I Watched Party Girl And Glimpsed A Forgotten World

The changing landscape of interiority in the 21st century

Like most urban Millennial couples, my wife and I spent the last two months wrapped up in White Lotus mania. We watched it every Sunday night (Or, whenever our tired 30-something bodies wanted to go to bed early, Monday after we got home from work) and we laughed at the memes it generated. Overall, I thought the show itself was fine. I found it to be a little boring and off putting, but it was better than 99% of the algo slop we’re served on streaming services these days. Sam Rockwell’s monologue in episode five was a highlight for me. Week to week, however, the actor I was most excited to watch was Parker Posey.

My personal affinity for Posey played a major role in this excitement. I think she’s a fantastic actress, and I was thrilled to see her working on such a high profile show. She played a great high school villain in Dazed And Confused, leaving a massive mark with a limited amount of screen time. She also stole the show in what I believe is the best episode of Louie in the entire series. Christopher Guest movies aren’t exactly my thing, but she’s been a standout in every one that I’ve seen as well.

So last Saturday night, bored and with nothing to do, my wife and I put on 1995’s Party Girl, Posey’s first breakout indie hit as a lead. It was right on the front page of Hulu, no doubt put there due to renewed interest in her work. The movie follows Mary, a New York City club kid who is forced to get a job at the local library following a run in with the law. Like most 90s indie films, Party Girl is scrappy and lo-fi and a little incoherent, but all of that lends it a tremendous amount of charm. However, my main takeaway wasn’t about the quality of the film, it was the way it made me feel. By the time the end credits rolled, I had spiraled into a minor existential crisis.

Through some weird mix of cinematic alchemy, I was finally able to intuit, on a deep, emotional level, what it felt like to be an adult without a smartphone. Not just an adult who doesn’t own one, but an adult who doesn’t even know what a smartphone is. I watched these characters go from place to place– to the club, to their apartments, to the falafel stand, to the library–carrying only a set of house keys and maybe an ID and some loose cash. I could feel their sense of presence in their current environment. They had nothing else to look at or engage with aside from the action right in front of their faces. And I fully comprehended the way their interior lives in no way resembled mine, and that there was nothing I could do to bring myself back to this analog state.

Why did Party Girl impact me to this degree? I’ve seen plenty of movies and TV shows where people don’t have a cell phone. Seinfeld is my favorite show of all time, and half of its plot lines could be resolved if George was able to text Jerry. I can’t say for sure why it resonated the way it did. Maybe it was the fact the movie was shot on grainy looking film, evoking a simpler time both in my life and the movie industry as a whole. Maybe it was the way these characters were always out and about, socializing in a way that feels foreign in the 2020s. Maybe it was because the Dewey Decimal System, a method of literary organization now rendered obsolete by the internet, plays such an outsized role in the story. But somehow all of these factors combined and mentally brought me to a time and place where rents were cheaper and the demands on our attention were far fewer.

The metaphysical problems with smartphones have been discussed to death, so I don’t think I need to rehash them here. It’s a given that they sap our attention and make us less present in the current moment. But I don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with the way they’ve colonized and disrupted our interior lives. Our consciousness is fractured into multiple pieces, existing both in the real world and the digital space. When I sit at my desk at work, I’m thinking about the PowerPoint presentation I’m putting together, but also the unread text messages awaiting my reply, the new episode of my favorite podcast that’s ready for download, the promotional emails burning a hole in my inbox, and the online discourse happening around whatever the Current Thing is during that given week. These additional inputs have a way of staying with me throughout the day. If I make the mistake of looking at Twitter within an hour of waking up, my brain is bogged down with hot takes and right wing memes for the rest of the morning. This has a tangible impact on how I move through and perceive the real world.

But none of that was an option in 1995. Maybe you had the internet if you were ahead of the curve, but you still needed to power through the clang and hiss of a dial up modem to get there. Now, the internet follows you everywhere, and its contents occupy a permanent space in your brain. The volume of this stimulation is brand new and in complete opposition to how we’ve lived for thousands of years, and it’s changing us. The internet has remapped our exterior world, why wouldn’t it do the same to our interior world as well?

Watching this movie, I realized I envied the interior lives of fictional characters. They didn’t have to work to cultivate an internal stillness. It was the default setting. Even at their most frenzied, their minds were calmer than ours, their lives simpler. I felt like I couldn’t relate to them. The idea of me, an adult man living in 2025, having a completely different interior life than someone who was in my position 30 years ago is categorically insane. We never truly stop and think about it, but we’ve built something over the last quarter century that psychologically sets us apart from the many generations of human beings that came before us. We’re in brand new territory, but everyone acts like all of this is just normal, natural progress.

I feel like such a Boomer complaining about this stuff, but the fact that it keeps coming up again and again has to mean something. It’s a real problem, and admitting the scope and scale would require us to make some very serious decisions, which in itself requires an extremely clear articulation of values. But how can one have values if they can’t focus on anything, if they’re being pulled in twenty different directions at all times? How do you know what you believe if you don’t know what’s real?

All in all though, I enjoyed the movie and am glad we watched it. I give it three out of four stars.