![]() ![]() When shooting the final scene, Seidelman was consciously thinking of The 400 Blows: “I liked the ambiguity of, Does she get in the car? If she does get in the car, is it going to be bad or not?” she said. “She makes mistakes, she has some bad judgment in men, but she always bounces back.” Wren has the captivating ferocity of Baptiste in Jacques Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord, the near-delusional ambition of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Smithereens is “about a woman who is trying to reinvent herself,” Seidelman said when I spoke to her before a revival of the film in 2016. A cab pulls up to the club, a woman inside shouts, “I hate you!” and out steps the utterly cool, totally punk, wholly untroubled Eric, played by Voidoids front man Richard Hell. “I think I know that guy,” Wren says to Paul, and proceeds to ditch him. For Paul, the date is a bit of a horror show too. The downtown New York cameos are golden: when Wren finally agrees to go on a date with Paul, actor and writer Cookie Mueller plays the victim in the horror movie they watch. After she hands him a flyer on the subway, Paul follows Wren to her copy-shop job and returns to wait for her shift to end. ![]() It’s the early eighties, so all the stalking is done on the street. Those details are endearing, but Paul is the nice guy, inevitably doomed in his attempts to woo Wren. She’s pursued by that guy from the subway, Paul (Brad Rinn), a native Montanan in flannel shirts, who lives in his van next to the West Side Highway, keeps his razor in the glove box, uses the rearview mirror for shaving. She’s impulsive and tough and funny and inherently cool. You root for Wren because you could be her, and because you wanna be her a little bit too. Still-in Wren’s case, anyway-the job didn’t always quite cover the rent. Where else could you print up your zine, novel, comic book, or show flyers on the store’s dime when your boss wasn’t looking? In the real-life East Village, you might have placed a print order with Gordon, her bandmate and then-boyfriend Thurston Moore, or underground filmmaker Sara Driver, all of whom worked at the same copy shop on Mott Street. Her copy-shop job is the barista-gig equivalent of its day, but also a nexus of artistic and DIY worlds-the act of reproducing images was inherently Warholian and punk-rock. She tiptoes past her landlady in those silver shoes she hustles money from strangers she talks a big game she makes her “Who Is This?” posters on the sly at work. Wren slips past the door guy at the Peppermint Lounge later, she’ll claim to be a musician herself. She charges forward, head-on, without wasting time on introspection. The flyers enigmatically feature her own face, begging the question “Who is this?” The next iteration of the poster will pose that query explicitly-in cutout letters, ransom-note style-and it is one that Wren would very much like others to ask about her, though no one much does, or at least not the people she wishes would ask. The cute guy sitting across the way is stealing glances. Outfit complete, Wren sprints down the subway steps in her fishnet stockings and glittery silver shoes with striped socks, hops onto a graffiti-tagged car, and coolly begins wheat-pasting flyers over the maps, as if nothing has happened. The soundtracked guitars reach a frenetic fever pitch. When Wren steps into the frame in her checked miniskirt, it’s obvious why she needs to steal them. Who can blame her? In the opening shot, we see a pair of black-and-white-checked sunglasses dangling tantalizingly from the hand of an unseen person. Smithereens begins with a criminal act-a petty theft, swiftly accomplished by its protagonist, Wren (Susan Berman). In her memoir Girl in a Band, former Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon describes the liberating thrill of driving into the city for the first time in 1980, “as if your car were being shot from a pinball machine, down a slope into some rough forest. ![]() If you were an artist, a punk, a weirdo, a drifter, fleeing a small town or suburb, downtown New York was a mecca and a refuge-dangerous but cheap and full of fellow outsiders. In 1982, the year Susan Seidelman’s feature debut, Smithereens, was released, New York City was still very much a world where it seemed possible to escape where you were from and figure out who you really were. ![]()
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