I was supposed to publish this yesterday, but I did not finish it yesterday. I took a Pilates class instead, for which I make no apologies. It’s here now, though! If you’re here from subscribing or just stumbled upon this somehow (a miracle, because strictly speaking, I do not know what SEO is or does), welcome. This is the first of a three part essay I’ve been thinking about for a year and a half on the three most important pieces of media to me recently - the foundational texts of my thirties, if you will. It felt right to work through them in the order I discovered them. This one’s for The Hours (2003).
I casually spoil The Hours galore here. If that’s something that would bother you, no time like the present to go watch a 21 year old film! I own it and cannot advise you on where to stream it (I never claimed to be a journalist). Obviously, I recommend it highly, but especially if you like Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, or Allison Janney (she’s not one of the leads, to be clear, but she does wear a great red jacket in it).
If you want to catch the next parts of this series, make sure you subscribe so they’re delivered right to your inbox. Thanks, as always, for being here! Love you, mean it!
It started, as most significant things in my life do, with an obsession. I was in my Miranda Richardson phase, sometime in middle school, and absolutely refusing to attend my brother’s Saturday soccer games. Hating organized team sports was just a pretense to stay home and spend the day as any budding cinephile would - marathoning movies in the Free On Demand section of my parents’ cable.
The Comcast On Demand selection was my personal streamer before any CEO had the notion they could exploit creatives with new media contracts, and I bet Emma Thompson saw RESIDUALS from all my Sense and Sensibility rewatches. I designed my own film education based on titles that seemed pretentious enough to be serious, taking a weird journey through whatever the premium cable channels had to offer me (it was not easy to bear the burden of being the only child in middle school to have seen Capturing the Friedmans and Summer of Sam). In the dark ages before streamers, it also made my attempt to be a Miranda Richardson completest almost easy. Or, easier than explaining to the family why you wanted to rent The Crying Game from Family Video, at least.
I had just watched But I’m a Cheerleader on the day I decided to tick another Miranda Richardson credit off of my list by watching The Hours for the first time. For a 12 year old who didn’t yet know she was gay, the double feature hit like a jolt. I had an idea of queer relationships - I knew every lyric to Rent, after all - but had no conception of myself in one (it’s a tale for another day that Maureen in Rent was my dream role for years because I really, really wanted an excuse to kiss a girl, but I digress). I wouldn’t come out for another decade, but following the camp romp about conversion therapy with the movie about suicidal queers was like going to the eye doctor for the first time and finally bringing the picture of a house into focus when you put on your very first pair of glasses.
I came back to The Hours in the fall of 2020 when I was rewatching The West Wing and on an Allison Janney kick and back on my obsession bullshit. Back on my bullshit is a teeny tiny bit of an understatement, because after that crisp little fall day when I got so excited at Margo Martindale’s name in the opening credits that I spilled my coffee all over my bed, I watched The Hours at least once a week, every week, for about a year. 2020, in case you forgot, was a weird time for everyone!
If you tell people The Hours is one of your foundational texts, it will illicit one of three reactions. A lot of people will go, “I have never heard of that!” and then you’ll have to explain what The Hours is as their eyes glaze over, because this is usually a person for whom The Hours will not resonate. That’s fine. Let them enjoy their non-depressing media in peace, for they are blessed with brains that are not broken, and they are not lying to their doctor when they say they do not experience symptoms of depression. Yay for them! Other people will hear about your love for The Hours and become deeply, immediately concerned. If you love The Hours for the reasons I love The Hours, you will take a beat, have a moment of realization, then go, “oh! Oh no! Not because of all that! Oh, I’m not in crisis! I am gay!!” The Hours usually does not resonate with this group, either. This is also fine. You are Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia, and they are Charlotte Gainsbourg. The last group of people will lean in conspiratorially to confide that they also love The Hours. The people in this group might love the movie for any number of reasons, but their reasons why don’t matter much; what matters is that you’ve found a kindred spirit who has likely also had their brain chemistry altered by Ed Harris falling out of a window.
The Hours, at its core, is camp, and so is the way I love it; I briefly considered writing a one-woman cabaret about it that included Melissa Etheridge’s Come To My Window. Everyone’s a bit highbrow, a bit presentational, a bit detached. The line readings are endlessly memeable, for the right audience (“my friend Richard’s WON the Carrutherer’s!”) The dialogue feels more like a play than a movie. And yet. It’s quite a lot of implausible melodrama. And yet. Literally every actor in it is white (this one I am not defending! Scott Rudin has always told us exactly who he is!). And yet.
Everyone loves to pretend they’d have been a lobotomy girlie or a shock treatment girlie if they were born at the wrong time (and if you’re exclaiming, “EVERYONE??!?” in concern right now, may I query why you’re mentally sound enough to be reading a personal essay about seeing oneself in The Hours? Some things aren’t for you, and that’s okay!), but the truth is far more of us would have been Virginia Woolfs or Laura Browns. Virginia, whose suicide bookends the movie, but who is loved enough to temper the genius out of her mental illness. Laura, who is loved in exactly the wrong ways, but chooses her own life to save herself.
Michael Cunningham has said he doesn’t want the gay aspects of his work to be their primary characteristic, but it’s hard to separate the strife of The Hours from its queerness. It’s true that The Hours is about women struggling through darkness, whether theirs or a loved one’s, but so much of that darkness is borne out of being queer at the wrong time. Virginia Woolf, the real woman, loved and desired women, but loved and was loved by Leonard. Laura Brown can’t escape or perform heteronormative domesticity and can’t openly love women, and nearly kills herself for it. Clarissa Vaughn loves and is loved by a man who loves and desires men, and she can’t reconcile what they were with what they are.
I’ve written before about seeing myself in Laura Brown, because I know, deep down, I’d have been Laura if I was born at the wrong time. Wanting to kill yourself over being rejected by a crush is peak gay behavior, to be so honest. I may be blinded by how viscerally Laura’s scenes make me say, “I am in this picture and I don’t like it,” but her world feels the most grounded and real. Virginia is burdened with period stylizations, making out with her sister to remind us she’s Not Straight, and an Academy Award-winning prosthetic nose performance. Clarissa’s world is the most presentational of all: she’s at once Mrs. Dalloway and the Leonard to Richard’s ill-fated visionary. None of that is criticism, though. I like Meryl Streep declaring all of her lines. I like Nicole Kidman staring off into space with a cigarette and muttering and making prolonged eye contact with a dead bird. And I love Julianne Moore sobbing. Goddamnit, this is my FAVORITE movie (I say this about at least ten different films)!!!
To watch The Hours as many times as I have is to kind of lose it, a little. I mean, duh, but I just wanted to make sure you know that I am aware. That deeply unwell part of me is responsible for things like thinking, “me at one minor inconvenience” at Virginia wading into the river. That’s who The Hours is made for, though, I think. For all its queerness and melancholy, The Hours is ultimately about hope: the hope for another moment of happiness, the hope for each new day, the hope that we will find connections to make life worth living. From the the match cuts of its heroines’ mornings at the movie’s start, The Hours reminds us that we are connected in quiet, earth shattering ways. Even at its end, with Virginia unable to escape her demons and Laura outliving her whole family after choosing life, Clarissa still has life to be in love with. She has her daughter, Julia, and she has her partner, Sally. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a queer woman out of time who couldn’t love her Sally, but Clarissa Vaughn, our Mrs. Dalloway, will lose and live on, loving as Virginia and Laura couldn’t.
There’s so much more I can say about The Hours that I could write a book, whether more about its queerness (we mourn you, cut for the movie character Julia’s lesbian separatist friend who is mad about Clarissa and Sally doing queer assimilation), how it handles HIV/AIDS, Ann Roth’s costumes (adult Richard’s robe echoes boy Richie’s pajamas!!), or Allison Janney. Someone once told me every movie I like is very sad and nothing happens in it, and I guess if you look at art that way, The Hours fits that bill. My favorite scene is the flower shop (“My friend Richard’s WON the Carruther’s!”), but it’s Virginia explaining to Leonard why she has to kill a character that truly sums up the film. I could write about it, but I’ll just let you watch it yourself.
The Hours, everyone! I love it! If you love it and even liked this a little, you can tell a friend to check it out, too.
I’m back tomorrow (as long as I don’t go to Pilates again) with Part Two. Have a great day, and buy the flowers yourself!