watching this now is like watching ghosts making a movie about ghosts trapped in a house haunted by ghosts

after watching this documentary on repeat for 3 days straight, i was inspired to update my linkedin profile, move out of my parents’ house, and throw my cat away! with the grey gardens program, YOU TOO can get your life together!!!

style icon... cat enthusiast... shut in... vision of my future

Decaying luxury sprawls in internal(ized) squalor. Both Edies are trapped, bitter, nostalgic, regretful, in love with a time and place, in love with dreams deferred or lost or warped by years of neglect and repression. There is love between them, but it is the choked, stripped love of two people chafing at the other's presence. It is difficult not to have sympathy for them, even though it's equally hard not to think of how they came into their money and power, how that has protected them even as they live in refuse, how others have been harmed by the avarice inherent in their lifestyles; these two women are seemingly guileless in their needs and strengths. It seems strange to think they were exploited--they were said to have loved the movie even if they were not paid everything they were promised--but it's hard to watch anyone experience pain and not wonder why those with the cameras do nothing.

52 project: 102/52

It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present... Do you know what I mean?… Very difficult.

This sad and disturbing film is extremely painful. Halfway through I always need several Advil from all the yelling and by the end my neck’s incredibly sore from being shaken so hard for such an extended period of disbelief.

The only antidote is an immediate viewing of Documentary Now’s “Sandy Passage”

…Anyway I gotta get all coordinated in my mind…

cinematic people-watching done incredibly well

One of the final shots is of raccoons eating white bread that Little Edie left out for them, and it honestly sums the whole movie up pretty well.

So tender it made me sad. My favorite part was the raccoons.

Wanna watch one of the saddest and strangest movies out there? I got the pick for you. 

An intimate portrait of a codependent relationship, living in the past, and inability to move forward. It’s infuriating, sad, and at times even charming. It does offer little narrative as the movies goes on and nothing new is necessarily learned, it feels more like let’s visit weird aunt this weekend and while you’re there you get told the same stories, and your family yells at each other, and you’re uncomfortable but have to stay there. This movie captures that feeling really well but I wished I knew more about them as people than just their eccentric lifestyles and resentments, under the microscope everyone is eccentric.

Little Edie, the biggest mood of all time.

There's nobody else in the world like these two. Sometimes I didn't really know what they were rambling on about but I didn't even care because the way they talk and interact with one another is so mesmerizing and comedic. They were such characters and it's difficult to believe that they are real people and not actors. I think I was able to appreciate this documentary even more having seen the film staring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore beforehand.

Tragic and heartbreaking. Imagine what Little Edie could have become if she was free.

I couldn’t help but shake the idea that this was a movie from an alternate universe, where I was the documentarian and the two women are my mother and grandmother. Eughhayghhh.

How strange are these women! Amirite?

It dragged a bit, even though it was pretty short. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just because nothing really happened. Hard to imagine that wasn’t the point.

Edie’s deadbeat Dad went to Sewanee. Hm.

“Peeeeopleee will say we’re in laaaaahhhhvvvee”. Libra men. Raccoons surviving on Wonder Bread. I recommend.