As the scandalization effect of Target opening in the East Village starts to wear off and people get rather comfortable with the idea of having access to such “affordable” products in a neighborhood that long ago could have been described using the same word (the tradeoff being crackheads and junkies bursting into your so-called residence at any moment), one can only contemplate what Susan might have to say about this. Susan, for those of you who are pop culturally stunted is the eponymous character played by Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, arguably Susan Seidelman’s only hit film (though everyone knows Smithereens is a triumph). More than someone worth stalking to the point of incurring amnesia for commitment to the cause of following, Susan was the East Village, represented everything about its allure–the charisma it had as a result of projecting a cavalier, bohemian lifestyle that every outsider secretly coveted while also despising (mainly the yuppie scum that ultimately overtook the entire realm, Target being the crowning final nail after all these decades).
Maybe, Susan, too, after finally letting Jim (Robert Joy), whose last name was appropriately Dandy–because only a dandy could finagle the heart of someone as free-spirited as Susan–pin her down, would have succumbed to Target like every other former rebel of the premises. Not that many remain. Only the die-hards still trapped in the Village of the 80s in their mind. The mind is a powerful tool for tricking oneself about actualities, as you might be aware (or maybe you’re not, because you’ve let delusion overtake you for the sake of self-preservation). She might have even gone in on an apartment near Avenue A and 14th after getting a respectable service job at a movie theater, just like Dez (Aidan Quinn). Enough time capitalizing on that era when it was adequate and manageable to live on the wage of a menial service job (just ask any erstwhile Kim’s Video clerk of the period of its East Village heyday), and Susan easily could have bought a place with Jim by the late 90s, at which point she probably also would have surrendered to having a child, because it’s just what you do when you give up those naive dreams of youth the way Marlo has to in Tully. Otherwise, you’re just an embarrassing aging party girl like Lexi Featherston, packing a subconscious death wish that manifests when you “accidentally” fall out of someone’s window because New York life has become too stale and stodgy to bear when you compare it to the one you used to know.
Susan, however, is not a weakling. Adaptable to even the most severe and egregious of changes, including Target’s presence in her domain. One can even envision her resolutely flouncing into the den of corporate iniquity to search for a similar pair of those iconic rhinestone boots (which Target invariably sells in one form or another) since her current pair from the long forgotten Love Saves the Day can no longer be salvaged once more even by the most adept shoe repairman (/woman, though we know that’s not a thing). Briefly experiencing a mild panic attack over the revelation that she can’t simply barter one of the items she’s wearing for the shoes, Susan will look from the cheaply made pair in her hand to the crying infant at the front of her shopping cart and wonder if she’s in the East Village or the Midwest–didn’t she move from the latter like thirty years ago? And now, it’s all only to find herself in the exact same milieu she wanted to run away from all those decades before.
Swallowing the feeling of ickiness to get through this excursion, Susan will continue to place “essentials” in her cart, from frozen pizza to tampons to socks (for the boots and all). But in the back of her mind, an idea is forming. A means for her to maintain some semblance of her old self and the old neighborhood. Picking her baby up (it doesn’t matter what gender it is since gender is as out of date as the 1980s themselves) and wielding it as a prop/shield, Susan stuffs the boots into one side of each part of her shirt to fashion some fake breasts. It “passes,” she thinks, as she shoves the baby back into the cart and walks to the self-checkout, humming the tune to “Into the Groove” as she shudders at the thought of going back to her butter pat apartment where Jim is working on a freelance graphic design project that leaves her responsible for the crying baby and the meal preparations.
The alarm goes off as she exits the Target, and it gives her the sort of wetness and titillation she hasn’t experienced from Jim in years. She wants to get caught, she wants something thrilling to happen again, just for one brief moment in her now pathetic and devolving existence. But the security guard just looks from her to her baby and says, “The system has a glitch right now, go ahead.”
Her heart drops. She’s regarded as too fucking tame and vanilla to be capable of even considering a low-level white girl crime. This is the inverse of what would have happened to her in the past, when the East Village looked upon her as a con artist ragamuffin. Back at home, she puts the baby to sleep (with cough syrup, courtesy of Target), and unloads the boots. Jim barely looks up from his computer at her to notice her lopsided tits. In her microscopic room, she pulls the shoes out and tries them on. They don’t fit. Nor do they sparkle quite like the original pair. It occurs to her that if she had started out as bored and unmoved as Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) in Fort Lee, NJ, maybe this wouldn’t be so difficult to process. Maybe she could find herself truly able to function in New York 2018.
