The Missing Apartment of Holly Golightly

“I am always drawn back to places where I lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment.”

The opening paragraph of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a vivid description of his apartment. It is only one among the myriad other physical spaces that Capote describes in his story, each in great detail: Joe Bell’s bar, the New York Public Library and the interiors of Woolworth’s. All of these spaces find due place, albeit in slightly altered forms, in Blake Edwards’ eponymous 1961 film. But there is one space – absolutely vital to the film – that is never described in Capote’s novella: Holly Golightly’s apartment.

In the film, we first see Holly’s apartment when Paul Varjack rings the buzzer below. Until now we have only seen a sophisticated Holly, strolling down Lexington Avenue in a black Givenchy sheath and oversized pearls. Our first peek into her apartment presents a shocking contrast: she wakes up among rumpled bed linen in an incredibly messy room, a cat nonchalantly strolling among the piles of stuff. Who is this woman, we ask ourselves, whose interior life is so different from her exterior life?

Part Human, Part Machine, Part Fantasy, Part Real

Download a pdf of illustrative images here.

The sight of Oscar Pistorius running unsettles me. All the visual tropes of the running athlete – bulging calves, stretched tendons, flexing ankles – are conspicuous by their absence. This is because Pistorius’ legs end at the knees. He runs on two curved pieces of carbon fibre that are sold under the name Cheetah Flexfeet. The cutting edge in prosthetic design, modeled on a cheetah’s feet, they will allow the disabled Pistorius to compete against abled runners in the 2012 Olympics. Cheetah Flexfeet are prosthetic limbs that actually work better than human limbs.

I am ashamed to admit it, but all I can think when I see Pistorius is “Cyborg.”

A New Mythological

The first feature length film made in India was ‘Raja Harishchandra’ in 1913. It isn’t surprising to any Indian to find out that the film was a ‘mythological’: it told stories of Hindu Gods and Goddesses, of ancient kings and curses. The medium of film provided the means, for the first time, for visual spectacles such as Gods flying in air and actors burning on funeral pyres to emerge unscathed. The mythological film was a prominent part of Indian Cinema till the 80’s, when television took over that genre. Tarsem Singh grew up in India, and while his film ‘The Fall’ bears an unmistakeable Bollywood stamp, I could not shake off the thought that its true progenitor is the bollywood mythological.

The film is a freefall into a world of fantasy. A stuntman in Los Angeles of the 1920’s breaks his legs in a fall, and then, while he is in hospital, discovers that his true love has betrayed him. After a failed suicide attempt, he befriends a little Spanish girl in the hospital. Hoping that he can trick her into getting him pills for a second suicide attempt, he begins to tell her a story. The audience now tumbles into the girl’s imagination, and the story unfolds through her eyes.