phrases that prevent those around her from truly seeing her. Even her big blockbuster emotional moment somewhere in the middle of the film—in which Linda shames a pharmacist for the suspicion with which he treats her when she goes to pick up morphine for her dying husband, anti-depressants for herself—is not an exposure but an evasion: in her righteous anger, she’s actually hiding the fact that the pharmacist’s concerns about her are correct. She’s really suicidal. But she leaves the pharmacy with her mask intact, her real self unexposed.
There’s also Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), walking proof that the masks people create for themselves hide not just vulnerability, but monstrosity, too. Host to a long-running game show, Jimmy’s mask is his professional persona—jocular, respected, fatherly—but what lies beneath is much more sinister: narcissistic manipulation, high-functioning alcoholism, and sexual predation. Even his attempts to reach out to others are manipulative: a confession to his assistant Mary, with whom I suspect Jimmy once had an affair, that he’s dying of cancer, seems designed to wound her, to satisfy his own ego by leaving her bereft. Later, when Jimmy’s wife grills him about why their daughter Claudia won’t talk to him, he can only manage to half-confess to sexually abusing her years earlier. In this scene, the title of the game show he hosts, “What Do Kids Know?”, turns out to be bitterly ironic—Claudia, Jimmy’s daughter, seems to know exactly what’s going on, whereas he’s the one in denial. (“But I don’t know what I’ve done!” Jimmy pleads as his wife walks out on him.)
The characters in Magnolia are connected whether they know it or not—but they are also utterly alone, cut off from everyone and everything around them. And the film’s best moments come when people’s armor, their self-constructed masks, come down for long enough to make a real connection.
Take Jim (John C. Reilly) and Claudia (Melora Walters), for instance. The extent of Jimmy’s crimes against Claudia is never completely clear—but judging by her hysterical panic when he comes uninvited to her apartment one morning, what he did to her must have been pretty traumatic, a betrayal that tore her life in two. To move on and really live, she desperately needs to begin dealing with her father’s betrayal; that, and ditch the cocaine. But Jim, the cop who might be Claudia’s salvation, her best hope for a real human connection, needs to drop his mask too: his mask of self-righteousness, of false competence. Only through the humiliation of losing his gun can he find his way to his own kind of salvation: coming clean to Claudia about the loneliness, the fear, the shame and smallness that he feels every day in his job.
A great deal of this was lost on me at the time. I was seventeen. What the hell did I know about about pain, about trauma, about abuse, about vulnerability? As a viewer, I could appreciate and admire the raw, almost embarrassing nakedness of Jim and Claudia’s need for each other, could understand Quiz Kid Donny Smith’s desperate plea for connection (“My name is Quiz Kid Donny Smith and I have lots of love to give”) and Stanley Spector’s declaration of need to his subtly abusive father (“Dad, you need to be nicer to me”). But I couldn’t emulate any of it.
I couldn’t let my own mask slip.
4
All I could do, at the time, was focus on what seems in retrospect to be the least important thing: the fact that I loved Magnolia, and that my friends (my old friends, that is; in the new place I had no friends) didn’t.
We kept in touch, my friends and I, and I’d go back home to visit them occasionally—but things weren’t the same. A gulf had opened up between us. I still liked them, but our lives had become separate things: I couldn’t convey to them the stultifying loneliness that had become my reality, nor could I fully understand the thousand small daily dramas that their lives without me consisted of. But my friends were, nonetheless, on a journey similar to the one that I was on: discovering film as something more than entertainment. The years of 1999 and 2000 were important ones for the movie-watchers of my generation. It’s when we found out that movies could be art.
But the movies they loved were different than the ones I loved, and for some reason I came to think that this emblematized the distance that had grown between us, the ways that we’d grown different in just a short time: I loved Magnolia, while they gravitated more to other 1999 titles like American Beauty and Fight Club. I’d seen both and liked them well enough, but compared to Magnolia both films seemed too easy, too pleasant. American Beauty had its broad social critique and its obsession with bags floating in the wind; Fight Club had its armchair philosophizing and hamfisted message about a crisis of masculinity in the modern world; and both felt a little too on-the-nose for me, a little too obvious. Whereas Magnolia, I thought, was a film that rose to the level of art by virtue of its refusal to announce its intention to be art, a difficult, unwieldy work that didn’t attempt to beguile its audience or even seem to care that there was an audience there at all.
Writing all this down for the first time, I’m pained to think back and imagine what an asshole I was. But it’s all true; I really thought this stuff. This was the mask I wore—the mask that Magnolia had become for me. Looking back, I see in this period of my life the source of some qualities that would persist in my personality long after my obsession with Magnolia had waned: reflexive contrarianism, a carefully cultivated air of superiority, and an affinity for difficult works of art that didn’t connect me with the world, but (I thought) set me off from it.
This attitude would later lead me to other, perhaps better films. My affinity for stories of interconnection would eventually take me to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy, and Robert Altman’s Nashville—all films I think I love more than Magnolia. I’d also soon sample the films of John Cassavetes and discover an even more uncompromising exploration of the human persona as an awkward contraption built of maddening verbal tics, of the face as a problematic site of emotional nakedness and emotional masking.
But all along, on some level, I’d be seeking what I sought first, at the age of seventeen, in Magnolia: a place to be alone, a dark monk’s cell of my own making.
5
I was a fool. Magnolia didn’t give a shit about me—and by my fifteenth or sixteenth viewing, I began to understand that the thing I’d chosen to serve as a placeholder for my identity wasn’t quite as unassailable as I’d thought. I couldn’t allow myself to see it at first, but Magnolia is deeply, irreparably flawed. Flawed in an interesting way, maybe—but still, flawed.
Of the film’s flaws, the most serious is probably its handling of the Marcy/Worm/Dixon storyline. Magnolia begins, after the prologue, with Jim, the cop, responding to a report of a disturbance. He comes into the apartment of a belligerent woman named Marcy, and soon discovers a dead man in her closet. We learn later that the man is the father of Marcy’s son, nicknamed Worm; there’s also a young rapper hanging around named Dixon, presumably Worm’s son and Marcy’s grandson. But who killed the man in the closet? Was it Marcy, or Worm?
We never learn what happened—a fact I scarcely noticed in my first dozen viewings, since there’s so much else going on in Magnolia. A while later, though, I read Paul Thomas Anderson’s shooting script and discovered two scenes that didn’t make the final cut: one in which Marcy confesses (perhaps falsely?) to the murder, and another in which Worm and Dixon encounter Stanley after he’s run away in shame from his humiliating failure at the game show.
None of this is in the movie, and actor Orlando Jones, who was cast as Worm and appears in the credits, never appears. His plotline remains a frustrating loose end: continuing to intersect in interesting ways with other characters’ stories, but never getting a satisfying conclusion itself. So that’s a flaw.
Also, maybe: the frogs?
The frogs. I’m honestly not sure, all these years later, which list to put them in: Magnolia’s strengths, or its weaknesses. Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.
A popular take on plot structure holds that, to dissect a narrative, you should take the story beats, write them down on a piece of paper, and then insert phrases between each indicating the chain of causation between one event and another. If you end up with words like “but” and “therefore” between each plot point, your story is good—but if the phrase that pops up between each story beat is “and then,” you’re fucked.
By this measure, Magnolia fails. Any plot summary of the film will always end with, “And then frogs fell from the sky, and then the movie ended.”
The problem is that the frogs simply don’t function dramatically. They don’t do anything in the story. Sure, one of them hits Quiz Kid Donnie Smith in the face, hurling him to the ground and messing up his teeth, which will probably require him to get the braces he decided he didn’t want after all. (Irony!) And yes, a frog prevents Jimmy Gator from killing himself, denying this predator even the solace of suicide in favor of a much more painful death.
But for the most part the frogs are purely symbolic. The question is: a symbol of what?
For a long time, I thought that the frogs had something to do with God. But I abandoned that reading a long time ago. It’s too simplistic.
Now, the best I can do is to say that the frogs are emblematic of some big Other against which all human lives must seem paltry—be it fate, or nature, or chance, or random misfortune. “This is a thing that happens,” Stanley says—and in a world where frogs fall from the sky, a world of cancer and pain and abuse and trauma, what else can we do with our numbered days but try our best to simply survive, and love, and forgive, if we can?
6
Italo Calvino says that a “classic” is a story that hasn’t finished saying what it has to say to its audience—and by that measure, Magnolia is a personal classic of mine, because it still hasn’t finished speaking to me. I rewatched it recently, for the first time in probably a decade, and found myself slipping easily into the old rhythms, responding once again to the film’s odd, off-kilter voice.
The prologue is still exhilarating. The kids—Claudia, and Stanley, and Donnie, oh Donnie—still break my heart. I still hate the parents, Jimmy and Stanley’s dad. Frank T.J. Mackey still provokes repulsion, though he’s funnier than I remembered. Jim Kurring I love, Phil Parma—played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman—I love, I love, I love. Julianne Moore’s scene in the pharmacy still gets me, as does Jim and Claudia’s flirtation to the strains of Bizet, and their awkward first date and kiss. The music of Aimee Mann—“Wise Up” and “Save Me”—is, as always, beyond reproach. And the frogs still retain their power to perplex.
But most of all, I watch Magnolia and think about the misguided, obsessed teenager I once was. I think about masks, I think about armor. I think about something that a wise person once told me: that life is a long process of coming out of the closet, that everyone has a false identity they must shed, snake-like, before they can truly live—but that you never come out into the light of day, only into another closet. The self we become after we shed the mask is itself a mask that must one day be shed.
And so it goes, and so it goes, and the book says we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.
And I wonder: which is the truer, better self, the teenager who foolishly looked to a movie to define him, or the person I am today? I watch Magnolia and see the shards of a mask I once wore: but what mask might I be wearing now? What false selves have I yet to discard in my journey to become a person?
It’s a depressing thought, this notion that there may be no true self, only the outer shell we’ve constructed to show to the world.
But surely, in the time it takes to shed one mask and put on another, there must be a moment. A brief, blessed moment, when the real person can be glimpsed, if only fleetingly. When she lifts her eyes and looks into the camera.
And smiles.