Julie Powell Fan Fiction

The best moment, for me, in the movie Julie & Julia happened when Julie Powell, powerless bureaucrat turned famous blogger, finds out that her idol and inspiration, Julia Child, is unwilling to spare a kind word for the work that she inspired. Apparently, Child has less than flattering things to say regarding Powell’s blog, which is about Powells’ own efforts to cook her way through Childs’ famous cookbook.

“Julia hates me,” says Amy-Adams-as-Powell to her husband, and he gently assures her that this is not literally true, and that anyway, it doesn’t matter.

I have nothing against Powell, who impressed me enough with the article, artfully laden with subtext, that she wrote about the movie’s portrayal of her cat, that I plan to read her book, which surely has merits not explored by the film. But this painful moment was my favorite part of the movie because it was also the part that was the most real.

Much of the movie is a carefully constructed gloss on the pain that seems, implicitly, to inform the lives of both women: with Childs, it’s her physical and social awkwardness; with Powell (the character), it’s her moodiness. The nature of this moodiness is unclear, and so are most of its manifestations. And yet, it’s Powell-the-character’s defining characteristic: her friend describes her to her face as “a bitch,” although we don’t know why, because relative to her friends, she seems quite pleasant. She annoys her husband by calling him a saint, a description that he knows he can’t live up to. She also annoys him, eventually, when her obsession with Julia interferes with their sex life. She finds it impossible to stay objective in her job, which has to do with allocating money to 9/11 victims, and we see her face covered in tears as she sits at her desk, listening to their stories on the phone.

This bundle of tenuously connected situations seems to more or less imply that the inside of Powell’s pretty head is an emotionally-charged tempest. It’s implied that she has some sort of difficulty with getting a grip on her emotions, but the nature of that difficulty remains tactfully unnamed. Watching the movie, I wanted to understand her better. Is she bi-polar? Manic depressive? Whatever it is, it doesn’t need a name, but it could have used a bit more definition. Because I was left unclear on whether this mishmash of characteristics was indicative of purely bad screenwriting, or rather a clumsy effort to show that Powell is a person in pain, without ever getting specific enough about the pain to threaten the levity of the story as a whole (in other words, bad screenwriting that may have been unavoidable, due to directives given the writer).

In fact, the whole movie plays this game constantly, hinting at serious issues often enough to remind the viewer that the story is real, but never for long enough to threaten the airy tone. We can still worry about Powell, who is young and attractive and married to a supportive and attractive husband, mainly because she feels powerless at her job, and her friends condescend to her, and her husband is overwhelmed by how deeply she feels things. And we can still worry about Child, who lives an exotic life abroad, supported financially and emotionally by her husband, mainly because she is ugly, awkward, and unable to have children.

These hints at darker issues were, to me, the best parts of the movie, not because I have a problem with comedy, but because, despite a lot of effort to make it seem like one, Julie & Julia is not a comedy. The early hints that Child is still alive at the time of Powell’s story suggest that their lives are bound to intersect. And this intersection simply must pay off to the viewers who wait so long for it.

So here’s my point. Julie Powell, the character, regardless of how realistic she is, deserved a better epiphany than the one she got.

In the movie, Powell hears of Child’s negative reaction to her blog, and immediately tells the reporter who has brought this to her attention that she has no comment.

Here’s another version. Julie hears about Julia’s lack of support for Julie’s blog, and then Julie doesn’t respond right away. She spends some time thinking about what to say. She sits there on her futon couch in her little apartment above the pizzeria in Queens, her toned legs curled underneath. She cries. And she composes an angry, resentful response to Child.

She doesn’t have to vocalize this response. We’ve seen the movie this far, and we know what it would consist of. Thus far in the film, Child has been portrayed as a life-loving, big-hearted woman who has difficulty saying negative things even about those who deserve it. So why, toward the end of her days, has she turned up her nose at someone who admires her so completely and so publicly? Is Powell not the ideal reader that Child had written for? Is she not proof that Child actually did have children, after a fashion?

The audience can fill in the blanks. Maybe Child, in the final part of her life, the part that we don’t see in the movie, became a less lovable person. Or maybe she was just too old to understand blogs. Or maybe — and to me, this is the most believable — there were actually many layers to her, some of them less flattering, that are not revealed in the movie until this impossible-to-leave-out moment.

So. Julie Powell hears that Julia Childs doesn’t care for her. And then Powell sits and thinks. Maybe this is a montage of clips we’ve seen from earlier in the movie, from both stories. Or maybe her thoughts are revealed by lingering glances at her good-looking husband, or her own svelte figure, or her crowded apartment, or the people pushing against her on her commute, or her office cubicle. There are lots of ways to do it.

This is a great moment for Powell to realize that she and Child are very different. Maybe she gets mad at Child for taking her own privilege for granted. Maybe she gets temporarily haughty and mean about the things in her own life that Child will never have. Maybe she writes a quip in response — we don’t have to know exactly what it contains, we only have to see the tears streaming down her angry face as she composes it — and then she deletes it without sending.

Why doesn’t she send it? Maybe she takes a break, goes to the kitchen, takes a bite of something she recently made from Childs’ book, and finds she doesn’t have the heart. Maybe she realizes that her much-improved relationship with her own mother has eclipsed her need for Julia’s approval. Or maybe she just finds herself willing to admit that it wasn’t Julia Child who wrote her blog and transformed her life; she did it herself.

I had a great teacher who once told me: “Everyone has to kill their parents.” Superman does it in the 1978 movie written by Mario Puzo. Ostensibly a story about preventing Lex Luthor from sinking California beneath the Pacific, Puzo’s story is really about a young man making a decision not to follow his father’s advice: in this case, a mandate not to interfere in human affairs. As Christopher Reeve circles the earth repeatedly, forcing time to run backward so that Lois Lane will be brought back to life, we hear Marlon Brando’s voice echoing ominously in his son’s head: “Forbidden…forbidden…forbidden.” Because this aspect of the film is not central to the plot, it’s easy to forget. And yet, that’s the element that really lifted the movie above schlock. We all know that Superman is just a cartoon. But we nevertheless want to believe at some level that he is real. And knowing that he feels the agony of growing up makes believing in him much easier.

Julie Powell, the character, is comforted by a husband who tells her that it’s the Julia Child in her head, the one who’s perfect, that really matters. This chestnut is almost explicitly directed at the audience, as if to suggest that we should not trouble our feeble minds about whether anyone in the movie bears any resemblance to the people on whom they are based. But we all know in our hearts that this is bullshit. The story is interesting because it’s about the tension between past and present, reality and the written word, specificity and universality. Glossing over that tension goes against the qualities that make the movie worth watching.

Julie Powell, the character, doesn’t have to put on a cape and circle the globe for me to believe that she’s “real.” But I wish she would have taken a few extra seconds to commiserate with me about the difference between reality and dreams, and about the pain that comes from forcing oneself to make the distinction. If she had done that, then I would have found it much easier to believe that she and I are living in the same world, and that the inspirational messages in her story are still going to make sense after the projector stops.