Who’s Afraid of Amanda Seyfried? Me!

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One of the primary missions of this blog, and the last decade or so of my life, is to change our society’s relationship with those who are in public life, especially entertainers. The toxic culture of obsession with the trivialities of celebrities’ lives that has predominated over the past seventy years or so hasn’t always existed. It used to be that our entertainers were a part of our community, and amongst the most respected members of it. 

This unhealthy obsession we have with all the wrong things about celebrities began in earnest in the 1950s. Without doing any research, I can guess at two reasons why this may have happened. During an era of enormous conformity pressure in America, celebrities had the privilege of saying and doing things that ordinary Americans couldn’t. So they were fascinating because of their ability be different. But at the same time, the 1950s were a time when salaries for entertainers began to increase dramatically, which led to a growing public jealousy. Celebrities were free AND ridiculously rich, leading to the love-hate (or really more worship-hate) relationship. 

Celebrity culture—the salacious entertainment “news” tabloids, the public harassment, the absurd urban legends about celebrities—it was all a way for the masses to punish them for their privilege, to inject some inconvenience into lives that seemed from the outside unfairly perfect. 

Though he was a brilliant inventor, and someone I idolized as a child, Thomas Edison is responsible for inadvertently damaging our relationship with entertainers as a society. The advent of music and video recording is a big part of what has led to the dramatic expansion of entertainer salaries, putting the average person at an economic distance from them, but it has also put us at a physical distance from them. When all music and theater performances were live, it kept us closer to the performers. They were people like us who shared some extraordinary talent they had. But with recorded media, entertainers became exotic strangers. Stars—distant, mysterious, unreachable. 

As our approach to celebrities became more and more irrational, they had to change to protect themselves. Celebrities started to deflect obsessive and excessive attention from the public by saying, “You don’t know me!”, but this flew in contravention of the basic ethic of the arts. The whole point of being an artist was to show the world yourself through your work. But a lot of celebrities stopped wanting to do that because of the unhealthy ways in which society responded, leading to a general decline in the authenticity and depth of the arts over the past several decades. I feel this is beginning to reverse now, thanks in part to the rise of social media, which has given celebrities a method of connecting with the public in a more down-to-earth and convenient way. But still there is so much work to do...

Some people may find a lot of the things that I have said and will say about celebrities on this blog to be inappropriate. But people are talking about celebrities everywhere all the time. But most of what they are saying is stupid. Because I’m a writer myself, I believe in the idea that a person’s art is a window into their soul. The whole point of what they do is to affect the audience in some way. So I don’t think any of them will mind me talking about them in a serious way. So with that, I have some things to say about Amanda Seyfried. 

I first became aware of Amanda Seyfried in 2011 when I saw previews for Red Riding Hood and thought, “Well, that’s one of the cutest girls I’ve ever seen.”. I very much wanted to see the movie apart from that as I am a sucker for live-action girl-power retellings of fairy tales. I had vaguely noticed promotional material for Jennifer’s Body but I hadn’t noticed Amanda in it since apparently the marketing team for that movie thought the amount of Megan Fox’s press reflected the number of people willing to go see a movie just to see her. It actually made money I see now, over $31 million on a $16 million budget. I’m shocked by that only because I’m shocked it only cost $16 million to make. I’d have guessed that it had grossed $20-30 million, but I’d have also guessed it cost about that. But in any case, I think studio executives’ noses would go Pinocchio if they denied they were expecting more. I’d seen clips of Megan Fox making out with some girl and thought, “Oh no, they’re not gonna get me with that shit!”. But eventually, they did get me...

Jennifer’s Body was running on HBO or Cinemax regularly for a while. I was flipping channels and I saw either Amanda or Megan and stopped. It might have actually been the scene where they are making out. I don’t remember. But for some reason, I watched a couple of minutes of it and I thought it was interesting so I DVRed it. While, as I’ve mentioned, I don’t as a rule get off on Hollywood sex scenes, I’m always interested in seeing sex scenes that are in any way boundary-pushing because as a fan movies and as a citizen of society, I think it is important to see them. Censorship is one of the most fundamental issues for an artist, and perhaps for anyone, and knowing what is permissible, both legally and socially, reflects a great deal about the state of a society. 

So, I watched Jennifer’s Body and within just two minutes, I was shocked by two things. First, I thought, “Ok, wait, this movie’s actually good.”. When you really know movies, when you’ve watched thousands of them like I have, when you’ve even been involved in the process of making them, you usually know a really good movie within the first few seconds. So in the case of Jennifer’s Body, this meant that I was already fascinated because most of the world says this movie isn’t any good, and I can already see that it is. So me and the world disagree. I have to figure out who’s right. But I was shocked by a second thing, something much bigger than the rather common occurrence that I think a generally panned movie is good...

There is a girl I’ve called June in my writings who I met in high school and fell in love with who was the central figure in my emotional life for almost two decades. In Jennifer’s Body, Amanda Seyfried IS that girl. 

I don’t mean that Amanda looks just like her. They do share a superficial resemblance though as you would expect Amanda is smaller and more Hollywood perfect.  But what I mean is that it seems like she’s actually playing June. If you’d told me that I was watching a movie about June’s life, a movie that very well could be made, I would have said that actress got it perfect beyond any point I would have thought possible. There are a couple of moments in that movie where the emotional experience of watching Amanda is IDENTICAL to the emotional experience of being with June. And that is when I first started to become afraid of Amanda Seyfried. 

Since the end of my hope of being with June, fifteen years ago, every time I saw a girl who visually reminded me of her in a big way, such that it kindled a memory of the emotion of being with her, I instantly felt a strong emotional attraction to that girl. I immediately pushed back these feelings, believing that it was wrong to be interested in a girl because she reminds you of a girl from your past. I immediately began to erect defense mechanisms against even beginning to allow myself to think that Amanda Seyfried the actress might be someone like June, or even that since she looked like the physical perfection of June that she might be June 2.0, which then would mean that I would be tempted to break all my rules about actresses and make an effort to try to meet her for what I thought then would be an emotionally unhealthy reason. I began to erect defense mechanisms against my becoming infatuated with Amanda Seyfried. But as usual, once you begin to erect defense mechanisms, it’s already too late. 

The second movie I saw Amanda in only made things worse. Andrew Niccol is my favorite filmmaker despite his limited output, and Amanda is in In Time, a movie I not only love, but have a unique sentimental attachment to as well. The first two movies I saw Amanda Seyfried in are two of my favorite movies of all time.  What’s interesting is that she doesn’t remind me of June at all in that movie. I felt a little relieved by that until I saw her in Ted 2 and it feels almost like she’s playing June again. It isn’t just In Time’s change of her hair color. She still reminds me of June in Lovelace with dark hair and dark contacts. 

I was trying to resist developing an unhealthy emotional attachment to Amanda all the while thinking about her frequently for another reason. Since I came back from Africa, I’d hoped to one day make a movie about my relationship with June. I’d thought about actresses that might play June, but there was nobody I’d seen who was the right age that I really liked for it (during the main parts of the story I want to tell, June was 14-24). When I saw Amanda in Jennifer’s Body, there was no one else. I saw that Amanda was already almost thirty, which shocked me, and I thought, I have work for this girl but if I don’t get something going soon, it’s going to be too late. 

I’d always dreamt of producing movies about my own experiences, and I never saw this as being an egotistical desire. I think it would be interesting to see anyone involved in movies tell their own story. I think Steven Spielberg’s life written and directed by Steven Spielberg would be fascinating and about 500 million other people would, too. But it could actually be a whole new genre of films where the filmmaking stars we know do their own biographies. I realize that the big impediment to this is that of course there would be far too many people who would have to give their consent for an authentic story to be told, and not all of them would. But it was still my dream to be able to do it. 

But my conviction threw cold water on my Hollywood dreams. I didn’t think much about Amanda Seyfried while I was in prison. I didn’t find her in my mind all the time again until I got out and got my movies back, and Jennifer’s Body was one of the first movies I wanted to watch. When I went away, Jennifer’s Body and In Time were the only movies of hers I had seen. I’d always thought Ted looked hilarious, plus I love Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis is smoking hot cute. A store had both Ted movies on sale for like $3 each on Blu-Ray, so I bought the first one, and I liked it, so I went back and bought the second. I didn’t even realize Amanda was in it until I picked it up to buy it.

Shortly thereafter, I watched about three-quarters of Lovelace with the sound turned off. This is something I’ll do with movies I’m not sure I want to watch. It might surprise people given everything I’ve said on this blog that Amanda Seyfried playing a pornstar would not be automatically super-interesting to me, but it’s not. Other than Boogie Nights, mostly all the movies about porn are boring to me because they have to dance around too much. Plus, I’m not nearly as interested in 20th century porn stars as contemporary ones. Amanda Seyfried as Brianna Love, I’m interested. But my takeaway from all these movies was that Amanda was SO good at her job, one of the best, and that if I could start making these movies in my head, I’d keep her busy for the next twenty years. 

As time went by, I began to rethink the idea that I should avoid girls who reminded me of June. I had noticed in life that certain physical appearances tended to correlate with certain personality types. Maybe seeking out people with a certain look wasn’t superficial. Maybe it was actually the most reliable way to find someone with the personality you wanted.  Perhaps nature was telling me something by making me so strongly attracted to these girls who shared these particular traits. But since June was the first girl I met who had these traits, it was a chicken-egg question whether I liked those girls because they reminded me of June, or I liked June because she had the same traits as those other girls. 

Then while watching Jennifer’s Body for probably the twentieth time, I realized something profound. I’ve talked about how Hollywood sex scenes are uncomfortable for me to watch, even Amanda and Megan making out which is so smoking hot in theory, but they do such good work in that scene that I feel like I’m looking in on something not meant for me to see. But I referenced that there was one Hollywood sex scene that was hot to me, and it was the one between Amanda and her boyfriend in Jennifer’s Body. But it was more than just hot...

June and I never had sex. Some stuff happened one night, but it wasn’t much past what you would classify as two adults playing doctor. For years, I replayed that night in my mind wondering what would have happened, if I’d said this, or done that. I spent years wondering how it would have changed things between us—how it would have changed me—if it had happened. I wondered the same thing about all the girls I loved who it seemed essentially tried to hide their sexuality from me.  The fact that I didn’t know what it was like to have sex with a woman I loved was the main thing the prevented me from being able to feel that I’d had a good life. 

In Jennifer’s Body, not only does Amanda Seyfried seem like she’s playing June, but her boyfriend Chip, played by Johnny Simmons, seems to be playing the kind of boyfriend I would have tried to be. All the situations where I might have had sex with June, that one night in particular, I tortured myself over them, replaying every word, every gesture, every decision and wondering, but not knowing, if something I said or did was wrong. But most of all I wondered what it would be like to be in that emotional space with her, and the fact that I would never know felt like a wound that would never heal. 

The scene in Jennifer’s Body almost seems like the continuation of that night if I’d said and done everything right. There is this one shot in the scene where Amanda is looking up smiling and I think—no, I FEEL, “Oh, so that’s what it would have been like.”. And it feels like the mystery is solved, and I don’t have to go on torturing myself about it anymore. 

It’s funny how the subconscious works. I now know, I felt all of this the first time I watched the movie, but I didn’t put it into words, even in my mind, until years later. But it is probably a big part of the reason why I kept watching it. I also kept watching it because I knew I still didn’t fully understand it, and I still don’t. I need Diablo Cody, or Karyn Kusama, or Amanda and Megan to sit me down and explain it to me. But what I FELT seeing Amanda and Johnny Simmons’ interaction in Jennifer’s Body was like experiencing a virtual reality simulation of what it would have been like to be June’s boyfriend.

In February last year I went to the mall and I met this beautiful Israeli girl named Mor. She had just gotten out of the IDF and was working in one of those stores selling preposterously expensive cosmetics. Normally, I’m immune to sales tactics, but she’s one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen, and she’s got that Israeli girl accent which is SO hot, I couldn’t walk away. You haven’t really lived until you’ve had diamond dust cream rubbed into your hand by a beautiful girl who knows how to fire an Uzi. So hot. Even though she had dark hair and dark eyes and somewhat olive skin, she had the Scarlett Johansson thing in that she looked very unusual. I recognized her as probably Israeli because of the accent before she told me so, but based on appearance alone, I wouldn’t have known what she was. 

At the time, I had a cut across the bridge of my nose from my second CLK crash. She was trying to convince me I needed the diamond dust stuff to reduce the scar. I told her it would go away on its own, which she didn’t believe. I have unusually good healing genetics. Other than stretch marks, every scar goes away. I told her it would be gone in a month. And she said no way. I told her that if it wasn’t, I’d come back and buy her diamond dust cream. She said I had to bring her a box of Godiva chocolates too. It went something like that. My memory isn’t perfect when I’m looking into the eyes of a girl THAT hot. 

After a very interesting fifteen minute conversation, she finally weakened my defenses enough to sell me a jar of the diamond dust cream. I didn’t use it on my nose, though. 

I’d just bought my third Mercedes CLK that week.  I was working on my book about my Vegas Scarlett encounter, and I was driving along one day soon after buying it and I thought, “Scarlett would look so cute in here.”. But I also thought, “That Israeli girl would look pretty cute, too. And we did have that bet...”. After a month had gone by, the scar was almost gone, and I was thinking about taking her that box of chocolates and asking her out. A number of things deterred me from doing this, but probably the deal-breaker was the prospect of explaining my legal predicament. But there was a dream that arose out of my thinking about it. 

Mor told me that she was from a kibbutz, and I assumed from her rather circumspect way of talking about it that it was a kibbutz in the West Bank. The West Bank settlement issue has been interesting to me for a long time, and I recalled being surprised when I read that Scarlett had made a statement in support of the settlements, and I thought, “Natalie Portman must have made her say that.”.  Not MADE her, like it wasn’t Scarlett’s real view, but encouraged her that it was important that she say it publicly.  I could never find Scarlett’s direct quote, though, so I wasn’t sure about the sourcing. 

For years, I’d thought the settlements were something Israel should stop doing. I thought it would be just about the best day of my life to take these three girls for a ride in my CLK and have them argue to me why I should think its okay.  I also had a hundred year old story about a Jewish girl I wanted to tell them that I would think they know, but it is a somewhat obscure thing and I would think Hollywood would have done a movie about it if they did know. I figured, this went in the impossible dream category. These two girls, Natalie and Scarlett, are worth about a billion dollars combined and I wouldn’t imagine that it would be the easiest thing to get their people to let them get in a car with me driving after I’d spectacularly crashed a CLK going...really fast...on a wet freeway. But, we have to have dreams. You better believe I’d drive careful if I was driving THOSE girls!

I had always thought Natalie Portman had been in the IDF, so I thought that Natalie and this girl would have something in common beyond just both being Israeli. It was only then that I realized I’d never seen a picture of her in uniform, which I would have thought I’d see, so I went to double-check and learned that she’d never done it.  

But that was when I got the idea that if Sammy Davis Jr. had the Rat Pack, I wanted to have a Jewish girl MAT Pack.  But this cosmetics girl wasn’t a MAT Girl, so far as I knew. That was just a one-day event to debate West Bank settlements with two Israeli girls and Scarlett (I can’t even tell you how hot that is!). Who would be my permanent MAT Pack members?

If you can’t figure out that the first two girls I’d want in my MAT Pack would be Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman, you aren’t paying attention to anything.  But I felt just as surely that I wanted Amanda Seyfried to be the third. Hell, I was ready to throw Natalie out before Amanda which I rationalized by thinking Natalie’s probably always too busy to be wasting time hanging out with me, and it is possible that she’s so serious that she’s literally never had fun in her life. I’m SO careful even talking about Natalie in print. Would that mean I’d be walking on eggshells around her in person? Probably. 

It was the most natural thing in the world that Natalie and Scarlett would be the first two. First of all, Scarlett was SOOO cute, and I had reasons for believing that I had a lot in common with both of them and it appeared that they were buddies. I’d been following their careers for over twenty years. But Amanda Seyfried was relatively new to me. So it set off my alarm bells again when I asked myself, why should I automatically place Amanda in my MAT Pack crew and not Jennifer Connelly who was one of the first to start steering the direction of my life in Once Upon A Time In America, and is even an alum of the same college as me, or Winona Ryder who I watching when I first formulated the Jewish MAT Girl idea, or Gwyneth Paltrow who despite being debatably Jewish and debatably a MAT Girl has been in more movies I love than all the rest of them combined?  

A part of this may have been the fact that Winona, Jennifer and Gwyneth are all older than Scarlett and Natalie and I was probably inclined to think Amanda would be more likely to have fun hanging out with Natalie and Scarlett than prior-generation MAT Girls. And if I was to be so lucky as to date or marry Scarlett, and that was what I wanted—one of my MAT Pack crew to be my partner—I figured she’d probably pick Natalie and someone else her own age. 

But yet, as much as Amanda seemed to fit perfectly, there were certain subtle ways in which she seemed different from the other Jewish MAT Girls. When I wrote my provocative and perhaps ill-advised “Trust List” on my old blog, there were several MAT Girls on it. But I left Amanda off. Why?

One of the things I respect and admire about the Jewish MAT Girls is that they seem to pay very close attention to the content of their films. These girls know that their work is influential and that they are building legacies. They are aware—some more than others (Hi, Natalie!)—that they are living historical figures, which is part of what makes them so hot. 

There was something in one of Amanda’s movies that I think is the most offensive thing I’ve seen in a Hollywood movie, perhaps in any entertainment media...and I’m not an easily offended person at all, as should be obvious from this blog and my prior writing. I’m not going to talk about what it was because it would be a long tangent, and I know Hollywood movies are full of inside jokes and things you have to be behind-the-curtain to understand, and this is something so far beyond the pale to me that I felt there had to be some story behind it. So I don’t want to attack the filmmaker involved possibly without knowing why he put this in a movie. I would talk about it if I felt that it was something that had somehow been overlooked, but it was discussed in the media and some people know what I’m talking about. Amanda’s not even in the scene in question. I don’t know if she was ever asked about it when some people objected to it. Maybe she didn’t even know it was in there until after the movie was done. Amanda’s not as big a star as some of these other girls, so maybe she really needed the job and didn’t feel that she had the stature to speak up. 

But to me, this was something that it was surprising and unacceptable that the other actors in the movie and the studio executives allowed it, especially the Jewish people. The studio should have killed the movie, and the actors should have walked if the filmmaker wouldn’t take it out. And of course, the studio didn’t need his consent to take it out, unless he had final cut in his contract, which I would doubt. I’m a big free speech advocate and I believe artists must be given great latitude to express controversial things in their art. But there is such a thing as too far, as every Jewish person should understand in light of the stuff Nazi propaganda “artists” said about them. I remember thinking, “There is NO WAY Scarlett, Natalie or Jennifer Connelly would EVER do a movie with something like that in it, not as teenagers and not now.”.

But it was bigger than just that. I realized, I did NOT feel the same kind of intuitive trust of Amanda Seyfried’s character as I did when it came to my other favorite Jewish MAT Girls. I wondered, how much of that was because she reminded me of this girl that I put myself through hell over?  And did the fact that she instantly became one of my favorite actresses anyway also have something to do with the fact that she reminded me of this girl that I loved enough to put myself through hell over her? I could not exclude the possibility that my attraction to Amanda was COMPLETELY because of June, as I could not exclude the possibility that my sort of intuitive distrust of her was COMPLETELY because of June as well. It became a fascinating existential question for me: What would I think of Amanda Seyfried if I’d never met June?

But I still felt certain, apart from the influence of June, the reasons why Amanda stood out to me, on both sides, were real. It wasn’t just that Amanda Seyfried looked like a White girl. She seemed to me to act like a White girl too in subtle ways that the other Jewish MAT Girls didn’t...

I’ve been on one date with a girl who I knew was Jewish. I met her on Match. It was the worst date I’ve ever had LOL. But the girl in question actually said, “I don’t care about being Jewish. I just consider myself White.”. I wondered, “Could Amanda Seyfried be like that?”

Now, it is important to note that close to 100% of my impressions of Amanda Seyfried come from watching her movies. I’ve never seen or read an interview with Amanda. I haven’t read even a short bio of her, nor have I read a single article about her. I know she was born in Pennsylvania in December 1985, started modeling when she was eleven, and that’s literally all. I’ve only ever even read one quote of Amanda’s, which, while it left me with a burning question I want to get to know her well enough to ask, isn’t a significant statement. Was it possible that Amanda was such a good actress, or had some unique factor in her experience, that allowed her to take her acting so far as to imitate subtle indescribable aspects of a certain kind of White girl that other Jewish actresses couldn’t?  It wasn’t noticeable to me until I learned to spot the subtle mannerisms that distinguish Jewish girls from Gentile girls. I started watching movies and guessing based on mannerisms whether actresses I’d never seen before and whose names I didn’t know were Jewish or not, and I was right at a pretty high percentage. I’d have been wrong on Amanda Seyfried. 

It’s not just that Amanda “looks White”. If you actually look at her, she looks more ethnic than Scarlett, who actually is half White, or Natalie for that matter. But Scarlett is totally Jewish in how she carries herself, and sometimes I’ll be watching one of her movies and think to myself, “Why does Scarlett Johansson remind me of a Black girl right now?”. I’m going to have to explore that. 

But as I thought about it, I pieced together a theory as to why Amanda would be different.  Amanda Seyfried and Scarlett Johansson are like the #1 and #2 most beautiful girls in the world to me. I’ve never seen Amanda in person, so Amanda won on screen. Scarlett won in real life. But they have a completely different kind of beauty. Scarlett is exotic. Nobody really looks like her. That probably has something to do with the fact that there are very few half-Jewish, half-Swedish people. There are a lot of girls who look like Amanda Seyfried. Right there in Hollywood, Dove Cameron and Michelle Pfeiffer. Dakota Fanning looks a lot like her too. Amanda’s just the perfect version of that particular look. 

Amanda Seyfried looks like the image of the traditional midwestern All-American dream girl, but it is more in attitude and mannerisms than physical architecture. Scarlett Johansson was an awkward teenager and probably had no expectation that she would grow up to be one of the most beautiful women in the world. I don’t know, she may not think that of herself now. Amanda on the other hand is the kind of girl who most likely has been hearing people tell her how beautiful she is probably as long as she can remember. I’m sure she was teased a little for looking like an alien (and she does—the most adorable alien EVER) but the voices declaring her beauty would have outnumbered those. 

Most of these Jewish girls I love, beautiful as they are to me and obviously to the world as well, they don’t have that kind of farm town pageant queen beauty Amanda does. When you have that particular look, people are going to treat you differently. And then Amanda went to work modeling at 11. If I were to ask her, “Is that industry as toxic as it looks?”, I’m guessing she would say, “Worse.”.  So Amanda, because of the effect her particular type of beauty had on people, would have had different experiences in her life that were more like the experiences of the midwestern pageant queen. 

But yet, there was one thing that made me think Amanda was TOTALLY a Jewish girl. Every day in the media, there is a “Most Beautiful Woman in the World” contest going on. Amanda is one of the girls in that contest and she’s trying to win it, too. How do you win it? By becoming Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, Brooke Shields, Angelina Jolie, one of the women documented by history as the icon of beauty for a particular era. Don’t fool yourself. These girls are thinking about that, though some care more than others. 

But yet, in Amanda’s Google image search results, next to the pictures of her in glamorous dresses on red carpets and at parties looking impossibly beautiful, there are pictures of her in dresses that come down to her librarian shoes and blouses buttoned up to her neck, basically outfits like she has on in the library scene in Ted 2 as if she got to the set late and didn’t have time to change. Gentile girls who are that beautiful are very rarely like that. Every time I Google image search a beautiful Jewish actress, I get lots of pictures of her dressed like a nerd. It’s so hot. They’re dressed like nerds because they ARE nerds!  Gentile girls usually can’t genuinely be both because Gentile men force girls to choose which they want to be—the hot girl or the nerd. June was one of the only White girls I ever knew who could pull it off, and this trait was something like a holy grail to me. If I’d been able to formulate the question properly, if I’d been asking thirty years ago, “Where can I find a hot nerdy girl with good ethical values?”, a smart person would have told me, “Try the Jewish Community Center.”...

This was one of three reasons why I still loved Amanda despite how little I knew.  The first was her movies. I half-joke about Scarlett and Natalie seeming to pick movies based on what I’m LEAST likely to be interested in watching. Amanda Seyfried seemed to be the exact opposite. Until I went and scrolled through her filmography for the first time tonight, every single movie that I knew Amanda was in was a movie I was interested in watching, with Lovelace at the bottom of that list, but I had enough interest to go and look at it.  I don’t just mean the movies she was starring in. Even movies that she had small parts in were movies that looked interesting to me. And to show how far it goes, Mean Girls came on MTV tonight while I was writing this. I’ve always wanted to see this movie, since it came out, but just hadn’t gotten around to it. But I never knew until tonight that Amanda was in it. I watched it without sound, which I did because on MTV it will be language-edited and I don’t want to see it for the first time like that. But a soundless watch is okay. My three takeaways are that the movie is good, Lindsay Lohan is good, and Amanda is SOOO cute, but cuter NOW than then!

Amanda Seyfried just won’t stop getting cuter. I had been seeing the previews for The Art of Racing In The Rain, a movie I know that I’m going to want to see just from the title, and then Amanda’s in it too?!?  

So last week, I see while flipping channels in my hotel room in the middle of the night that “The Art...” is about to start on HBO. I watch with no sound. Pretty early on, I know I’m going to like it, but I don’t know if I’ll like it a little or a lot. But here’s a movie I’m actually really interested in, but I’m just watching thinking, “Where’s Amanda?”. Oh, there she is. She’s so cute. In that white sweater coming out of the house, I think she’s as cute as she’s ever been. 

I’m looking forward to watching The Art of Racing In the Rain properly. I had to turn it off before the very end for reasons I won’t say because I don’t want to ruin the movie given that it is so recent. But it featured the second reason why I trusted Amanda afterall: her smile. 

The most beautiful thing about Amanda Seyfried is her smile. It’s that smile some girls have that we equate with innocence, but it doesn’t really represent that. It’s something else. On one of my last viewings of Jennifer’s Body, I was watching the scene where Amanda is waving to Megan from the bleachers, and I realized that Amanda Seyfried is a mystery of physics. When I see her smile on television, there is positive energy flowing into me from somewhere. Where is that energy coming from? A biologist can argue that because I like her, my brain releases some chemical that changes my physiology, but even so, the release of that chemical must be initiated, and it requires energy to initiate any physical reaction. So I guess that makes Amanda Seyfried nuclear smoking CUTE. She is actually radiating bright positive energy to the world...like the sun. 

There are a lot of girls in the world who have that smile, and when you just look at them, you feel an emotion very similar to what you feel when you are in love. These are the girls who end up with the most stalkers and people who develop unhealthy obsessions with them. I don’t fully know or understand what makes a girl have that smile. But I know that most girls only have it when they are young. Almost always by the mid-20s, something had changed them, and that sunshine smile had gone away. 

I suspected and feared that the loss of that smile in every case corresponded to some abuse suffered at the hands of a man. And I also suspected and feared that all girls naturally had this smile, but that the small percentage of girls you saw with it reflected that being abused by a man was to be so common as to practically be a rite of passage for young girls.  And that was why I knew I was right about Amanda Seyfried. I know enough about the world and what scumbags men can be, that given Amanda’s career chronology, and the character of the two industries she has worked in, it is a near-certainty that she has had some horribly traumatic experiences with men. Perhaps a great many. She has every right to be angry. But she can still look at the world with a smile that says, “I love you anyway.”.  That’s a person I’ll bet on. 

There are a handful of Hollywood movies that seem to have strange entanglements with my life, and none more than Jennifer’s Body. I’ve talked about the fact that I lamented having never had a romance. But the closest I ever felt to it was one day with June. Amanda’s bedroom in Jennifer’s Body looks like June’s bedroom where we spent that night, even in being up a flight of stairs and to the right. 

I’ve owned three Chrysler Sebrings. It and the Mercedes CLK were the two models of car that felt like they were designed for me, and both went out of production after two model generations. In Jennifer’s Body, Megan comes to pick up Amanda in a Chrysler Sebring and she’s all excited about it. But hers was a convertible, and the Sebrings I loved were the hardtop coupe, a totally different car actually made by Mitsubishi. And in 1999, on that day with June, I was “between Sebrings”. But I had a rental car. That day, I came to pick up June in a Chrysler Sebring convertible. 

Jennifer’s Body is a 20th Century Fox movie. When Jennifer’s Body was released, my sister was working at Fox, her everyday office in the Die Hard tower. She was an HR person, not a studio person. But my niece was going to school with Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe’s kids. Which is interesting because that night June and I were together, we went to see Cruel Intentions. 

But there was one thing that made me feel that somehow, Amanda’s character in Jennifer’s Body really was based on June. Megan Fox has unusual thumbs. This is something that I noticed before it became news...because June has the same thumbs. That one day with June, I made an awkward comment about it, the only time I ever mentioned it. I thought they were cute but I didn’t say anything because I expected that a girl, a very pretty girl especially, would be self-conscious about it. That day, I was trying to work my way around to telling her I thought they were cute, but I didn’t say what I meant to say, and I could tell I’d hurt her feelings and I didn’t know how to fix it. I mentioned that the sex scene between Amanda and her boyfriend seemed like a continuation of part of what happened with June and I, but the funny thing is, the scene with Amanda and MEGAN did too! I’d watched Jennifer’s Body a bunch of times before it dawned on me that in a movie with a scene that almost seemed to reenact that day, I was watching a girl who seemed to be playing June kissing a girl that shared this unique physical trait with June. And that brings Amanda Seyfried (and I guess Megan Fox) into a web of strange entanglement with Scarlett. 

I’ve written about the quirky birthday connection between Alanis Morissette and Scarlett Johansson. The reason I picked the pseudonym June for this girl is because that day we spent together was 21 years ago Monday—June 1, 1999. Unbeknownst to me then, it was Marilyn Monroe’s 73 birthday, and Alanis Morissette’s 25th. 

For over a decade, my heartbreak over June was the central emotional issue in my life. A few years after I came back from Africa, I was driving across the San Mateo bridge listening to Alanis’ song Flinch and I realized that it described the exact emotions I felt about June. You affect me like you were my twin.  

People don’t believe artists really affect our lives anymore. They are mere amusement, a diversion. My life was changed by this musician and these two actresses, one of them off camera and the one on. There were certain things I felt that I was afraid nobody understood,  but I heard Alanis, and I knew somebody does. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to experience even a fraction of what it would have felt like if something more had happened that night with June, but then Amanda gave me a little piece of it. I never thought there would ever be a girl that I could love MORE than June, and then I saw Scarlett in Vegas...

For my story with June, the answer to all those “How long...” questions Alanis asks in Flinch is, right up until you see Scarlett Johansson in Las Vegas. Or maybe right up until you see Amanda Seyfried in Jennifer’s Body. Or both.

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