Every time the name Greta Gerwig is brought up, it’s practically a non-starter that Sacramento will be as well. That much held true in Gerwig’s latest cover story for Vanity Fair, during which she is profiled and interviewed by none other than Sloane Crosley (and yes, one can easily see Gerwig adapting Cult Classic, or even The Clasp). Among some of the anecdotes (not necessarily “titillating,” so much as, let’s say, “unsavory”) shared in the article, be they brief sentences or lengthier direct quotes, is the one that appears in the very first paragraph. It goes: “She likes what she likes, be it Truffaut or Titanic, which she saw eight times as a Sacramento teen and ‘wept beyond anything I thought I was capable of.’” “Little did she know,” as the saying goes,” Gerwig would go on to match (and possibly, eventually, outshine) the box office receipts of that rare movie to make it into the “elite” club of films that have managed to gross over a billion dollars. Many of them consisting primarily of superhero/IP movies. And yes, Barbie certainly does fall into the latter category (she might even be considered a superhero to some, i.e. Paris Hilton and Nicki Minaj). But one must admit that it’s not exactly a conventional “billion-dollars-at-the-box-office” movie. Nor was Titanic. A three-hour-and-fifteen-minute love story that essentially shows the rich have a fetish for banging people “beneath their station.”
Barbie (Margot Robbie), on the other hand, does not. At least not according to Gerwig’s rendering of her. Instead, she sees Ken (Ryan Gosling) not only as slightly “lesser than,” but hardly worthy of much of her mental or physical energy. That is, until Ken manages to surprise her by overtaking Barbie Land and turning it into Ken Land via explaining the “immaculate, impeccable, seamless garment of logic that is patriarchy” to the other Barbies “and they crumbled.” Perhaps, watching so many male-directed, male-written movies over the years, including Titanic, Gerwig finally understood the extent of this perspective’s brainwashing. Even its insidious influence on her own psyche. But it took her some time to stockpile the confidence to get behind the camera and flip the script on what viewers were seeing. As Crosley puts it, “…she always felt acting was training for directing.” If that’s the case, Gerwig has been training for decades. Arguably since her private Catholic school days at St. Francis High School in, that’s right, Sacramento. And if it sounds familiar, that’s because Gerwig fictionalized this part of her life for Lady Bird, with Saoirse Ronan as the eponymous character standing in for Gerwig’s teen self. The very teen self that saw Titanic in a Sacramento movie theater eight times in 1997. When Gerwig would have been fourteen.
Considering she grew up in the River Park neighborhood, one wonders if this meant she saw the film at the famed Cinerama domes of Century 21 on Arden and Ethan. And no, Century 21 did not automatically connote the real estate company or the “discount” “department store” that is still beloved by East Coastians despite being generally defunct. Gerwig, in fact, likely made no association with the phrase “Century 21” to anything except the domes that iconically peppered the parking lot of said movie theater. Where Titanic played seemingly ad infinitum thanks to its popularity among the hoi polloi. And Sacramento is nothing if not filled with just that type of “everyman” moviegoer. Even Gerwig.
For her to call out that experience of being in the theater and weeping over the tragic love story of Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) speaks to one of her most profound memories of moviegoing in general. That it was in a milieu as “pedestrian” as Sacramento is telling of cinema’s unique power to transcend every background. Even one as “non-glamorous” as California’s capital city. A place Gerwig herself was sure to call out for being “non-glamorous” by quoting fellow Sacramentan Joan Didion at the beginning of Lady Bird via the aphorism, “Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.” Indeed, in order to experience anything like true hedonism as a, let’s face it, suburban Sacramentan, one would have to go to the movies. As Gerwig clearly did. Letting her jaw drop in disbelief like everyone else in the theater when she realized there was “no room” for Jack on the piece of wooden debris Rose manages to latch onto. Letting herself weep to the tune of “My Heart Will Go On” as the credits rolled. This after Cameron gave a “tag” ending that we can interpret either as “Old Rose’s” recurring nightly dream or an alternate reality in which the Titanic didn’t sink (yes, it’s more likely the former). Either way, that bittersweet concluding scene of Rose back on the boat ascending the steps where a still-alive Jack awaits her at the top is evocative of a lyric like, “We’ll stay forever this way/You are safe in my heart/And my heart will go on and on.”
For Gerwig, that line undoubtedly applies to her relationship with Sacramento. Even if, just as Didion, she ended up abandoning it permanently for the likes of a place that has actually become just as pedestrian: New York. It’s also entirely probable that seeing the impact a song could have in a movie like this affected her on a cellular level. That is, if we’re to go by the Barbie Soundtrack. And, even if no one song in particular came to embody it (some might say it’s “Dance the Night,” others “Barbie World” and others still “What Was I Made For?”—such is the hodgepodge nature of the soundtrack), Crosley is right to zero in on Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine.” The non sequitur (to the untrained ear) track that Barbie sings along to seemingly every time she enters and exits Barbie Land. And Crosley is certain to relate that choice back to how Gerwig wept over Titanic at a Sacramento movie theater (one of which, out of those eight times, just had to be the Century 21 on Arden and Ethan), following up that statement with, “Perhaps this explains why, this past summer, a certain generation of women watched Margot Robbie zipping along in her pink Corvette, a challah of blond hair over her shoulder, singing along to the Indigo Girls’ ‘Closer to Fine,’ and thought: Am I really watching this? Or rather, Am I getting to watch this?” That might not have been the exact sentiment Gerwig was experiencing while taking in Titanic at fourteen, but seeing something that big at a time when her world felt so small was unequivocally important to the seeds of her artistic growth. Because yes, seeing a movie can have just that kind of profound effect on an artist, whether they’re “germinal” or already established.
And yet, even after firmly establishing herself, there remains about Gerwig a certain “salt of the earth” aura. To this end, Crosley highlights a quote from Gerwig’s “partner” (that cringe-y word), Noah Baumbach, who assesses of her directorial style, “She’s just there without any pretense, figuring it out alongside everyone else and it’s inspiring to people.” One might argue that being from a place like Sacramento is at the core of her lack of pretense. After all, she is that Sacramento teen of Lady Bird, Christine McPherson. Hyper-aware that she might not be the “smartest” or “best” in the room, but she’s the most passionate and enthusiastic. The daughter of working-class parents (like Lady Bird’s, her mother was a nurse, while her father worked at a credit union [after his stint as a computer programmer] where he specialized in small business loans), Gerwig knew what it was to want “more.” Even if, like it did for Jack in Titanic, that might have proved to be more trouble than it was worth. And for a while, maybe it was for Gerwig. Even when she was already being branded as an “it girl” in the 00s…at least, in the “mumblecore” scene. Nonetheless, she cited this period of her life as being the most depressing, commenting, “I was really depressed. I was twenty-five and thinking, ‘This is supposed to be the best time and I’m miserable.’”
Perhaps meeting Noah Baumbach on the set of 2010’s Greenberg helped allay some of the misery. After all, in these two artists’ neurotic case, misery really does love company. The commiseration becomes inspirational. At the same time, Baumbach doesn’t exactly strike one as the type who would fuck with Titanic in the movie theater, least of all eight times. He comes across as much too jaded (“too cool for school,” as it were) for such a thing. Not just because he would have been twenty-eight during the year of Titanic’s release (indeed, that tidbit emphasizes the “May-December” nature of his and Gerwig’s romance), but, of course, because he’s from New York and fancied himself a real Woody Allen type before it became extremely politically incorrect to do so (regardless, he’s maintained that brand in the majority of his films, including The Meyerowitz Stories and Marriage Story).
Who knew that someone as plucky and “unscarred” by being the product of divorce could gravitate to someone as “opposite” as Baumbach? But then, look at the opposites attracting that were Jack and Rose. Their onscreen love rather likely planting a seed in Gerwig’s own young, moldable mind about how a relationship “ought to be” (minus the part where someone has to die in an extremely cruel and premature manner). And as she sat there (again, one wants to imagine the viewing took place at one of the Century 21 domes, long before they were fully demolished by 2016) taking in the three-hour, billion-dollar-making movie, maybe another seed was planted: that she, too, could one day makes something as influential upon “the monoculture.” It might have been a roundabout way to arrive at that point via various “indie darling” films, but, in the end, it seemed to be the right path for this director’s journey to the “billion dollar club.”
So sure, maybe being from Sacramento is “lame, or whatever,” but maybe it’s also the very thing that enabled Gerwig to write and direct a movie like Barbie with some sense of wonder and naïveté still intact. Dare one even say, some sense of…purity. That Baumbach co-wrote it with her only underscores the notion that she needed his jaded eye for certain aspects of it. Like the ones where Ken is a huge asshole. Of course, there are plenty of male assholes all over the U.S., including Sacramento.
