Grey Gardens

I want to talk about Grey Gardens today. If you don't know, it's a documentary made by the Mayseles Brothers back in 1975 and it is also a movie with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.

I stumbled across the original documentary on netflix and fell in love with Little Edie and Mother Darling. They are the aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy Onassis who lived in their home called Grey Gardens in East Hampton, NY. The two got some national attention when it was discovered that their home was a pit of filth and squalor. Newspaper headlines accused Jackie of ignoring them, so Jackie went in and had their home cleaned up and repaired.

Little Edie and Mother Darling are fascinating!! I am a sucker for crazies! Mother Darling lives in a bed covered with newspapers, food and cats. Little Edie dresses herself in some of the most outrageous costumes. She always binds her head up in scarves or shirts to cover her bald head. You can see a little bit of Edie here on youtube.

Please understand, I'm not making fun, maybe a little, but I can't stop watching them. It's like a puzzle I want to figure out - but I think there's no solution. I think I see a bit of my own insanity in them.

This is a piece of what Guy Kettlehack had to say on the official Grey Gardens fan site:
The thing was an amazing slow psychic train wreck that never quite entirely wrecked. A surreal sleight-of-hand turning nothing into -- well, visual nothing. It spooked me. Edie's lunatic confidences & scarves & flesh & animals & old eerie debutante photographs all seemed like broken shards of a psyche gaily tossing itself bit by bit into psychosis. I looked for something, anything to guide, ground me. Some sane Dorothy in Oz, someone to reassure me I wouldn't lose my own mind if I spent too much time with these people. But there was no one reliable enough for that. Big Mama Edie sometimes helped out a bit (kind of like the Red Queen when for a brief moment here or there she says something congruent to Alice and seduces her, falsely, into thinking she's not in hell) -- by contrast to the imploding people and house surrounding her she seemed to offer an iota or two of clear-eyed commentary -- but basically it was a coupla nut jobs flopping around and breaking down happily in front of us. My dangling palms began to sweat. "When am I gonna get out of here?" Edie asked in one of her many frazzled moments. I wondered the same thing.


It wasn't so much that these ladies needed help -- I was beginning to feel like I did.

Hahaha! So true!!

If you want to go for a little trip into Crazy Land, watch Grey Gardens. I suggest you watch the documentary first, then you'll see what an amazing job Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange did in the movie.