In comedian Amy Schumer’s new film Trainwreck she plays a young woman called Amy, who likes to go out drinking and end up in places she doesn’t remember, with men she wants to forget. She is funny, she is rude, she creeps to work in last night’s sexy clothes, stinking of booze, and tells her happily married sister that her husband looks like he “teaches computing in a church basement”. But then, she meets a nice safe man herself and the film turns into the kind of conventional romcom we’ve all seen before. Disappointing. I’m much more interested in the trainwreck part.
Just to be clear, the film contains no railways. The trainwreck is Amy. This neologism is commonly used to describe a person who parties their way to disaster – an architect of their own misfortune, as my father might say.
She’s a heroine we might as well get used to, because this is not the last of these characters we are going to see on the big screen. Also known as a hot mess, these are women who mess stuff up in exciting environments; boozier Bridget Joneses who can initiate really strong conversations about dildos. The bro films have been doing this for years, only there’s not so much conflict involved in a man living for fun. Women are still expected to play a more nurturing role in society, so when they can’t even nurture themselves, the narrative gets interesting. I’m not saying I’ve done extensive field research in this area in my own life, but... I’ve done extensive field research in this area in my own life. So I can offer some enlightenment as to what you discover when you come out the other side.
Laundry, for example. The trainwreck can’t wash her clothes in a systematic fashion because that scares her into thinking she will turn into someone who understands endowment mortgages. So she makes herself late for work by hunting through old suitcases for discarded bikini bottoms, thinking, “Well if I just turn these inside out then I can get another couple of days’ wear out of them. You can see the string outline through my skirt, but I’ll just make sure I walk into all rooms sideways and then I’ll maybe find a safety pin to fold that string bow in a bit. Don’t have a safety pin, will never own a safety pin, OK, I’ll use this Happy Eater badge that went a bit rusty in 1983, ouch.”
Ironically, because you didn’t want to waste any time on the mundanity of doing laundry – half an hour a week, perhaps – you will spend entire days dealing with the fallout from this. Until one tragic day you bite the endowment bullet, organise your underwear drawer, and discover that getting dressed takes one whole minute. Who knew?
Trainwrecks also struggle with remembering birthdays, apart from their own, which last for a fortnight. Bank accounts are similarly problematic, often mistaken for a tower of cards with a magician hiding at the bottom. So are trainwrecks aimless, ambitionless, resistant to the future? No, it’s the opposite – they’re trying to be heroes.
Scared of taking on the larger tasks that life can ask of a person, they have blotted them out, turning the simple act of leaving the house and arriving at a railway station with a ticket to a hero quest that could be broadcast on Challenge Anneka. Trainwrecks have a goal so big and a dream of future transformation so intense that they drink to recover from it, or hold it in. When you are drunk, you can dream. When you are sober, you can do. But the doing is arduous and repetitive, and the drinking feels like a new invention every time you fall down the rabbit hole. And the rabbit holes whisper to you, telling you that you are the best and funniest rabbit.
Unconsciously, trainwrecks get in their own way, making life in its immediate presentations complicated, because they fear what they will find out when they stop. A horrible revelation, such as they hate their stupid life, perhaps. Or an even more horrible revelation, such as they love their stupid life. Or, worse still, they have mixed feelings about their life, good, bad and middling, just like everybody else does.
The fear is that if you step out of the rabbit hole altogether, then Wonderland will disappear. The truth is, as the queen told Alice, if you make the time you can dream six impossible things before breakfast. And this is something I now do, lying in my lovely bed, luxuriating in the anticipation of all that clean underwear.
