“We’re the same person,” Frances says of Sophie to her new roommates, Lev and Benji.
Later, her voice laced with thinly veiled anxiety, she tells Sophie, “You and I are both undateable. We’re gonna end up spinsters.” Sophie, who has since cultivated an air more sophisticated and bored, merely replies, “You better break that to Patch.”
There’s a certain pleasure in determining that we are “the same person” as our best friend, particularly for those of us who regard our friendships as romances. Often we are propelled to such vows when we find unevenly shaped pieces of ourselves in one another. But these moments, however vital, are only a nuance of a larger, fundamental drive to enlace oneself so tightly with another that all boundaries fizzle away. To assert that two are one is to defy tenets of logic on the hallowed principle of woman’s intimacy—to desire spectacular manifestations of one’s closeness because platonic romance is as vast and boundless as anything sexual.
And yet under different light this hyperbole emits a more somber hue. When Frances declares that she and Sophie are the same, she yearns to steady herself through identification. All of the questions that make us squirm in the twilight of our twenties—am I pursuing the right career? Should I commit to this person? What, precisely, do I want?—lose their charge when we decide that our best friend’s life narrative validates our own. When Frances aligns herself with Sophie—Sophie, who has both a job and parents successful enough to fund a move to Tribeca—her increasingly disappointing dance career becomes, not a professional misfire, but an incontrovertible plot thread of their larger Story. Her choices are rendered valid, and unambiguously so.
After Sophie moves out of their apartment, however, her presence becomes more peripheral and laden with caveats (she can’t hang out all day; she promised to meet Patch by five). Though Frances continues to tell people that she and Sophie are the same person, this description of their friendship begins to read more as a desperate grasp at an unraveling narrative and, critically, at her cherished perception of Sophie, who has never been her double.
Even at its most feverish, closeness is a vague, protean sensation, one we can experience even when we do not fully know the person catalyzing it. It’s unclear exactly why Frances does not know Sophie the way she purports to—why she must learn just how little she knows. But this much is clear: Frances—out of fear of loneliness, insecurity, or immaturity—has been unwilling to interpret Sophie on Sophie’s terms. We see the expanse of this gap during what amounts to the film’s climax. After a fight with Patch, a liquored-up Sophie crawls into Frances’s bed, and she murmurs everything Frances’s basest self aches to hear—boozy promises of reunion and a resurrected narrative: Sophie’s going to leave Japan, where she now lives with Patch, and, more crucially, she’s going to leave Patch himself. She will return to New York City with Frances. The two fall asleep as Sophie intones, “I love you, Frances.”
Sophie does love Frances; of this, we are never in doubt. However, when Frances awakes the next morning, it is not beside a Sophie committed to relinquishing her new life, but rather to the sound of Patch’s car pulling away, her best friend in tow. Their night together was not a return for Sophie, but a retreat—retreat from commitments and change that have been far more overwhelming for Sophie than Frances has previously understood. Nonetheless, these are the commitments, and abiding changes, that Sophie has embraced.
One evening, in the midst of her estrangement from Sophie, Frances dreamily describes to fellow dinner party guests her conception of purest romance: a shared look across a crowded room that communicates one essential fact: we are each other’s person. “That’s what I want out of a relationship,” she concludes. With Frances’s remarks, we understand two things: this is what she wants from her friendship with Sophie. And she wants it precisely because they have never experienced it. In spite of affection, attachment, and intimacy, they have not quite grasped how to see each other.
But they learn. At the end of the film, Frances and Sophie beam at each other across the expanse of a reception. Frances has just showcased her first work as a choreographer. Sophie has married Patch. And as Frances basks in the pulse of that warm glow, indiscernible to the rest of the crowd, she finally understands whom it is she sees. It is not another manifestation of herself. It is not the embodiment of some predetermined life. It is Sophie, her best friend.
* * *
Baumbach’s film delivers an insidious edict against women cultivating romances with one another, apart from men—one couched in cogent messages of independence and honesty. It’s not an altogether alarmist cultural artifact, but a more muted representation of our milieu. Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, based on actual events, peddles in blatant fear-mongering. Purporting to convey the natural conclusion of unchecked female intimacy, the film chronicles the increasingly obsessive bond between two teenage girls unhappy with their familial circumstances. Ultimately convinced that one of their mothers is determined to separate them, they orchestrate and carry out a scheme to murder her in cold blood. The through line is clear: young women are prone to excessive attachment that can yield unthinkable destruction. Moreover, the film’s evident lesbian panic intensifies the anxiety surrounding romantic female friendship, insinuating a more primal concern that men lack the organic pull on women’s desires and affections that they’ve been taught to expect. Too Much friendships rail against this expectation, while refusing to account for an attraction that, for all its potency, cannot be read according to heteronormative discourse.
In 1953, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme9 met in Christchurch, New Zealand. Before long, the two girls grew so attached it frightened their parents. The Hulmes made plans to remove Juliet to South Africa, indefinitely separating her from Pauline. But Juliet, fifteen at the time, and Pauline, sixteen, were determined not to be parted. Identifying Pauline’s mother as the primary obstacle to their scheme, the girls resolved to murder her and frame the deed as a tragic accident. They arranged an outing to Victoria Park on June 22, 1954—Pauline recorded it in her diary as “the day of the happy event.” After tea, they lured Mrs. Parker to a secluded hillside and, wielding a brick inside a stocking, bludgeoned her to death.
Pauline’s diary—the source of the narration for Heavenly Creatures—was discovered during the investigations, its contents revealing the girls’ intentions. Both Pauline and Juliet were brought to trial, found guilty, and imprisoned. They were released five years later, purportedly on the nonnegotiable condition that they never reunite, never reignite a friendship whose intimacy begot insatiability, a love dipped in terror. Pauline and Juliet are a case study of panic: the legible lesbian panic in their parents’ desire to separate them, and born from their motivation for killing Mrs. Parker. There’s panic whenever young girls reveal their capacity for bloodlust. And panic wraps itself around the center of Pauline and Juliet’s bond; they fear being alienated from each other and will do anything to avoid it.
Jackson’s film features the debut performances of Melanie Lynskey (Pauline) and Kate Winslet (Juliet). Lynskey’s Pauline scowls from beneath a mop of brunette curls, her face softening only when she looks at Juliet, near-idolatry engulfing her eyes. In turn, Winslet’s Juliet basks in this bald adoration. Chin aloft, she speaks deliberately, accentuating her English accent as a mark of superiority among the New Zealanders. She lords over Pauline too, partly because it’s her natural inclination and partly because Pauline is a happily rapt devotee.
Together, Lynskey and Winslet perform this barbed, mutual love—one that can never satisfy. Both of them, since childhood, have been working around a deep-seated dread of isolation. When she was a child, Juliet’s frail health inspired her parents to send her away to warmer climates. Now as a teenager, living with her parents again, she grasps for their elusive attention. Pauline barrels through the school halls, head down, keeping a brisk pace that beclouds the thickened epidermis of her solitude.
The two girls first encounter each other in t
he classroom, where Juliet’s irreverence draws Pauline’s attention, sparking a fantasy that’s crystallized at the first sight of the Hulmes’ splendid Christchurch residence. Pauline halts her bike, dazzled first by the house and then at the sight of Juliet on a bridge, sun-dappled and laughing as she flings petals into the stream beneath her. She’s dressed regally—gauzy gown, crown atop her head—but Pauline, her face rinsed with enchantment, registers Juliet’s play as authentic. We understand that, for Pauline, Juliet will henceforth exist as a fairy princess trapped in reality’s squalor.
So often we think our interpretations are fact. In Jackson’s scheme, the light that bathes Juliet functions as metaphorical illumination, a kiss of truth that transforms her into some splendid creature only Pauline can recognize. There’s nothing especially bizarre about this dynamic: literature is dotted with women who seem exquisite byproducts of luxury—and, as a result, bewitch the lesser at their feet. In Jane Austen’s Emma, Emma Woodhouse exerts deleterious influence over pretty, dithery Harriet Smith. Dainty, coddled Ash Wolf elicits Jules Jacobson’s love in Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings. That affection is barbed with jealousy and covetousness—but it never approaches the cathexis of Heavenly Creatures, where a girl is inspired to crush her mother’s skull.
The film’s basis in a real-life narrative makes it even easier to wonder what went wrong. To cherish one girlfriend better than everyone else—to fall extravagantly in love with her—is no crime. But how could Pauline and Juliet possibly glorify their love, and each other, to the extent that other humans seemed to live only for and at their mercy? Then again, it’s not worthwhile to plot cause and trajectory on a movie or on real life. There’s never total coherence, no meaningful tipping point. We can’t pause on the timeline, point a knowing finger, and say, “Here—here’s where the bloodthirst became possible, when she finally knew she’d strike.”
Murder, like love, exceeds the sum of the evidence. As she narrates, Pauline even articulates their motivation, but we can never grasp what transforms an instinct into an event, how impulse mutates into brutality. The obscurity surrounding murder is terrifying in any case; what’s often illuminated is ultimately just our prejudice about what sorts of people commit crimes. The mythology surrounding the Anglo-Saxon schoolgirl renders Pauline and Juliet’s capacity for violence unthinkable. The schoolgirl is archetypally sweet, naïve even at the first blush of sexual awakening. If she is dangerous, that danger inheres in her desirability, perhaps even in her awareness that she has been objectified. Schoolgirls giggle mischievously, as Pauline and Juliet do; they might even traipse through the woods in their underwear, or assemble a shrine to their most cherished Hollywood celebrities (Mario Lanza, in this case). No matter how brazen the fantasies, the schoolgirl friendship never fully sheds its mantle of innocence: fresh curiosity and saddle shoes, fullhearted earnestness and notes on loose leaf. We know these clichés are false; that’s why pop culture is always dismembering them.
Pauline and Juliet are rendered as most unusual in the voracity of their love, one plagued by endless need—for each other, and for refuge in a world of their own creation. Dissatisfied with their circumstances and stymied by parental limits, they create and cultivate the kingdom of Borovnia, populated by hedonist characters they sculpt together out of Plasticine. The girls spin a mythology that grants them access to this fantastic world, permitting pleasures alien to good Christian schoolgirls. And with this perceived supernatural mobility comes self-deification. The human world refuses to “appreciate [their] genius,” Pauline writes, and so their intimacy serves as a means of worshipping themselves. The line from which the title comes is telling: “Tis indeed a miracle one must feel that two such heavenly creatures are real.”
The fantasy may be alluring, but its atmosphere is porous. When Pauline travels to Borovnia, her fears and vexations dog her. Bored during a mundane sexual encounter, she hurtles her consciousness inside Borovnia’s castle walls. Pauline is enthralled by the company of her Plasticine characters—now life-size—and tickled when her lover appears (also rendered in Plasticine), and is brutally sliced in half. A moment later, she gazes into a far corner where one figure transforms into bright, laughing Juliet. They share a flushed look of mutual admiration, but after a moment, Pauline’s eyes brim with tears.
Even here, in this fantasy, Pauline cannot disentangle her love of Juliet from her tragic awareness that she will always be chasing after her, perched on the brink of loss. However fervently they intertwine their lives, Pauline is mired in unshakable anxiety. Safeguarding this relationship is not simply a function of love, but of a wretched, fundamental knowledge that it is too good to be true, too precarious to endure. Juliet is as much fantasy as flesh. Pauline, unaware of how strongly Juliet’s father dislikes her, even daydreams in black-and-white of racing into the embrace of Juliet and her parents, who beam with pride as the two girls share a deep kiss.
These are not just desires for intimacy, but for a new origin story that absorbs Pauline into a refined world full of intellect and art. In more tempered varieties, these fantasies have never been uncommon among best friends. When I read the Baby-Sitters Club series as a child, I relished the plotline of Mary Anne and Dawn, girlfriends who become stepsisters and housemates. Even those of us fortunate to have a happy home couldn’t help but dream of a different family, one that we could inhabit while retaining aspects of our own. But it’s in the nature of a dream to exceed the possible.
And so Jackson’s film runs on pursuit. Pauline’s first visit to Ilam, the Hulmes’ homestead, leads to a chase sequence throughout the grounds. Daytime frolics throughout the woods surge into playful games of tag. When Pauline indulges in the far-fetched, cherished vision of joining the Hulme family, it begins with an eager race down a ship’s deck. The girls are locked into a ceaseless chase, never allowed to catch their breath. Seeking more than can be found in a single person, they can never be satisfied by what they share. And, as youths suspected of a so-called unnatural attachment, their parents’ suspicions keep them from inhabiting their friendship in peace. Pauline is forced to visit a doctor who, with gravest solemnity, diagnoses her as homosexual. Disruptions in the Hulme household—plans for divorce, Dr. Hulme’s dismissal from the college in Christchurch—inspire Juliet’s parents to leave. For Juliet, the plan is unfathomable: her parents are abandoning her—again—while demanding that she forsake Pauline.
Their togetherness in jeopardy, Pauline and Juliet seek satisfaction one night by making love the way they imagine their favorite celebrities—those they worship as “saints”—do. It’s erotic, but the girls are young; it’s not difficult to read this relationship as one that eschews the strictures of heterosexuality without applying the totalizing stamp of “lesbian.” It is one matter for the girls to characterize their intimacy on their own terms and another for outside observers to categorize it as if puzzling over the genus of a strange animal. We are eager, always, to make intimacy legible, but all bonds often veer into unplottable territory.
Despite the matrimony-centric schema ordering their perspectives on female friendship, the Victorians nonetheless depicted a sweeping calico of bonds between women. Charles Dickens’s 1865 novel Our Mutual Friend includes among its vast cast of characters the devoted companions Lizzie Hexam, who, like so many Dickensian heroines, is beautiful, selfless, and long-suffering, and Jenny Wren, a disabled dolls’ dressmaker who supports her alcoholic father and, though she seems whimsically idiosyncratic, refuses to suffer any man’s tomfoolery, particularly where Lizzie is concerned. This pair of young women, snarled in poverty and all its accompanying plights, takes succor in small tendernesses. After long, laborious days, they unpin each other’s hair by the fire, “it being Lizzie’s regular occupation when they were alone of an evening to brush out and smooth the long fair hair of the dolls’ dressmaker.”10 It’s a sensuous and romantic ritual—two young women basking in their mutual physical charms, silken streams tumbling across shoulders and bosoms as a fire
crackles in the dusk. And because Jenny Wren was accustomed to solitude before Lizzie came to live with her, it is fitting that she would revel in this companionship, determining that any husband would pale in comparison to her friend. “He couldn’t brush my hair like you do,” Jenny avows, “or help me up and down stairs like you do, and he couldn’t do anything like you do; but he could take my work home, and he could call for orders in his clumsy way…I’ll trot him about, I can tell him!”11
Jenny Wren speaks like a disenchanted personality from Mother Goose, and this is appropriate: Fanny Cleaver is her given name—one with a myriad of sexual implications—but, purportedly inspired by the English nursery rhyme, she rechristens herself. Her position in the novel is a slippery one—performative in a way that sometimes seems to resist her reduction to a disabled body. But then, Dickens’s track record in writing female characters, not to mention nonnormative ones, is pitted at best; perhaps he means Jenny’s sassy, hyper-girlish fantasies of a married future to be read as such: the adorably confident musings of a character who, as a result of her own, physical too muchness, has been altogether evacuated of sexuality, in name and in person (though she does, eventually, find a partner, and because this is a Dickens novel, he is disabled too). Regardless, Jenny’s stern assessment of this lacking hypothetical husband lays bare a crystalline hierarchy: no man, according to her predictions, can soothe and delight her the way that Lizzie does.
But the friendship shared by Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren is a healthy one, unmarred by the panicked frisson agitating the bond between Pauline and Juliet. Intense homosociality abounds among women and girls in Victorian fiction, but rarely does it signal cause for alarm. After all, these women, even Jenny Wren, do not love their companions too much if they accept the heteronormative marriage plot as the template for their own timelines. Perhaps the most deadly female intimacy in Victorian literature occurs in Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 gothic novella Carmilla, in which the titular character, an ages-old vampire, seduces and feeds on pretty, naïve girls. The story chronicles her pursuit of Laura, who is sweet, sheltered, and a bit dim; their quick intimacy, which confounds Laura; and Carmilla’s eventual undoing.
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