Hang it all!

I first saw "Picnic at Hanging Rock" 20 years ago or so — Don't do the math, you ageists! — when I was in college and pretty fresh off my own extremely intense high-school girl crush. I quite identified with Sara, although the girl I liked was nothing like Miranda. She would have made merciless fun of Miranda, come to think of it. And while this girl had a whole lot more going on than Miranda, her physical appearance had a very strong pull on me and caused me to invest her with certain attributes that she almost certainly did not possess, like superintelligence and perfectly refined artistic sensibilities and some sort of vague spiritual transcendence — and all that stuff. And that similarity, plus unrequited love, plus the fact that my girl died when we were 18, made this movie very powerful and haunting for me, especially because you didn't really see one girl longing for another in movies then. I think it was the first time I had ever seen that. And it was treated so naturally, like there wasn't anything very unusual about it and that it was really very poignant and special in some way.

I haven't seen the movie since then, although I've thought about it from time to time. I even thought about picking it, so I was thrilled when cl chose it. I was preparing to be dazzled all over again ... but, alas, I wasn't, and I was sort of happy about that, to tell the truth, because it seemed to mean I was no longer in thrall to various romantic notions I had as a kid. And I don't know whether my very positive reaction to the film 20 years ago or my slightly negative reaction today is the more telling. I'm tempted to think of it as a sort of a barometer of how I've grown — maybe how I've grown more cynical — and become more realistic about people and the role they play in one's life and what it really means to love someone; it's not swooning and craziness and putting someone on a pedestal and worshipping them night and day; it's interacting with them as a real human being and making a real day-to-day life with them and not burdening them with your own projections of who you think they are.

Several times during the movie last weekend I wanted to shout, "Get over it! Lots of people have blonde hair. Give me a break with the Botticelli angel thing. Please. You're deifying your own fucked-up lust! Can't you see that? This whole Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic of women as long-haired tragic beauties not fit for this world is bunk! A morbid masturbation fantasy! Puh-tooie!"

So I guess because I loved the movie as a kid and am lukewarm on it now, I tend to think of its charms as adolescent by association and of my reaction to it now as "mature." But that's probably not fair. And I do like the story — I have to say I'm even kind of fond of the weird missing chapter that "solves" the mystery — I just find the execution rather unfulfilling in the ways we've already discussed in various comments. And I'm alternately intrigued and turned off by the endless speculation the movie gives rise to — without any hope of a satisfactory explanation — but mostly intrigued.