Just watched Fan Mail, a 25-minute short that played in the wee hours on the Sundance Channel. Reason I recorded it is that it stars Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney. "Stars" doesn't get it ... she's in every scene. Only other person I recognized was James Ransone who played Ziggy in Season Two of The Wire. Carrie was v.awkward, but her character was awkward, so there's no telling based on this one movie how good an actress she is. The film was about an art-school student who has a fixation on the singer in a rock band. Virtually all of the movie's interest for me was in thinking about my own fixation with a certain rock band ... it's odd to see someone pretending to have the same weird stuff going on in their heads that I've had about that very person. When Jo (Carrie's character) meets up with the object of her obsession (once briefly in an elevator, once for a bit longer backstage), she gets all flustery, like she can't believe she's actually talking to him! As someone who has watched Carrie Brownstein walk right by me and thought "I can't believe she just walked by me!" ... well, it's v.weird seeing Carrie herself play out that scene.
OK, we take it for granted that I get star-struck ... the one time I got up the nerve to talk to Janet Weiss, the S-K drummer, all I could do was gush "ohmigodyouaresuchagreatdrummer!" ... I did better when I interviewed Corin Tucker, because I had a professional role I could fall back on ... still haven't said anything to Carrie, although if I see her in Andronico's I'm gonna go say hi, I swear I will ... but I'm not the only star-struck person out there. The odd thing is that Sleater-Kinney are so anti-star, recording on their little indie labels, helping set up their own equipment at concerts, manning the merch tables themselves, basically demanding that they get to be not only performers but "real people" ... it's entirely possible in a different world, I'd know them in "real" life, esp. Carrie, the academic of the group. But instead I fetishize ... "look, it's Carrie in a movie, and she's wearing a skirt, I've never seen her wear anything but pants before!" You can almost understand this kind of reaction when it comes to something like seeing Bruce Springsteen in High Fidelity ... Bruce plays at being a "real" person, he's "real-er" than most big stars, but he's a star and always has been ... but Carrie Brownstein is real, so my reactions seem esp. silly.
And Fan Mail is about those silly feelings. It's not a great movie or anything, and if I didn't fetishize Carrie in the first place, I doubt it would have made any impression on me at all. But with her playing at being an obsessed fan ... well, I couldn't help but watch it and think "she understands how we feel about her," even though the point of the movie seemed to be that there is a lot more to life than merely obsessing about abstract others.
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