I have heard stories of artists and writers being enormously productive during periods of war, plague, and national crisis, but I wasn’t one of them. Just before lockdown began, I had published my first book and begun working on a second—a novel about a queer woman photographer and a nonbinary journalist who decide to do an ambitious art project together. But as hundreds of thousands of people were dying, anything that happened in the mind now seemed like a fucking joke.
I thought. . On one of the many nights at home, I rewatched that great work of American cinema, (2002).
It’s about four female friends surfing in Hawaii, although two of them don’t really matter. The two who do are Anne Marie—white, blond, incapable of wearing a shirt with sleeves—and Eden—Latinx, board shorts, drives a jet ski. Anne Marie is established as the more talented of the two, so Eden assumes the role of her trainer.
When AM gets involved with an NFL player visiting Hawaii on vacation, jeopardizing her training by ordering pancakes post-coitus and swimming in the ocean in a cocktail dress, Eden is pissed—possibly about AM throwing away her talents, possibly something else (I am not the first to suggest that this movie is very, very gay) but ultimately Eden is there, watching from the shore, as AM makes her big bid for surfing stardom. I loved Michelle Rodriguez as Eden—she seemed hungry throughout the whole movie. She seemed starved.
There was also something in the movie that remin.
