For the Girls in a Constant State of Melancholia

Sometimes, I imagine my life if it were a film. In this case, I see myself as Julie (sadly not as tall, bangs not placed so perfectly) who is as trapped in ennui as the typical 20 something year old. I say typical because what I’ve deduced from my endless scrolling on Tiktok and online magazines, as well as my own devout listlessness, is that every 20 something feels this inevitable dread with each incoming birthday; this overwhelming sense of loss at the past potential of who they could have been.

I’m only 23 and yet I feel so far behind. I don’t have as many successes in comparison to failures, I haven’t been published in the publications that I so ardently read and I genuinely cannot remember the last time I felt content with all aspects of my life. But does one ever truly feel content? Is it even possible? It’s an age-old adage at this point.

There’s been a cultural shift within the last few years. Maybe it’s due to the pandemic we found ourselves at the center of or even solely its longevity — maybe it’s alchemy or astrology or something that just directly correlates to the stars and their lifespans and gravitational pull and what not (all valid explanations.) The shift in question is not so much of a shift I suppose but rather the rise of dissociative feminism and the celebration of the unhinged, lackadaisical woman. I, for one (one out of thousands), am a fan. But ‘Worst Person in the World’ is far from dissociative.

I wouldn’t call Julie unhinged, not like those in Moshfegh’s stories or Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts. I don’t even know if I’d call her lackadaisical — though if the shoe fits. Julie is an inherently relatable character due to her inability to decide and commit. She tells Aksel that she feels as if she’s a bystander in her own life, just watching life happen to everyone else around her as a secondary character.

The notion of FOMO at its height, was essentially a meme of the very real feeling of regret and the fear of remaining unhappy and unsatisfied. I am afraid to miss out on the plethora of literature I still haven’t read, the people I have yet to love and the experiences I have yet to experience and daydream about, weeks later.

Julie is scared of missing out on being loved in the colloquial sense. Aren’t we all? The excitement of newness is too tantalizing — but the potential of the past is too promising.

Unlike dissociative feminism, Julie is the personification of the melancholic woman — the woman so overcome with sadness and perpetual ‘what if’s’ that she never truly knows what she wants — but even if she did, it still wouldn’t be enough. She remains unsatisfied, from relationship to relationship.

Forget Moshfegh’s characters — Julie is familiar in a similar manner in which Sofia Coppola’s whimsical femmes are familiar, due to the melancholia and indecisiveness, both of which are integral to the making of the sad feminine figure. She’s a voice of our generation, for us girls that cry more often than they laugh — that are constantly overcome with an intense sadness that keeps them isolated in their rooms, stricken with a lethargy and melancholia that pervades relationships that aren’t necessarily bad and causes us to realize that they’re not necessarily good either.

Worst Person in the World is a film for girls who are unsatisfied, constantly wondering what could happen next at any given moment — for those suspended in a perpetual state of ennui that can only be sustained by a bevy of new interests and people.