On Wednesday night R. took me to see (500) Days of Summer. This was payback because on Sunday I forced him to see Inglorious Basterds with me. I want to say things about Inglorious Basterds, too, but I feel tongue-tied because this isn’t a movie about young romance and supernatural creatures, and because I can’t spend three paragraphs examining my cute bitterness towards the starlet’s BMI. Instead, Tarantino’s movie, as snappy and stylized as it is, involves really incredibly serious stuff, like Hitler and prejudice and dehumanization and death and the nature of violence and why we pay to see violence and how maybe when we watch people die and laugh about it delightedly we’re just as bad as the pasty-faced Nazi boys with their sneering mustache-twirling German-textbook accents. And I find that I’m too overwhelmed to say anything. I wish I could write a whole entry about how this one scene made me feel … the one where Melanie Laurent is preparing herself for the final showdown and David Bowie is singing in the background and Laurent is so tough and icy and noble that I never even IMAGINE being that angelically bad-ass, oh my god, and her red lipstick! And her red dress! But if I posted that, everybody would hate me for reducing a very complicated (just ‘cause Brad Pitt makes a hick accent and Eli Roth has a baseball bat doesn’t make it uncomplicated, kids!) movie into a moment of vicarious, vacuous fashion lust. So I won’t. See what I did there?

Anyway, so, this is apparently the summer (slash early autumn) of movies with unexplained and slightly annoying titles. Like, why the ‘e’? Why the parentheses? Do these things reveal something important about the nature of each movie, or are they only in place so when you forget and write 500 Days of Summer, some loveless Poindexter on the IMDB movie forums can be all, “UM, I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT, THERE IS NO MOVIE WITH THAT TITLE.” Not that this happened to me (ha). But that’s not an unrealistic scenario, and I can’t help feeling that Tarantino and, uh, Scott Neustadter just wanted to mess around with their titles so that you’re forced to pay particular attention when writing about them, kind of coercing you into their cutesy wordplay or else banishing you to the unwitting masses of parents who accidentally missed the 4:30 showing of Shorts and had to take the next available movie so they could make it to Applebee’s in time.) Bastards.

Predictably, during this hipster rom-com, I was totally tense and resistant, and sat there with my knees drawn up to my chest, chewing all my fingernails, and hating Zooey Deschanel. It’s funny because I was just re-watching that episode of Mad Men where Peggy Olson is so appalled and weirded out by Ann-Margret’s version of “sexy.” I mean, that’s so outdated, right? When I watch that scene in Bye Bye Birdie, I get total chills. She looks so manic … swishing her skirts, tilting her head, that flesh-colored dress, the puppyish false eyelashes, running and throwing herself at the screen again and again like a bird too dumb to figure out that’s GLASS not AIR. Bye bye birdie indeed if you don’t stop that, amirite? I can’t pretend to understand the male brain … is Ann-Margaret sexy because she’s mad with lust? Is it sexy to think you might have to fight a girl off because she’s crawling out of your television set like that girl from the The Ring? I don’t know! She is unfathomable to me! 

Don Draper explains it to Peggy, who is confused in the same way I am (Peggy, we should do lunch). Men want Ann-Margret and therefore women want to be her, even if they find her terrifying and shrill and disconcerting. And I was like, “OK, Don, well, that’s a fine explanation, but that’s not the way it is anymore! These days, women can define sexiness for themselves! We can have a crush on pre-baby Angelina Jolie even if our boyfriends inexplicably don’t! We dress for other girls, not for boys! I don’t agree with your assessment of female sexuality, Don … it’s not just about pleasing men. By the way, Don, I love your jawline. Could you put your hand up my skirt in a threatening manner?”

But I’m wrong. I’m so wrong. Apparently Ann-Margret still is sexy, according to comments on YouTube. Also, I’ve heard a ton of people say that Megan Fox is today’s unrealistic arbiter of sex-appeal, but I don’t agree. Megan Fox is somehow accessible. She’s self-deprecating and weird and vulnerable. She’s aware that for all her tiny cropped shirts and waist-length black hair and pillow-sized lips, she’s not girlfriend material. OK, she was Shia LaBeouf’s girlfriend, but that was in a movie where the supporting characters were robot-cars with guns for hands. She’s trapped in BoyLand! Like Marilyn Monroe, her decadent hyper-sexuality is somehow fragile; other women can see that she’s being dragged down by the weight of her breasts, and they respond to that. We will protect this impossible sex-doll from the harshness of the male gaze. We will be her friend, which is what she herself truly craves: to be taken seriously, to be loved for who she is inside and not for her tramp-stamp.

The real bitch is Zooey Deschanel.

Who can be Zooey Deschanel? Seriously, who? You could work out and wear low-slung jeans and stripper heels and straighten your hair and make suggestive jokes and come out with an ambiance that’s roughly Megan Fox-ish. Guys don’t look too closely. She herself has bad skin and a nose-job, so. But Zooey! Zooey! She is totally unattainable! She has baby-blue eyes the size of teacup saucers! She has a dear little button nose! At twenty-nine, she looks fifteen! She wears bows around her ponytail and looks beautiful and elegant in high-waist wide-leg pants. I do not believe for a second her BMI is 20.1, but she’s not fussy and bulimic, she eats pancakes with adorable gusto, and God himself melts the flesh from her slender upper arms. Zooey is named after a Salinger character. I don’t care if her name is Summer; it’s always Zooey, OK? Boys, here is what she will do for you: Zooey shares your obscure taste in music. She likes the weird movies that you do. She will make you do silly things in public; you will enjoy it, because you’re with this beautiful girl in her Alice in Wonderland dresses, and she wrinkles her nose when she laughs. She loves the ugliest Beatle: she is a saintly protector of the odd and unloved. She’s like a dude in that she doesn’t want to suffocate you, but she’s like a girl in the way she lies next to you on an Ikea display bed and smells like shampoo and toothpaste and everything clean and pure and good that you remember from your lonely childhood escapist movie fantasies.

Now, girls. Girls, you may think that a funny, tough-minded, eclectic hipster girl like Zooey is totally attainable. From a certain angle, i.e. if you were a really bored alien looking down on human relationships, you might assume that girls feel better about leading-ladies like Zooey, because it’s easier for us to sing in a garage band than it is for us to walk around in slow motion with water streaming across our breasts. But the thing is, Zooey is the kind of girl your (potential, please-please-look-across-the-classroom-at-me) boyfriend wants. She appeals to the sensitive, the intellectual, the boys in glasses, the boys who remember your birthday and pine over girls from a distance. They’re boys you THINK would like you, because, hey, you’re pretty smart, you have funny taste in movies, you like video games, you’re brunette, you like to cuddle and whisper Smiths lyrics. But no. Boys will not like you because you’re also a little shy; you mirror their own insecurities instead of making them BETTER PEOPLE. You feel unethical stealing animal masks from dime-stores, and you feel embarrassed screaming “penis” in Central Park. Hey, maybe you’re not that pretty (it’s OK, we’re friends here: I myself can relate, I promise). In the end, you just will not be enough to be a dream-girl. And there’s the modern paradox. Boys who like football and grilling on weekends will like girls who do not read Voltaire; boys who read Voltaire will be discontent until they can date a girl who will complete them with her hair-ribbons.

So, in sum, I worry that I don’t know what “sexiness” is (surprise!). I don’t know if it’s Ann-Margret throwing herself at the camera, or if it’s Megan Fox in leather pants, hanging out with robots. I don’t exactly believe Don Draper; I don’t exactly believe Peggy Olson. I do believe sad hipster boys, but they don’t want to listen to my agreement, because I love trashy things like celebrity gossip, and I look silly in sailor pants. I’m just too plain jealous to be a dream-girl. And sure, fine, all my “witty” blog entries are solely about me, which seems a step in the right direction if I want to be more like Zooey. But my eyes are muddy-colored and I’m crap at eyeliner, which dooms me all over again.

Maybe one day I’ll figure out whether I love Audrey or Marilyn more, and at that point, all things will become clear to me.