The first time I watched Licorice Pizza was on November 28th of 2021. It was my first day back in New York City after a very difficult and emotionally distressing Thanksgiving break. Seeing my family was fun, the food was great, and taking the train to and from DC for the first time was seamless. But it had been such an awful four days because I was snapchatting a guy. On Wednesday night we had gone to a party, nearly together, where I rested my arm on his leg without him flinching or moving. He had snapped me twice on Thanksgiving, once the Friday after, but not at all on that Saturday. I spent the train ride back stressing about whether or not he’d be able to snap me in time for us to keep our streak instead of congratulating myself for successfully navigating a round trip on Amtrak for the first time. So when I went with my friend and his friends to the theater I felt very alone and by the end of it I wanted to cry. I had watched the past two months of my life unfold on 70mm in an AMC in Lincoln Square. It felt iconic and I knew I’d have to rewatch it, but I played off this impact on me as a joke.
Three days later I saw it again. This time I took two of my friends. One of them liked it- moderately. Admitted it was well crafted, but the story didn’t interest her. I wrote her critiques off by saying, “You have to watch this movie when you’re in love.” And that flippant statement went on to solidify this core idea in my mind as well as a review I felt strong enough to draft and post.
My other friend felt the exact way I did. She too was texting, facetiming, and talking to a guy she felt strongly about. She felt like she was Alana and the guy she was into was Gary. I encouraged her, hyped up her delusion, and when I told her I felt the same way she instantly sobered up. “This is not you guys,” she said to me.
When I saw it for the third time I took two of my best friends. One of them fell asleep and when she was awake she was checking her phone. The other hated it. The age gap was inappropriate and gross and the racist jokes at the expense of asian women were inexcusable. I tried to explain my way around the critiques and the slow and deliberate pacing, but at that point I was too focused on my mission of trying to quote the entire film.
The fourth time I saw it was with my friend on my last day in New York for the fall semester of 2021. It was a very somber screening for me. I had changed so much from the beginning of the semester. I had so many life experiences and new perspectives to reflect on. I felt like my brain had been molded and reshaped. I wasn’t sure if it was from the copious amounts of alcohol or from this new confusing feeling that was spreading from my heart to the rest of my body. After being left to walk the two miles home alone at midnight by the guy I was snapping, I had decided that I was over it. I had been nice to him, gone out of my way to help him, asked him to hang out only for it to all go nowhere. I couldn’t ever confidently define our relationship at any point of our time together, not even being able to go as far as to call it a friendship. I stopped texting him, responding to his snaps, his dms, he was cut off. All these thoughts and feelings were buzzing around in my head as I woke up before noon to catch the last showing of Licorice Pizza before they took it out of the 70mm theater at Lincoln Square. Ultimately this is all I had to say about it.
But I feel like watching it, that one last time in 2021, was me keeping that door cracked open just a little bit. That if he did something to really win me over we could be like Gary and Alana running into each other’s arms in front of that movie theater.
The fifth time I watched Licorice Pizza was on Valentine's day. When I did come back to New York in January we happened to be at a party together. After sharing glances charged by morbid curiosity, I got drunk enough to break the silence and offer him water as he got high with a girl who psychosexually hated us both. He went on to sing my praises to that same girl just because I handed him a glass. Two days later he asked me to work on a film with him. Under the guise of it being good for my career despite it being bad for my mental and emotional health, I said yes. By the 14th of February we had been working intimately together for two weeks. We had gone from not talking for an entire month to calling and facetiming past 1am, spending time in his room, spending entire days together, and going to movies together. We uncovered one another’s personal tragedies and triggers, I turned 20 in between shoot days, and I watched and fueled his dependence on RedBull. And I spent that Valentine's day watching Alana flail aimlessly without Gary until she gave in and put every molecule of her being into him and his passions. That was the first time I had ever watched that movie alone.
I thought it was going to be the last time I saw it in theaters until my friend brought it to my attention that Paul Thomas Anderson would be in the city to attend a Q&A at the BAM Theater. So me, my friend, her future boyfriend, our other friend and the girl he wanted to be his girlfriend went to go see Licorice Pizza and Paul Thomas Anderson six days later. And in only six days my feelings for the guy I was snapping had radically changed. When the film ended, so did our time together. After he called cut I didn’t hear from him. I attended three parties that following weekend, I saw him at none of them. And though deep down I knew that we just worked together, that nothing truly changed between us and that all this work I had done for him and the knowledge I had collected about him was useless, I was still holding out hope.
I was at another party the next week with my friend who commented on my review when I got a text. It was the guy I had been snapchatting thanking me for my work and support throughout the film. Now deleted and lost to time, it’s not a direct quote, but it was along the lines of ‘I could not have made it through the week without you.’ My friend pleaded with me to not respond, and I obliged but not without a near meltdown. It drove him to write some words of wisdom on my arm in sharpie, “Don’t give in!”
PTA didn’t say anything incredibly profound at the Q&A, mostly because the interviewer sucked. But what did stick with me for a couple weeks was an -ism he used. He described something as being “like food and drink to me.” Something that was cosmetic or non-important but was simultaneously deeply essential to him and his creative process. He couldn’t let it go, even if it didn’t make sense to others. That wasn’t the last time I interacted with PTA. I went to pick up a vinyl of the Licorice Pizza soundtrack signed by him, Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, and Benny Safdie before a complete flop of a date with the guy I was snapchatting. It was a date he had suggested and I had planned after he had messaged me brainstorming a theme of his 20th birthday party. He mused about having a Licorice Pizza party where he dressed up in one of Gary’s psychedelic shirts and me in Alana’s iconic pink dress. He did things like this often.
I watched the movie three more times, June 17th, June 23rd, and July 3rd of 2022 after buying the film on Blu-Ray. These were all times where I was showing the film to friends made very familiar with my personal obsession with the movie but not yet subjected to my fanaticism and recontextualization of how or why it related to me so deeply. Each time they all asked me to bring my DVD so they could attempt to have this out of body experience with me. Experience me yelling and pointing at the screen when Gary initiated a game of footsie with Alana underneath his kitchen table. I don’t think they got it, but I think it was their way of telling me that they loved me. Also during this time, the guy I was snapchatting went back and liked two of my reviews for the film. First my review from February 20th, 2022 and then my review from December 1st, 2021. Based on his Letterboxd activity he hadn’t rewatched the movie and these weren’t even my most recent reviews for the film. They were, however, reviews where I had bravely written a love letter to him and disguised it as a review. I hadn’t seen him since before his 20th birthday (a party he did not invite me to), but I had asked him to come over to watch a movie with me which he completely disregarded and ghosted me. I couldn’t quite understand his logic. I took it as a reigniting of the wavering flame between us.
We saw each other one last time before I rewatched the film again on August 13th, 2022. We spent 10 days together shooting a film between New York, North Carolina, and New Jersey. We drove around in his vintage Ford mustang (the one Gary and Alana had was blue whereas his was red), wind blowing in our hair as we laughed, sat in silence, or yelled at each other. It was the car ride where we took the long way home as the sun was setting that I realized I did not love the guy I had been snapchatting anymore. It was when I laid in my friend’s bed (the one who hated Licorice Pizza) after quitting that I realized I had actually loved him at one point. After crying a lot, waking up in the middle of the night thinking I was still on set, peeing the bed, and spending days inside, I found it in myself to walk to the Museum of Moving Image and watch Licorice Pizza in 35mm.
When I got home I had discovered that the thing in my apartment that had been making me sneeze all summer was this rotting piece of cardboard from my Licorice Pizza pizza box. I threw it away as soon as I saw the mold.
The 11th time I saw Licorice Pizza was after I had walked off a set that reminded me of the feeling of those 10 days over the summer. I talked myself down from harming myself by giving my mom a call and telling her how I felt. I also did a bit of self medication that ended up doing more harm than good. I invited my friend who slept through Licorice Pizza in theaters over and insisted that we put it on. She obliged as I jumped up and down and slid across the floor screaming and moaning about all of it. I remember laying down in my bed as the talent agent asked Alana about her special skills before running to the bathroom moments later to vomit. I can’t quite explain what happened when I decided to live from August 2022 to January of 2023 but this is a pretty accurate depiction of what it was like.
I watched Licorice Pizza again on January 20th to test out my parents’ Christmas gift (a Blu-Ray 4K HD player). It was one of the last films I watched before I left America for the semester. I couldn’t take the proximity anymore. I didn’t want there to be even a sliver of a chance that I would run into the guy I used to snapchat or that anyone would talk about him or even know about him. It felt like the only way to retain any ounce of my sanity and to get better was to leave everything I ever knew. In my heart I knew that the moment I had said yes to the opportunity to study in London I was free. For the first time I saw the movie for what it was, a piece of art. It wasn’t this thing that was replicating or mirroring my life. It wasn’t a tale of how my life is or was going to be. It was just a movie, and a really beautiful one at that. And for the first time I was seeing Alana as a character outside of Gary. A girl who was really lost, just at all. Not without Gary or because of him, she was just lost and desperately searching for a direction. It was a completely new film.
After months of distance, several sessions of therapy, and flexing my ability to communicate and extend compassion I was forcefully informed that the guy I had snapchatted had a new best friend. And when I went to check Instagram for myself I discovered I had been blocked. Where I had felt like I had grown into this entirely new being, taking the shape of the person I was finally meant to be, this deep anger, resentment, and sadness was still holding me back. I started isolating myself, getting angry at anyone and everyone, driving wedges in the progress I had made, and at the worst of it, contemplating acting on retired coping mechanisms of self harm. I also felt incredibly paranoid. Like nothing I had experienced had ever happened, but that couldn’t possibly be true because he had known enough to block my finsta too. I felt like a burden. Nobody wanted to hear about feelings from a relationship that ended eight months ago. I was boring everyone with my obsession with it all. The only thing I was sure I had was Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza. Where I could be validated by Alana making the difficult decision to pull herself away from Gary when he makes out with Sue Pomerantz or when she separates herself from Gary and his immature antics with the pinball industry to find out what she really wants. But no matter how many times I rewatch it, the film still ends with Alana restarting the cycle by kidding herself into thinking Gary will ever love her.
The other day I got incredulously high and in my inebriated state I thought it would be a good idea to put this on. It is July of 2023. We’re so close to the beginning of where it all fell apart. I have done so much personal work since then to the point where the days getting closer to the 15th almost didn’t mean anything. And I thought that maybe that would mean this movie had lost its meaning too. I wasn’t in love anymore, I had channeled that love for myself. I didn’t need anyone to approve of or understand what I had gone through, I had accepted my experience for what it was. And this movie was about the journey. It’s about Gary and Alana developing this emotional connection with one another. How it starts and how it falls apart over and over again. And whether or not you think their ending lasts, you’ll never know, because when they kiss and Alana confesses her love for Gary, the film ends. I had arrived at my destination, I had made peace with it all, there was no service that this film could provide me any longer. So I turned it on, for my 14th time, to prove to myself I didn’t need or want Licorice Pizza any longer.
I have discovered that my lifelong search for an absolute truth has been fruitless. Licorice Pizza is here to stay and there is nothing that will change that. No amount of rewatching or recontextualizing will change what that film meant or means to me. Licorice Pizza has been with me from the beginning of its theatrical run and it will stay with me long after the data on my Blu-Ray erodes. And to even try to attempt to make sense of my obsession with it is doing it a disservice. It’s always hard to tell the story of me and the guy I was snapchatting, I have tried many times before. I can’t tell it perfectly, but I would die before I let myself tell it half-assedly. And I’m not even quite sure of how to end it now. I hope that by telling the story of me and Licorice Pizza no absolute truth was gained, no deep and dark insight, no personality defining discovery. It was just a story about a girl, a boy, a movie, and a lesson.
"I can’t tell it perfectly, but I would die before I let myself tell it half-assedly"