The Enduring Allure of the Fantasy of Grey Gardens

Words: Ciara Farmer

Make it stand out

Grey Gardens is, in my eyes, a film about women liberated from the confines of gender norms that hold women hostage in banal lives. 

I’m sitting across the sewing table from my friend, Alice, flipping through vintage pattern books. This is the first time I’ve socialised with her one-on-one. Mentally searching for a topic that will elicit a response and connect us, I ask her how dating is going. She tells me she’s recently had her heart broken at least once, but it seems to me like it was maybe twice. 

The online dating era is really wearing on all my single friends. I pay thousands of dollars a year for therapy because dating is decimating my self esteem. An anxiety mushrooms in my mind that I’ll grow old without finding my person, but it seems better than growing old with the emotionally unavailable men our mothers and grandmothers accepted. 

“My backup plan is just to Grey Gardens it,” I say, which is to say, ‘I feel sort of hopeless but I want to transform my seemingly inevitable lifelong dearth of romantic love into something that feels joyful in its own way.’

Alice nods solemnly, “I love that movie.” A moment later, I notice the DVD on her shelf. 

Talking to Alice, I realised that I last watched Grey Gardens (1975) - at the recommendation of my divorced hairdresser – as a teen, on heels of the release of the fictionalised film by the same title. The documentary film follows a mother-daughter duo, Big and Little Edie (Edith Beale senior and junior, respectively), relatives of the Kennedys who live in a beautiful formerly-condemned house, as they live their day-to-day lives over a summer. 
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

It’s hard to say if I even remember the documentary very well but since it’s lived in my head for so many years, I wanted to watch it again. I placed a hold on the film at the library and while I waited for it to come in, I read a handful of articles about it. It is perplexing to find that the articles, and apparently the 2009 film - which I have largely forgotten - suggest that the cult documentary Grey Gardens is a film about two women living a small life of abject poverty. This is not the film I’d committed to memory at all and it’s not the film I subsequently watched. 

__STEADY_PAYWALL__

Big and Little Edie’s house is crumbling. It’s probably not advisable to feed a nursery of racoons inside your home. The Edies are probably mentally ill. I can see this in my rewatch and I’m sure I could see this as a teen. It’s just that, what was – and is – foregrounded for me is not what’s wrong with the Edies’ lives, but rather what they’ve gained by living the way that they do. 

As a teen girl, all I could see was how liberated the Edies were from the norms that tethered so many women of their time to diminutive lives as accessories to men and consumers of Mother’s Little Helper doses.

The Edies were free to wander their cat-filled property in a series of absurd headwear choices or rest in bed, singing showtunes.

In the opener for Gilmore Girls (S.3. E.9 “A Deep Fried Korean Thanksgiving”), Lorelai and Rory, TV’s notorious single mom and teen daughter duo, watch the documentary. In their signature quippy dialogue, they summarise the allure of Grey Gardens: 

Lorelai: Something beautiful about them though. They’re cool, they’re free. 

Rory: Yeah, and they’re memorable. Most people are very forgettable. And they’re happy. 

Lorelai: They had their cats. 

Rory: And their raccoons. 

Lorelai: And their pretty house. 

Rory: And each other. 

That’s the Grey Gardens I committed to memory. Surely, that’s the Grey Gardens my hairdresser recommended. We took what we needed from the film and shifted the rest to the periphery, much the way the Edies seemed to do with the squalor. It doesn’t so much seem that the Edies minded the state of their lives, so much as other people thought they ought to mind it. 

The male gaze wants women to believe that the Edies lived a diminutive, pathetic existence. It must be harrowing for men that Grey Gardens, when viewed through the eyes of women and girls, is often a joyful film. Harrowing to think that a life they see as destitute might be better than the dating landscape and that women won’t accept the bare minimum anymore. 

At one point in the film, Little Edie says, frustrated with her mother, “I can see now why girls get married. You know, they’re forced into it.” And yet, Little Edie has never married, perhaps ultimately realising that the trade off - the reprieve from their mother/daughter dynamic – might not be worth it. Maybe I’ve idealised the Edies too much, but even they seem unsure of what a better option could have been. They have their cats and their racoons in their gorgeous decrepit house at least.

Grey Gardens, the myth of it, the version in my head, is an antidote to the fear that I won’t find romantic love. If I don’t, there’s a life waiting where I can feed the racoons that pour through a hole in my attic a cake so rich that they vomit; where I eat corn on the cob served bedside; where I eat ice cream straight from the tub and still feel like I deserve to parade around in all my little outfits. It doesn’t matter that I only remembered an idealised version of the film, because this fantasy is what has made the film so enduring for generations of girls and women.