C6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019all-too-common side effect of revisiting the
things you loved in your more oblivious
youth.
During a more recent rewatch a couple of
years ago — it might have been around the
dawn of the #MeToo era — I was hyper-
aware of the inherent bro-iness of the film:
The piggish jokes the police officers, played
by Bill Hader and Seth Rogen, make about
Hader’s character’s wife (and ex-wife),
whom we never see onscreen. Seth’s horn-
dog remarks about women’s body parts that
suggest both fixation and revulsion. (“Have
you ever seen a vagina by itself? Not for
me.”) The woman Seth dances with at a
house party, credited as Period Blood Girl.
The flatness of Jules (Emma Stone) and
Becca (Martha MacIsaac), who exist solely
as the objects of Seth and Evan’s affections.
Yet “Superbad” was far from ruined for
me. It’s still fun, and what I probably appre-
ciate the most now is the film’s surprisingly
progressive (for its time) view that taking
sexual advantage of drunk women is really
not O.K. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve also
re-examined why I was drawn to certain
things when I was younger. When it came to
“Superbad,” it was all about optics.
At some point as a kid, I unconsciously in-
herited the belief that to be a girl was to be
less than, and thus undesirable. Classmates
mocked throwing/kicking/running “like a
girl” in gym class. The boys and men in the
movies and TV shows I consumed were
usually the protagonists, the ones the audi-
ence is supposed to identify with from be-
ginning to end. Girls and women were often
outnumbered and peripheral, siloed as the
love interest. For every “Never Been
Kissed” or “Love and Basketball,” there’s a
seemingly infinite supply of “American
Pie.”
And so I attempted to identify with the
male heroes of these stories, perhaps to the
point of overcorrection. I couldn’t feign
even a passing interest in ESPN, but when I
became obsessed with all things movie-re-
lated around middle school, it was easy
enough to channel my own version of the
“cool girl” (as Gillian Flynn so astutely de-
fined women who assume the identity of a
demeaning male fantasy in “Gone Girl”)
into film nerd-dom.
When you’re an impressionable teenager
entering that vast world, you’ll look to de-
vour the canons and seek out the so-called
authoritative voices on film. The “definitive”
lists of the “best” and “must-see” movies.
You might date guys who insist Wes Ander-
son is God and Quentin Tarantino’s gender
and race politics aren’t up for debate. Your
film history class may devote only one ses-
sion to female filmmakers for the entire se-
mester.
And if you’re a woman or a person of color,
you may not immediately notice that hardly
any of the movies or filmmakers in these col-
lections speak directly to your existence, be-
cause the erasure is so deeply woven into the
fabric of pop culture that it seems unremark-able. You’re just reveling in your obsession.
I saw — and still do, to some extent —
one’s movie preferences as a deliberate form
of sartorial display. As much as I enjoyed
“Superbad,” there was also a bit of perform-
ance to my enjoyment. It was a way for me to
both conform and stand out as a black girl
who could love a raunchy, cartoonishly vio-
lent buddy comedy relying heavily on penis
jokes. Putting, say, “Mean Girls” on my dat-
ing profile when I was in my early 20s was to
be expected. (Based on its cross-cultural
popularity in the mid-’00s, “Anchorman”
was also predictable.) “Superbad” was a
“cool” and edgy choice; it showed men that I
was chill. Or so my regrettable thinking
went.
I look back on that version of myself now
and cringe. Earlier this summer, I caught up
with “Booksmart,” Olivia Wilde’s directing
debut about two overachieving high school
girls determined to break out of their self-
imposed social segregation and party withtheir classmates (and maybe hook up with
their crushes) before graduation. As critics
have noted, it shares much of its DNA with
“Superbad” — Jonah Hill’s younger sister
Beanie Feldstein even plays one of the leads.
I couldn’t help but feel sad that I didn’t
have more films like “Booksmart” when I
was actually a teenager, movies that cen-
tered girls’ perspectives and friendships but
still had that spike of raunchiness and sub-
version. “Superbad” was surrounded by co-
horts — all of the Frat Pack films, “Napoleon
Dynamite.” Yet even in 2019, “Booksmart”
feels like an outlier in the same way “Brides-
maids” did in 2011 and “Girls Trip” did just a
couple of years ago. The number of women
with leading roles in major film releases re-
mains abysmal, and were I younger now, I
might still buy into the lie that women’s
stories just aren’t that important. I don’t
blame my younger self, though. I’ve grown
wiser now — Hollywood could stand to catch
up.Top, in “Superbad,”
Christopher Mintz-Plasse, left,
with Jonah Hill, center, and
Michael Cera. Above, in
“Booksmart,” Beanie Feldstein,
left, and Kaitlyn Dever play
brainy teenagers want to party
hard before graduation; above
right, Mintz-Plasse trying to
use a fake ID.CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
MELISSA MOSELEY/COLUMBIA PICTURESFRANCOIS DUHAMEL/ANNAPURNA PICTURESMELISSA MOSELEY/COLUMBIA PICTURES‘Superbad’ & Me
mostly tried to forget.
This book is dense with characters and
stories. It’s a big, simmering pot that comes
to a boil at the right times. But the central
character may well be the yellow house of
the title. It’s a shotgun house that Broom’s
mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961 with in-
surance money after her first husband’s
death. Simon, her second husband, was
good with his hands and began to add on to
the house.
Simon died when the author was 6
months old, and tended not to finish the
projects he started. The house looked re-
spectable on the outside. Inside, things
were chaotic. Stairs and walls were unfin-
ished, mere raw framing. There were ex-
posed wires and holes in the floor. Cabinets
lacked doors. The plumbing didn’t quite
work. Pliers were needed to turn on the
bathroom sink. Termites and flying cock-
roaches were abundant.
“The Yellow House was witness to our
lives,” Broom writes, and in most respects
the family adored it. But it was a source of
deep shame. Outsiders, even close friends,
weren’t allowed in to witness the decrep-
itude. The notion of people seeing how they
lived mortified Ivory Mae. She’d raised her
kids to be clean and well dressed and to
have good manners. The family cut itself off
socially.
How much did this house matter to the
family? After it was totaled in Katrina and
torn down by the city, one of the author’s
brothers lingered around the empty lot for
years, just to keep the grass cut out of habit
and respect.
“New Orleans humidity is a mood,”
Broom writes. This book is a mood. It starts
slow, with layers of family history. The
opening sections impart a sense of someone
swinging the prop of an airplane, hoping the
engine will fire. The author doesn’t make
her first appearance, as a 5-year-old, until
we are more than 100 pages in. But trust her.
This book more than takes flight.
She chronicles her childhood with all
those squabbling older siblings. One
brother became a chef. Another was a crack
addict who’d sneak into the yellow house to
steal the color television. Some family
members had lighter skin than others, and
this book has a lot to say about the politics of
that fact.
“The Yellow House” takes a detour when
Broom goes to college in Texas and (this is
barely mentioned) gets a master’s in jour-
nalism from the University of California,
Berkeley. She joins the staff of O Magazine.
After meeting Samantha Power, who
would later become the United States am-
bassador to the United Nations under
Barack Obama, at a dinner, Broom moves to
Burundi to work in development for a non-
profit radio station. (If a film is made of this
memoir, the trailer will feature a shot of
Power declaiming, with her decorous Pep-
permint Patty-meets-Katharine Hepburn
avidity, “You must go to Burundi.”)
Broom takes jobs in journalism and trav-
els the globe. She returns to New Orleans in
2008 to work as a speechwriter for the now-
disgraced New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin.
Unhappy with the city’s progress, she
leaves and moves to Harlem. In 2011, she re-
turns again, with the intention of writing
this book.
Broom does a masterly job of situating
each of her family members as Katrina
looms on the horizon. She was in Harlem at
the time, watching CNN, feeling helpless.
Two of her brothers were out of contact for
more than a week. Other family members
ended up in Texas, and then California.Would they ever be able to return to New
Orleans?
By 2011, Broom has money and a book
contract. She takes a nice apartment in the
French Quarter and is torn between admi-
ration and bitterness. She has some nega-
tive epiphanies. “How had one square mile,”
she asks, “come to stand in for an entire
city?” She writes that the poorer people
from New Orleans East were merely “the
supporting players.”
“Much of what is great and praised about
the city,” she writes, “comes at the expense
of its native black people, who are, more of-
ten than not, underemployed, underpaid,
sometimes suffocated by the mythology
that hides the city’s dysfunction and hope-
lessness.”
She takes aim at other targets, including
some of Joan Didion’s writing about the city
and David Simon’s HBO series “Treme,”
named after the New Orleans neighbor-
hood. Simon romanticized New Orleans,
she writes. His show was “more concerned
with trotting out all of the city’s tropes (Hu-
big’s pies, WWOZ, street musicians, Black
Indians!) than with actually examining the
ongoing corruption” and other issues.
There is some mildly portentous writing
in “The Yellow House,” but for the most part
Broom’s prose is alert and inquisitive. If the
author remains at a certain distance at the
end of this book, if she is somewhat unknow-
able, well, she’s had many other stories to
tell, and to tell well.
This is a major book that I suspect will
come to be considered among the essential
memoirs of this vexing decade. There are a
lot of complicated emotions coursing
through its veins. It throws the image of an
exceptional American city into dark relief.
Like Stanley Kowalski, you will want to hol-
ler.DWIGHT GARNER BOOKS OF THE TIMESIn New Orleans, a Home Full of Character(s)
WILLIAM WIDMER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESCONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
The Yellow House
By Sarah M. Broom
Illustrated. 376 pages. Grove Press. $26.