Last week, I did the unthinkable. The Big Change. The thing I had been tempted to do for probably my entire adult life but never had the balls to commit to. The thing I thought might set me free from the tedium of my corporeal form!!!
I got bangs.
I had recently gone to see “Materialists” and while watching Dakota Johnson do her little acting, bang lust crept into my mind and took its hold. We have the same hair color! I thought to myself. Maybe we have the same face shape? I denied myself the urge to look up “face shapes,” lest I discover that my face is Round and Dakota’s is Heart. That would be devastating.
Instead I paid $20 for a yearly subscription to FaceApp so I could have the fancy Korean AI put bangs on my face. The results spoke for themselves— bangs could look good on my face while also obscuring my Icelandic five-head. I showed Liam who insisted I get them, and then finally pulled the trigger when my friend Curtis backed him up.
I went to a real hair salon for the first time since the pandemic (my sister normally cuts my hair since I have all of 2 strands of it and it’s all the same length) and came out a whole new bitch.
So I drive my little car down to the beach for the holiday weekend and my fuckin’ sister keeps calling me Zooey Deschanel. Your millennial is showing, I tell her, the kids don’t know who that is! And then I wonder why I’m fighting her on it at all. Am I not in the middle of a “New Girl” rewatch myself? Is Zooey not out there, happily in love with a Property Brother, strumming her little guitar in some multi-million dollar house in the Hollywood Hills? Did I not reblog that woman within an inch of her life in the 2010s?
After all, are the tenets of twee not sound? Twee tells us, be a cute little bitch! Put on a fun matching outfit! Wear a mini skirt! Take up analog photography! Play an acoustic instrument! Wear a little collared shirt! Learn to crochet! Be a lame-o and love it!!!
You can see the signs of the return to twee if you are paying attention. Mary Janes have become a staple. Sandy Liang is making the cutesiest preppy shirts I’ve ever seen. Miranda July is having a renaissance. Lena Dunham is back. We all would have been feral for bag charms back in 2011.
There was a time when twee was everything, and in that time you could find me in my childhood bedroom, which was FUCKING TWEE— I’m talking paper airplanes made out of maps and hung from the ceiling. I’m talking vintage electric piano painted turquoise. I’m talking an entire wall covered in sad lyrics and movie stills and like, train tickets or whatever— and I would be looking at images of Alexa Chung and trying to convince my boss at the movie theater to play “Moonrise Kingdom.”
And what’s changed? I recently went to school to learn about fonts and moved to the forest to become friends with the groundhogs. I make ceramic lamps and wear ruffly pants around town.
I guess after all, twee is my culture and in a landscape stained so permanently by irony and aversion to cringe, I got the ultimate twee status symbol, and it feels like coming home.
This time, though, I think we can leave the colored tights behind.
THE ESSENTIAL TWEE CINEMA:
Ghost World
Moonrise Kingdom*
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Youth in Revolt
Garden State
Where the Wild Things Are
Juno
Anything Miranda July
*A note on Wes Anderson— The twee comeback does NOT apply to Wes Anderson. That man needs to try something new IMMEDIATELY! I am going on Wes Anderson strike until he can prove to me he isn’t a complete hack by making a gritty 1980s NYC crime movie with only handheld photography.
I've recently gone back to listening to Camera Obscura. I approve the twee comeback!
Moonrise Kingdom will forever be one of my favorite movies AND I’m not seeing The Phoenician Scheme