It’s Like Nothing Else We Used to Know

The first YouTube Music Awards were in 2013. I arrived at Pier 36 along South St. to cover them and stopped to survey the tents for the press check-in. Lady Gaga stood in front of me in sky-high vinyl pleasers with little-girl lace socks from American Apparel and a grill of skeletal teeth. 

To the left was the press tent. Inside it, I dropped my phone face down on the unforgiving cobblestones. Its case was mirrored gold and not protective in any way. All of the press girls dressed in black screamed but the screen survived. 

They directed me to a rickety-looking smaller tent next to the grand one for the awards. Press would be sequestered inside it, away from the fans who filled the one where the performances and ceremony would take place. We would instead watch the show live on a closed-circuit monitor and artists would shuffle in for interviews when they got off stage. I walked over as Michael Cera pulled up on a bike and leaned it against the tent before going inside. 

It was days after Halloween and on each picnic table in the tent that we were filing stories from were bowls of leftover Halloween candy. I shivered at the winds whipping through the open seams of the tent and ate Sour Patch Kids for dinner. 

In journalism you’re supposed to be objective, giving over your sense of self to be an all-seeing lens for others to make their own observations from. It’s unrealistic and honestly against the ethos of the profession in some ways, but one thing that does happen naturally is that even when you’re up close with worlds and people that you admire as a fan, a detachment occurs. So even when presented with Jason Schwartzman—one of my favorite Coppolas, and that is saying something—in front of me, I was pretty nonplussed. 

But at some point during the proceedings, even though it was only mediated through the small screen fixed inside a bulky silver contraption, I was transfixed. Greta Gerwig was in an apartment set, intensely staring at a man we can barely see, if only because there is no looking away from her. Her presence goes beyond the box. Arcade Fire, at some point outside of this faux living space, starts to play “Afterlife.” 

It is months past the release of “Frances Ha,” so we all know that Greta is a dancer, that even in her acting and her writing, it comes through. But there is something different here because here Greta is truly dancing, not playing a dancer, and it is transfixing. Whether or not she is technically skilled does not matter. Her dancing is emotionally affecting. Everyone in the tent, who were all trading jaded celebrity stories moments ago, is quiet. 

She goes through a heart-wrenching breakup and we know it is necessary and that she instigated it but that she will be dealing with its repercussions for a long while. It’s in her face as she kisses him twice and gives a nod to indicate that he can leave and more importantly and impressively, after he goes, it’s in her body, the way she seems to argue with herself as she hurtles through the apartment. She escapes her own head and the apartment, victoriously emerging in a snowy wooded area, reveling in her freedom. It’s dark but there are continuous flashes of light. 

Watching it makes me cry every time, the same way I did on that cold early November evening on the pier. It was cathartic then and even more so now, “in these times,” as we have to keep saying to remind ourselves how irrevocably different our lives are. Despite emerging through a dark episode into even more and wilder darkness, Greta is filled with fight and joy, and sometimes still, sadness and worry, as Win Butler keeps asking, pleading, “Where do we go? Where do we go?”