Culture Club: Tears of a Funny Girl

Revisiting the 1968 Streisand classic

Welcome to Culture Club, a feature where my editor David Swanson and I talk about what we’ve been reading, playing, artistically admiring, and—this week—watching. This is a feature for paid subscribers only, but enjoy this free preview and consider upgrading to paid!

Barbara Streisand and Omar Sharif in 1968’s Funny Girl

The long and the short of it is I watched a movie on a plane and it broke me open.

We’ll skip over—for the sake of brevity—the weeping, writing-a-will-in-crayon-on-a-paper-airplane and general miasma of terror that accompanies levering an agoraphobe onto a plane, and skip right to the in-flight entertainment, the last non-work-related culture I poured into my face before launching into a raucous and highly observant family Passover.

Anyway, the scene: a darkened 747 soaring over the ocean, a woman who has bargained with God for her own fate and found herself wanting and God nonresponsive. Sleep flees in the face of being squished into a seat meant for a child or doll, and the unremitting wailing of a fevered toddler in the next row. A few hours in, once the initial panic has passed, she turns to the tiny screen in front of her for solace, where an array of films parade before her, each more unimpressive than the last. The Banshees of Inisherin proves to be a cautionary tale about how much a severed finger looks like a carrot, and how hard it is to break up with a friend. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is even better than remembered—all those flying wuxia moves!—and features a lot of cave sex with a bandit. Finally, in the last hours of the flight, she finds Funny Girl (1968) buried in the back of the catalog and flips it on. It’s the story of Fanny Brice, a Jewish vaudeville legend– her unlikely rise from humble beginnings to the Ziegfield Follies, and her doomed love affair with suave gambler Nick Arnstein. I know the story and I know the songs. And still:

Cut to Barbara Streisand in leopard furs, sitting in an empty theater, watching the stage. And… let the waterworks begin.

Smash cut – the turbulent sawing through the air that precedes landing. The ending of Funny Girl keeps getting interrupted by captain’s announcements. I can’t turn it off, though; I can barely see, I’m crying that hard. I can’t stop; I’m sobbing. I haven’t cried this hard since the fourth time I saw Brokeback Mountain in theaters. There she is, decked in velvets, singing about her man, and a tear slides down the porcelain cheek beside that magnificent prow of a nose. I feel like part of me has broken open, the part of me that loves unreservedly, that believes in my own talents, that wants to persist in demonstrating that gift. That will always be punished for ambition and for loving too much and too immodestly. As every woman is.