DEEP IMPACT

Four writers share a pop-culture moment that truly struck a chord.

By Kate Stanton -

If you were asked to name a movie that completely altered the course of your life, would you tell the truth? Personally, I’d be tempted to say something that makes me sound like a gal with taste: a coming-of-age story by a wellrespected indie auteur, perhaps. Or a darkly funny foreign-language film on the violent consequences of capitalism. I’d sound so intellectual! But we’re all mates here, so I’ll pop my dignity to the side for a tic and be honest. The film that changed my life is Under the Tuscan Sun: a mediocre, mid-budget rom-dram starring Diane Lane.

Let’s start with my broken heart. At 23, I was left devastated by a man who had exactly one (always slightly damp) towel, a fondness for playing devil’s advocate, and about 30 empty Miller Lite cans hidden around his room like Easter eggs. In the weeks after our break-up, there wasn’t a person in the city who hadn’t seen me cry, including a very sympathetic 16-year-old kid restocking the meat aisle at the supermarket, and my boss, who at the time was the actual fucking mayor of Washington, DC. Like many folks in the throes of heartbreak, I sought solace in clichés. I sang “You Oughta Know” into a wine bottle. I got a fringe. I created deeply pathetic itunes playlists titled “songs 2 cry 2” and “men suck”.

I also watched the aforementioned Diane Lane vehicle: the story of a 30-something writer whose husband leaves her for another woman. I’d seen it before, but it was only then – wallowing in my own sweet, man-hating misery – that I felt so seen by Diane’s crumpled cry-face and predominantly beige wardrobe (bright colours are so painful when you’re depressed). The thing that really got me, though, was Diane’s hasty decision to escape her problems by moving to a foreign country. In her case, it was Italy, where she restores a dilapidated villa amid a series of whimsical encounters with charming Europeans. By the end of the film, when a fully self-actualised Diane shows up in a peach-coloured silk-taffeta cocktail gown,

I was googling ‘countries where Americans can move without a job’. I settled on Australia, which seemed at the time like a very sexy country, one probably teeming with Heath Ledgers. What better way to demonstrate to my ex that I was over it than by posting Facebook pictures of myself living my best life as an effervescent, freespirited world traveller?

In just a few months, I was at a hostel in North Melbourne with no job, no money and no friends.

I did have Under the Tuscan Sun on DVD, which I’d watch regularly for reassurance. With the lovely Diane as my role model, I could get through my early morning shift at the hotel (the one with all the cockroaches). I could survive my prick of a housemate, my extreme homesickness and my first Melbourne winter in a ramshackle sharehouse with no heating. It was all in service to my eventual growth; I was getting to that peach-dress place.

The thing about making a dramatic life change is that once you get over the psychological high, it becomes your regular ol’ life. You develop fun, new problems to escape from, and eventually you learn that men who own a single, perpetually damp towel are not men at all. One day, without realising it, my Tuscan Sun self-actualisation fantasy had turned into a silly memory. Later that year, I met my future husband. I stayed in Australia, and 10 years later, we went on a trip to Italy. And you’d better fucking believe I made my very tolerant husband drive us up onto a Tuscan hilltop, where we milled around outside the Tuscan Sun villa with a few other basic Americans. (Deepest apologies to the Italian people!)

“This stupid house is why we’re married,” I told my husband. He laughed. It was a perfect peach-dress moment.

By Nadine von Cohen -

This is the story of how Fifty Shades

of Grey helped save my life. It was February 2015 and I wasn’t in a good way. I’d stopped eating, I rarely left my bed, and showering had dropped from ‘daily’ to ‘sometimes’. At the time, I lived alone and worked from home, so I could easily hide my sloth and decrepitude from others. I was lying about my deterioration to family and friends; to my business partners; even to my psychiatrist. Not to deceive, or out of malice

– I honestly didn’t realise I was doing it. I’d hit the psychological sweet spot where survival meets submission. Also, in hindsight, my meds had stopped working.

It was when I tried to feed my cat chickpeas because I was too terrified to go to the shops that I finally acknowledged what was going on. (She didn’t eat them, for the record. Fussy bitch.) I’d always imagined breakdowns as epic, violent episodes with hair-tearing and lamp-throwing and a lot of screaming. My sluggish descent into unkempt reclusiveness felt extremely anti-climactic. Sure, I cried a lot and wrote one hell of a suicide note, but all in all it was pretty subdued – pedestrian, even.

The night I broke completely, I was sat mute in my psychiatrist’s office as she and my sister Ariella discussed treatment options. Hospital? Rehab clinic? Moving in with Ariella and her family? When I realised staying at home wasn’t being considered, I managed a sentence:

“What about Blanche Devereaux?”

“Who’s Blanche Devereaux?” asked Deepi, my shrink.

“My cat.”

To Deepi’s credit, she didn’t laugh. Somehow, with few words and no conviction, I persuaded them to let me stay at home on a trial basis. But there were rules. These were mostly about how I was to spend my time, and included, to quote Deepi, “No heavy literature, no sad films or TV, and no documentaries. None of the depressing stuff you like. Only funny or fluffy crap.”

A few weeks later, when I felt up to reading, I remembered once hearing that in times of economic, social or political unrest, sales of romance novels tend to spike, as do fantasy, sci-fi and other niche genres. When shit gets real, people want escapism. It makes sense. So, that’s why I, a professional writer and literary snob, read the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy from cover to cover.

I was grossly unprepared for how bad the best-selling romance-slash-erotic novels of all time would be. I mean, I knew they were bad, but they’re a bad so bad that they make this sentence read like poetry. The writing is awful, the plot tenuous at best, and author E.L. James wouldn’t know subtext if it spanked her. She uses phrases like ‘holy cow’ and ‘gee whiz’ DURING SEX SCENES and tries to manicpixie-dream-girl bland AF heroine Anastasia Steele with constant reference to her ‘inner goddess’. “My inner goddess is doing the merengue.” “My inner goddess is basking in a remnant of post-coital glow.” It would be nauseating if it wasn’t so funny.

And what’s more, the famed Bdsmheavy eroticism that shot the trilogy to prominence is about as sexy and risqué as a Nescafé commercial.

I like to believe James made her unadventurous, middle-aged, suburban husband try every sex act in the book. He didn’t care for it, but went along to keep the peace.

The Fifty Shades books are a joke, but I love them. For a long time after the breakdown, I teetered between numb, anxious and hysterical, but they made me laugh inside. This is not to say I recommend others read them. In general, I do not. However, if you’re ever in a bad way or need a good distraction from the oppressive burden of modern existence, consider reading the worst love story ever told.

By Lisa Marie Corso -

My boss is mostly understanding, but sometimes really puts the pressure on. She’s fastidious about colour-coordinating her weekly to-do list and her stomach starts rumbling a haunting symphonic overture at precisely 11.30am each day. Sometimes she gives in and just eats her lunch right then, then spends way too much time overthinking whether it was technically ‘brunch’. I know my boss so intimately because, well, I am my own boss.

I didn’t just ‘fall’ into this selfappointed role – it was a long time in the making, tracing back to when I was 11 years old and watched Nancy Meyers’ 1987 film Baby Boom for the first time. (Disclaimer: I got onto it a decade after its original release.) This film follows Manhattan advertising executive J.C. (played by Diane Keaton), whose life is turned upside down when she ‘inherits’ an 18-monthold baby from a distant, recently deceased relative she hasn’t seen for 30 years.

At first, she’s resistant to her newfound motherhood, but grows to lovingly accept it. She manages to juggle this great responsibility with the demands of her professional life, though the boys’ club at work increasingly doubts her ability to multitask, eventually demoting her from an executive to a junior role. How she reacts to this news has stayed with me ever since: she quits.

J.C. knows her value and her worth. She knows her priorities. And most importantly, she knows she can be a self-made working woman AND a mother. She goes on to start

her own successful business on her own terms. For 11-year-old me, this was a LOT to take in.

Baby Boom was the first movie I recall watching where the woman on screen had real power in the world, and not just fantastical superpowers like the pink and yellow Power Rangers. J.C. wasn’t perfect by any means, but she made her own decisions. She had instinct. She had grit.

The film also stayed with me in the way a good film hangs over your head like an omnipresent cloud, because my own mother was a working mother (and still is today). Mum went back to work when I was six months old, which wasn’t unusual to me at all, until I went to primary school and discovered a place where all the kids with working parents went when the bell chimed 3.30pm: after-school care.

I remember my mum (and sometimes dad) rushing to pick me up by the 6pm deadline to avoid the $10-perminute late fee for those who arrived from 6.01pm. Watching Baby Boom gave me greater insight into what my mother was doing between 8am and 6pm, and her miraculous ability to keep EVERY. THING. TOGETHER.

I’m also certain this revelation led to a drop in the number of times Mum had to ask me to clean my room, set the table and unpack the dishwasher (from five times to three). Remember, from the boardroom to childhood domestic chores, progress is incremental. But don’t worry: I once displayed my unwavering gratitude by setting the table with limp napkin swans.

Both J.C. and my mother remain inspiring to me now, as I navigate life in my early 30s as a working woman who’s been receiving a lot of texts from friends recently telling her they’re pregnant. Instead of fearing how their lives and careers – and one day my own – will change with kids, I turn to the working mothers who came before and know we can indeed have both.

By Luke Ryan -

I’ll forgive you if you don’t remember “9PM (Till I Come)”, the breakout and solitary 1999 hit from German trance producer ATB. Briefly reaching number one on the Australian charts, this frankly embarrassing collection of breathy vocals, dweezling synths and pounding four-to-the-floor beats represented the apex (or nadir, depending on your perspective) of anthem trance’s mainstream moment. For most, this engagement with trance music was but a short and regrettable dalliance – a soon-to-be-forgotten paean to ’90s excess, like Pogs, skorts or the Macarena.

Not for me, though. Sitting there at age 14, listening to my freshly purchased copy of Clubber’s Guide

to… Trance, mixed by ATB himself, all I heard booming through the $40 speakers was limitless possibility. “This,” I thought to myself, “is how I’ll prove to those hormonal reprobates at school that I am both different and better.”

Now, let’s be clear: anthem trance was a genre designed specifically for people taking ecstasy in darkened nightclubs. The style is fast, frenetic and perpetually uplifting. Women with waifish voices belt out lyrics like, “Everything will be perfect / tonight and forever,” in complete and total earnestness. If an adult legitimately enjoyed this stuff without being high, or at least knowing what top-quality, turn-ofthe-millennium ecstasy felt like, you could safely assume they’d been on the receiving end of a semi-serious acquired brain injury.

I remember quite clearly that my copy of Clubber’s Guide to… Trance came with a credit card-shaped insert, which unfolded to reveal an A4 piece of paper with the word ‘CHOON’ written on it. The idea was that you’d keep the insert in your wallet, then when the DJ dropped a killer track, you could hold it up to let them know they were doing a good job. It truly is beyond parody.

But try telling that to young Luke. Pudgy, nerdy, and about as far from the UK club scene as it’s possible to get without being in orbit, I found in trance music the glimmering kernel of my adolescent articulation. Other kids got hip-hop or punk in the teen rebellion lottery, and I judged them for it. How basic, how dull. Wrap your ear canals around the breakdown in “Cream” by Blank & Jones, then tell me how cool your Wu-tang record sounds.

Understandably, their copy of

36 Chambers continued to sound significantly cooler than my growing collection of trance anthologies. But I didn’t need their validation. In anthem trance, I was discovering a world impossibly different from that afforded by my suburban, Catholic upbringing. I could only dimly understand the hedonism, sensory overload and emotional totality that trance music implied, but I knew somewhere in there was an expression of otherness that I could get behind.

Trance soon became a central plank of my identity: I subscribed to clubbing bible Mixmag; I engaged in vigorous debates on trance music forums; I changed my email to perfecto_ fluoro@hotmail.com, in honour of Paul Oakenfold’s iconic mix CD of the same name. My peers couldn’t begin to understand, even if they wanted to.

Listening back to Clubber’s Guide now brings with it the same mix of warm nostalgia and seething embarrassment that accompanies most excursions into our collective adolescences. But I never quite got over the promise offered by those surging build-ups and euphoric synths. Lengthy tours through the rave and club scenes, a stint Djing and the kinds of parties, friendships and adventures that would have thrilled that lonely 14-year-old: all of these flowed from that one incandescent album, played over and over again, every repetition adding more and more to my sense of independence in the world. Choon.