Aesthetics

When I was twelve, Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet appeared, like a comet, in movie theatres. That was the year we lived in Victoria, BC, and for the first time in my life, I had some degree of freedom: I walked to school instead of riding the school bus, I could go on some very chaste dates (I saw the Fran Drescher vehicle The Beautician and the Beast with Big Frank, who liked me and about whom I was...neutral-positive), and I was free to roam the aisles at A+B Sound, a kind of Western Canadian Tower Records. It was heaven, to be honest—while that year was terrible for my parents, who struggled in work and family life, I was finally free from the oppressive Ottawa suburb where I had been viciously bullied, and I regained a tiny sliver of the confidence that had been chewed up during puberty and middle-school hell. 

I didn't see Romeo + Juliet in theatres—I was a smidge too young, and I was sort of contrarian in my approach to pop culture: if it was marketed to me, I wanted no part of it. But the magazines I read at the time were loony tunes for it, doing fashion spreads inspired by the film, watering down the sexy Venice Beach/Dolce and Gabbana look for the high school freshman crowd, and doing their level best to underline that Leonard DiCaprio was a heartthrob, dammit. (To me, Leo has always been a heartthrob like he's been an Oscar winner [HEYOOOO].) The story was secondary, but the glamour! My Lord. 

I have always loved a well-developed sense of aesthetics, and Romeo + Juliet had this in spades. It featured cascades of specific, beautiful artifacts relating to the inner and outer lives of its characters. It was so precise, from the neon crosses lighting up a church nave, to the unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts, to the hurricane rushing across the sky as Mercutio lay dying on a beach. I know people find Baz Luhrmann over the top and garish, but when I was thirteen and finally seeing the movie in my cousin's dark basement, it looked the way the rest of teenagerhood felt: like I had stuck my finger in an electric socket.

Over the years, other movies and TV have done this dance of aesthetics—Fight Club, The Royal Tenenbaums, Black Panther, Mad Max: Fury Road, Hilda. They are, after all, a visual medium, so telegraphing information about characters through the way they dress, the songs they like, the cars they ride in, the houses they inhabit, is not lazy or frivolous. It is a way of telling us who they are.

We all have our own sense of aesthetics, which are part of the stories we tell to and about ourselves, even if we allow them to remain largely invisible or unexamined. Think of gender-neutral baby clothes and the parents who buy them; minimalists who ditch their couches; the extreme house-plant set; book collectors; thrift store junkies; femmes in lilac lipstick; dudes in spiked jackets. We have such a wide range of beautiful available to us! What we choose is not neutral: it's political, nurtured by the houses and cultures we grew up inside, influenced by the music we like and the movies we watch, influenced again by friends and housemates and the people we want to attract, and distilled down to our walls, our closets, and our favourite colours. 

It can be a dance, especially with people with whom you share space: my husband is a collector (DVDs, records, teeshirts) and sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of items in our house. His music tastes veer towards industrial/punk; we have a lot of horror-movie posters that remain in tubes. At the same time, he pushes back on my desire for less; the compromise, as of right now, is piles of stuff destined for the donation bin "someday," an "aesthetic" that we both hate. 

Sometimes I daydream about a little house—a downtown apartment, an a-frame in the woods—that can be wholly mine. I haven't had a space that was just for me in many years, and I miss it; now every room is designed with an eye to sharing it. I like lots of art on the walls, and struggle with clutter, but I'm not a maximalist. I love colour and am learning, at the age of 37, how to use it in my wardrobe and in decor. And this is political, even if I don't recognize it: learning how to let myself take up space, to have my own sense of beauty, and to remind myself that it matters because I like it, even if I'm the only one who does. I've spent time adopting other people's aesthetics because I wanted to be close to them (the number of horror movies I watched in the first five years of dating my husband!), and I've spent time under my parent's highly beautiful roof, but the fact is, I'm still learning how to do it myself. 

Romeo + Juliet is a breadcrumb: I will never adopt the balls-to-the-wall colour scheme and/or lifestyle that those characters are immersed in, but I will identify the cool blue neon light as something I love, along with Margot Tenenbaum's raccoon eyeliner and knee socks, and Furiosa's steampunk practicality. The idea is not to borrow other people's specific identities; it's to give myself the bravery to figure out my own. I want to look like myself, beautiful in my own weirdo way, drenched in colour and light.