he said it's all in your head and i said so is everything but he didn't get it
last night, at a dive bar in the east village, laila, mikail and i were turning over the cult that is taylor swift. when did this begin (covid? scooter braun ordeal?)? what sort of lecherous capitalist really expects her fans to purchase 82 ‘colors’ of the same record (not remixes)? and despite all the criticism i have for swifties, i have to admit a parasocial relationship of my own… the one towards PTA. paul thomas anderson.
he’s back in the news and on my instagram feed, everyone raving or critiquing one battle after another - which i havent seen yet (collection of reviews here, collected by writer delia cai: “Mary H.K. Choi dissected it for tone, J Wortham critiqued the racial dynamics, Max Read went deep on the cars, Shea Serrano sent a subscriber-only newsletter rating the cast’s performances from A (Teyana Taylor) to A+++ (Sean Penn), and Justin Chang noted the great “kineticism of sad performances”) this isn’t about that movie, or his work in general. this is about PTA at 26, fiona apple at 23. and me at 23.
i wanted to raise the question of what do you do with an artist when you can’t really move past your own projections of him. i know factually it’s all fine, it’s all good, PTA directed the hot knife music video in 2011 - over ten years after their relationship ended, but when i have to see his name plastered everywhere, my heart rate rises, my palms get sweaty. lol
if you know me at all, you know fiona apple is my all-time favorite artist. no one has ever impacted me artistically or personally like her and her work. and especially at 23, in 2020/2021, when fetch the bolt cutters came out… all i listened to was fiona.
i was deep in the pain/gendered crisis that inspired the record we just put out. and so i’d do things like hop on the handlebars of my friend’s bike and we’d scream ‘for her’ as she’d biked us through traffic in midtown manhattan. we’d all go out to this actual (now non existent) speakeasy fran found and i’d drink the absinthe and play paper bag on their grand piano to the applause of equally sad, drunk people.
and although i love all fiona records, not one has impacted me quite like 1999’s when the pawn… she was 23. and it’s all about PTA.
this album captured the frenetic energy and crushing sensitivity of her genius. the songwriting, the arrangements, the performance launched me onto another planet, one where i was at home. i felt it deep in my bones.
and when i first listened during my teenage years (shoutout to my aunt irene who gave me tidal and when the pawn… at 12), i didn’t know who pta (or any of his movies, lol) was. in fact, i didn’t know who PTA was until the Fiona interview which detailed some components of their torrid relationship. but i never saw a pta movie until i was 23 when i, like fiona, was involved with a film guy (mistake) - one who’s favorite director was pta (bigger mistake).
and so it went. the intense confusion of my situationship launched onto the Fiona/pta one. but it was more than that simple projection - their own relationship felt like a conduit for us to communicate to each other and for me to understand myself. after not speaking for a month, he asked me to spend new year’s eve with him… to watch licorice pizza (biggest mistake). and so i did: two lonely people living out their own delusions and fantasies. hearts breaking slowly when the sun rose and a new day begins and you’re forced to enter the world outside of a theater, where performance is shallow, and where reality never works out like the stories, or even the songs.
i think that was the last pta movie he had me watch. i was open about how much i despised it - it’s weird age gap relationship, and most of all, it’s ‘whimsy’. and although we’d see each other off and on for like four more months (mistake) and the next movie we’d see was vincent gallo’s buffalo 66 to kind of sum up the sort of film guy / man we’re dealing with, i consider nye / licorice pizza the epitome of my feelings towards myself and my artistry that year. i had to watch a stupid movie called excellent with a boy who didn’t care about me, and why? to get one ounce of feeling seen and feeling good by someone who allegedly knew more, someone with more authority in this world, a man. now - almost 27! - i know how ridiculous that is. in that theater that night, i did not.
as i was writing this, i realized i never shared fiona apple with him. unlike the world renowned genius pta, who is loved by all everywhere, she was at this time just for me. and although there’s something sad about this discrepancy something that’s somehow mirrored in how their personal lives turned out - pta with his happy relationship with maya rudolph and family v. fiona, who’s a recluse who court watches with her dog, alone on her ranch. there’s something painful about fiona’s genius being less known. i don’t know any of the men in my life who hail fetch the bolt cutters as they do there will be blood. although, they should. i, for all my pta nausea, recognize that there will be blood, and magnolia, and boogie nights, are all excellent, brilliant movies, that i watched carefully (post this situationship, on my own terms) in order to understand humanity a bit more. and so it pains me immensely that she’s left out of this discourse of humanity/art by many (by no means is she the first artist of any non-white dude background to be resigned exclusively to importance/interest/fame via the representation of her own identity. many such cases.), especially in comparison to the man who hurt her so gravely, a pain that i feel viscerally every time i turn on that record.
i’m glad i never shared fiona apple with that man. she’ll always be mine.
and pta will always be the man who pushed fiona apple out of a moving car.
and so i sang limp at winnie’s karaoke last night. as julia said: ‘this ones for you, PTA’.