Grey Gardens

When I was first watched Grey Gardens, I myself was not in the best of living conditions. The old adage “location location location” did not really extend to that shithouse of a flat which, while in the prime location of Cuba Street, had little else to offer. Cigarette butts on the floor and in the kitchen sink? Check. A room whose only window looked into another room? Check. Median age of flatmates: 18? Check. But ultimately it was waking up on a Sunday morning to find a pool of purple vomit outside of the bathroom and a blood smeared mirror inside of the bathroom that pushed me into the arms of another flat; an all girls, E television watching, “ohmigod, last night at Establishment” screeching, flat. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
But, if my housing horrors were a fire, Grey Gardens, the dilapidated Hamptons estate of Little Edie and Big Edie Bouvier Beale, was a towering inferno. The documentary sets up their enormous shack of a mansion as a metaphor for their lives; what once was grand now slowly disintegrates. And, as the film reveals, their lives certainly were grand. Big Edie and Little Edie are the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Bouvier Onassis, respectively, and flashbacks poignantly draw attention to Little Edie’s beauty, and the many opportunities she had, yet did not take. Much of the dialogue between Little Edie and Big Edie centers around the past and, because the film was made in 1975, the current viewer is even farther distanced from their reminiscence. Watching it, I became nostalgic for their nostalgia, whilst simultaneously fearful for my future: the ultimate dread that I could end up like them.



Now Grey Gardens has been made into an “HBO film,” starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. The original film is frightening, whilst the trailers for the adaptation indicate that perhaps this fear has been replaced by nostalgia. Never a good sign. Still, when it comes out on DVD I will watch from the comfort of my non-racoon infested home, reassuring myself that it would take me at least twenty years to reach a Bouvier level of insanity.