Party Girl is Possibly my Favorite Movie of All Time

I wrote about the pressure, the vulnerability, and the performative quality of having a favorite thing when I wrote about the Emma (2020) adaption of my favorite book, but I will not stop there. I am again throwing a wordy parade about my favorite movie, Party Girl, the 1995 film co-written by Harry Birckmayer and Daisy Von Scherler Mayer (also director) starring Parker Posey. (Clueless also came out in 1995. I could survive on 1995 films alone). A big part of loving Party Girl is loving Posey, herself, in admiring her spikey performances throughout her career in her gleefully anxious ‘villians’ in You’ve Got Mail and Josie and the Pussycats, and the shining disconnectedness in the Christopher Guest films, etc. She thieves focus in every scene she is in with her open mouth smile and theatrical posture. And her voice, that nasal husk that sounds self-aware of each ironic syllable. I recently read her memoir to glean Party Girl trivia only for her to barely mention Party Girl, except to say that fans of the movie “look fun.” Thanks, I guess. Further she writes, “When we made the movie, we talked about giving the kids something to dance to while they watched it on TV,” which exactly embodies why I love the movie because It. Is. Fun! Fun is a virtue in that having fun is genuinely self-improving, bettering. The phrase “having fun” situates “fun” as an objective, something to obtain, but also, that is supposed to be an active practice. Party Girl is really about the coexistence of responsibility and fun as equal partners in one’s life; it is about how we marry personal dichotomies to challenge and grow– how ultimately, personal identity is a construction that is changeable.

Let’s note that Party Girl was the first movie to debut on the internet. She was the original straight to streaming diva, and it’s still free online with ads on Roku, PlutoTv, Tubi, and Prime Video, or on Peacock withouts ads. Happy watching, I will be spoiling.

The movie starts with a lost earring (described as “a little plastic baby boy in a noose,” which is so funny, only thirty seconds into the film). We see the earring-loser, the infamous drag queen Lady Bunny, as she whines, “I cannot make my big entrance with only one earring on,” encapsulating the story’s tone immediately of something funny and trivial yet self-meaningful shrouded in the realm of glamor. Drag queens kneel to look for the earring at the bottom of the steps as the camera ascends the stairs, scanning the occupants of corners wearing beaded necklaces in casual posture. The gradual ascent of the stairs are intercut with title cards, a graphic of our protagonist Mary as an animated figure that looks like those wooden joint mannequins you would use as models in middle school art class, as if she is the model and the movie itself will be the sketch attempting to capture her essence. Back up the stairs, it’s as if we are climbing the steps to enter Mary’s illegal rave ourselves. We gaze upon Mary smoking and dancing with a fan of paper singles in conversation with a stranger in a bright red long-sleeved corset top and colorful sparkly hot pants over a delicate horizontal stripe black fishnet. Her lipstick is color-matched to the top, her hair side-parted over her widow’s peak in loose curls. People pay their entrance fees to her. Quickly, the police arrive to arrest her. She struggles down the steps, crowded by dialogue of her acquaintances’ personal misfortunes on the way down the staircase as the police cuff her. Next shot, they’re leading her in her cell. Slam of jail cell. Declaration of her crimes: “unlawful use of a social club, illegal sales of liquor, possession of controlled substances, possession of pirated video-cassettes, and aiding and abetting minors.” Directed by Daisy Von Scherler. She calls her godmother Judy (Sasha von Scherler) to explain, “prison, but it won’t happen again,” in order to procure bail. Upon meeting her, we understand Mary is rash, Mary is ambivalent, Mary is cool, and Mary is selfish. She is a siren, luring the audience to be charmed by her.

First, I love that Posey’s character is named Mary. A simple woman’s name, one that holds the entirety of western tradition in The Mother Mary. One of my favorite poets, Mary Szybist, contemplates the implications of Mary being representative of women in her poetry collection Incarnadine, specifically in the poem, “Update on Mary.” It’s a prose poem that grounds a collective and self-identifiable Mary in daily wonderings. The lines, “Someday Mary would like to think about herself, but she’s not yet sure what it means to think, and she’s even more confused about herself,” captures the essence of Party Girl’s Mary in her confused selfishness that is at first resistant to actually claiming self-identity. The character of Mary takes the narrative that female protagonists are supposed to be likable and puts them directly into the shredder, because frankly, that is boring. Instead she spins convenient plates of lies until they crash at her feet. She tries to lie to the police that her illegal function was for charity for the “underprivileged children of Chinatown,” has a “prescription” to prove it, and tells her godmother she may have a case for police brutality while demanding money from her– jokes to establish she is not a good person, but is over privileged and broke. She screeches “You don’t think I could be a library clerk?” three times while haggling with her librarian godmother. She insists that she has the capacity to be a librarian, thus the plot of the film: that a party girl discovers the joys of library science.

Director Von Scherler Mayer illustrates that the costuming, humor, and characterization are in congress in depicting Mary as fragile yet packaged boldly in the strength of her own charisma in an article with Vogue:

“There’s a good clothing in-joke when Mary is sobbing to the immigrant falafel vendor in the garage with his cart, and she is wearing that incredibly expensive Gaultier sweater. She looks kind of like Joan of Arc. The fact she’s saying, ‘Oh, my life is so terrible!’ and she’s in this couture, is not at all lost on us. We’re laughing at her as much as we love her. To me, she’s this very ambiguous character. She is lazy and she is selfish and she does need to learn a lesson, but things get so earnest sometimes, and I find that boring. We wanted it to be light-hearted, too.”

The movie explores Mary’s own self-contention with the paradoxical nature of self, and further the embrace of your own paradox makes you able to encourage the paradox in others. After Mary commits to enjoying library science, she begins to integrate skills of complex filing systems in re-organizing her DJ roommate, Leo’s (Guillermo Díaz) vinyls, effectively pissing him off, but still she is trying to be a good friend. Her misguidedness is expository of both her confidence and her self-absorption. After Judy yells at Mary for her mistakes at work, (while Mary is wearing fake fruit in her hair as a hair garnish), she gets drunk and then breaks back into the library after hours to teach herself the Dewey Decimal system, forgetting about her date with the falafel guy, Mustafa (Omar Townsend) entirely. Or the sequence of scenes where she orders the exact same order from Mustafa every day, so he will forgive her for standing him up. Mary has to contend with the consequences of her personality and for the first time, she’s motivated by her desire to prove herself to Judy (and to herself) to correct them. Mary’s rashness is also funny, there’s a scene where she is just screaming unintelligible noises while dancing in the kitchen, intercut with shirtless imaginations of the hot falafel guy with Arabic music playing. Soon after, she burns some unidentifiable baked good in the oven and tells Leo earnestly that she “Thinks she’s an existentialist.” We’re laughing at her as much as we are her. It’s cathartic to relate to Mary.

The fashion of Party Girl, costumed by Michael Clancy, is a major reason I love the movie in its aspirational quality and how the clothes reinforce the comedy. The aforementioned montage of Mary ordering falafel is really about the outfits. Mary orders in a leather suit and low-pony. Mary orders in an outfit consisting of red grid tights, shorts, faux fur puffer coat, and heeled Adias. Shorts and tights are the best outfit, my personal textbook definition of fun. (I own several more pairs of colored tights than the average person owns, which is zero, because they make no sense other than you want your legs to be purple that day.) Or Mary fighting with Judy, asserting, “I’m a loser, shoot me” trying to get a job wouldn’t be so funny if she wasn’t wearing a chic hair net that makes you consider what online overpriced Etsy shop would sell you a similar one. It’s that juxtaposition of Joan of Arc confidence and Junie B. Jones level of practical knowledge.

Beyond superficial reasons, Posey reflects on the influence of style in her life when interviewed about fashion in Party Girl for Vogue:

“I remember sitting in the West Village a year or so ago and this woman in her twenties walked past in this floppy hat and these wide-legged ’70s sailor pants, with heels and a nice crispy shirt, carrying a Joan Didion book. It felt like performance art in a way. I wanted to ask, ‘Are you reading that? What is your story?’ I just love that kind of self-invention through clothing. I think style isn’t always about wanting to stand out, but simply what gets you out of the door. If I’m not having a great day, I wear certain things to really see that day in a positive way. Throw caution to the wind and wear a scarf if it makes you feel like Isadora Duncan, whatever helps you get through it all.”

In other words, fashion can be a buoy, an externalization of complexity of thought. Posey’s Joan Didion reference makes me think of E.A. Hanks’ essay titled “Notes on Native Daughter” about Lady Bird, contemplating, “What is it with girls and Joan Didion?” answering her own question that “To read Didion is to know that other people think about things as much as you do, no matter where you are from.” If reading Didion is confirmation that the depth of complexity in the minds of others is as real as your own, then thoughtful dressing is proof of the desire for personal pride. Party Girl demonstrates you can be both Party Girl and Library Girl, expanding your own externalizations of complexity through whatever medium. The fashion, though, offers an insight into Mary’s actual capacity, talent, and her creative interest for how effortful she is with her appearance, reflecting a personal pride needed to produce hard work.

In a 2019 New Yorker article, Jia Tolentino writes that Drop Dead Gorgeous is “quite possibly her favorite movie of all time,” despite it being critically panned and entirely offensive because “..there is a profound and unlikely sweetness to the performances in Drop Dead Gorgeous that transforms the material of the script into something resembling the performance of femininity itself. It is offensive, for sure—completely awful, really, and possibly deadly. It is also irreplaceable, hilarious, surprisingly tender, and lavishly, magnificently absurd.” The performance of femininity breaks down in Party Girl when Judy fires Mary by way of feminist speech, asserting that women struggle to prove their complexity and earn equitable wages while Mary is determined to prove to be “the town idiot.” Mary sells all her clothes to pay her rent–the tactile representation of ‘femininity;’ her signature outlet of creativity she trades for practicality. Judy, too, has an earlier moment in the film where she’s having a menopausal heat stroke, lamenting the partying days of her youth to Mary that really centers the film as these two women struggle to validate one another. Mary wants to be appreciated for the work and immense progress she has made at the library, frustrated that Judy keeps sticking her with shelf duty (while wearing an ornate embroidered cream suit with black and brown platform wedges). And Judy (in the alphabet button up worn as a cardigan) expresses that she wants to know about Mary’s life, who her friends are, to which Mary responds curtly, “My friends are just people.” At the end of the film, she gains her job back from Judy through proving her researching knowledge has improved each of her friend's lives and that library science is her own ambition at her surprise birthday party after a male stripper arrives. It’s chaotic and pathetic and stupid. In the scene, Mary arrives wearing all black business professional with a brooch and brown oval glasses, to indicate her commitment to library sciences to her godmother, but then the movie concludes with a resolute ‘everybody dances together’ scene, so the performative seriousness is immediately undercut. The final note of dissolved tension but projected responsibility shows that the juxtaposition of personal and professional is just as awkward as the coexistence of two, so it might as well be embraced. Judy gains access to Mary’s personal world, and Mary gains true acceptance to Judy’s professional world.

The language of “possibly my favorite movie of all time,” is a feeling, okay, and even the possibility of watching a movie that could be a favorite is enough. A favorite is a metaphor. A metaphor of self, an aesthetic or tonal assignment of the sort of thing you like. We’re decorating intangible essences of self with favorite films, favorite colors, favorite foods. When you ask little kids ‘what their favorite color is?’ you’re asking for some personal fact of their internal world. You’re asking them to translate their imagination to a shared concept we can both understand to reveal something about their little kid personhood. Even your favorite sweater: it is a tactile object that is metaphoric of an aesthetic or memory or sensation the fabric provides. (See, I can make literal things figurative, it’s a talent. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s a liberal arts degree.) The multiple performance art-like comedic dance scenes ( the amazing voguing scene with Natasha Twist!) in Party Girl are so ridiculous, and the attention to detail of her outfits and the relatability to ordering the same lunch week after week and the earnest desire to love something so personally satisfying yet outwardly boring– all resulted in tearing up in my apartment living room inwardly declaring it as my favorite movie. The jokes are verbose and shouted– my favorite combination. “I need a mind-altering substance, preferably one that would make my unborn children have gills.” Only Parker Posey could deliver that. The Dewey Decimal system jump scare? Come on. Okay, yes, we have Mary drunkenly yelling the f-slur at Derrick (Anthony DeSando), and the overt cultural appropriation of Mary’s last party of the film where everyone is in half-effort Middle Eastern garb. Like, sure, not great, but Mary is sufficiently punished for her actions. Honestly, sometimes Lady Bird could be my favorite movie or Roman Holiday or whatever I saw at the movies last, but Party Girl is still “possibly my favorite movie of all time,” because I just felt like it is and the self is changeable.