Penny at the Movies: "Horse Girl"

caption...

Horse Girl is one of my all time favorite movies. It came out in 2020 and I didn’t see a single advertisement or promotional clip for it until the moment the title appeared on my Netflix homepage. I was an early-pandemic sophomore at the time, lying sideways in a bed littered with crumbs. I had my laptop balanced on its side so I could watch movies while lying down, and I was probably either between zoom classes or had just finished them for the day. I was about a year out from being formally diagnosed with OCD, from releasing Public Void, and from a lot of other things that I had no way of predicting at that time. In that moment, on every level of my being, I had truly nothing better to do. I hit play.

Horse Girl opens with a shot of a cozy blue sky that becomes a blue fabric, introducing us to the life and environment of our main character Sarah. Sarah is a sweet and shy employee at a crafts store called “Great Lengths”. She has a friend there named Joan.

I could tell you about how it all goes down, with the aliens and the downward spiral and the Birdman-like schizophrenic dream-vision with one of the strangest sex scenes I’ve ever witnessed. But that’s no fun. What you really need to know about this movie is that it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful in an understated, relatable way that is both aesthetically coherent and oddly comforting. The Horse Girl universe has a sitcom-esque energy that makes it feel the way a film photo looks. You feel like you’re peaking into a real community, and into the real isolated soul hovering on the outskirts of it.

Sarah herself is a very interesting character. I love the way we get to know her. At first she’s normal, then she’s so plain and boring that she actually stands out. You wonder, why would a nice, pretty girl like this keep her life so small and plain? Is she really so insecure? She’s a modern princess, so perfect in her demure adorkable-ness that she doesn’t seem to realize what a prize she really is. And she’s so earnest in her shyness, in her pursuit of a simple life, that it makes her genuinely endearing, and also a little concerning. Her friends nudge her. They try to get her to let loose a little, and time and time again she politely declines with a friendly overwhelm that only makes her more likable.

Then we see the missing pieces, and of course there are missing pieces. The way it’s laid out, it’s so obvious in hindsight that Sarah has her reasons for wanting a plain life. Being interesting, going on an adventure - these things are not so simple for a woman like Sarah. She might not be able to articulate that, and she may not want to for fear of speaking it into existence, but eventually the viewer comes to understand what Sarah has instinctively known all along: the spiral away from our reality is always closeby. While her peers are often seeking exciting new experiences, Sarah has carefully (if subconsciously) built a life for herself that discourages unpredictable adventure. A part of her is well aware that once she starts creating rogue meaning, once she starts chasing her story away from our story, she will never come back down to earth.

It’s never exactly revealed whether Sarah’s wild experiences are real, delusion, or some combination of the two. To me, it doesn’t really matter. I think it’s more interesting to watch Horse Girl as a story about a woman’s relationship with her craziness. I am not schizophrenic, and I have also never (to my knowledge) been abducted by aliens. I’m also not a horse girl (sharks ftw). Still, this movie feels extremely relatable to me, and I think it’s because of this focus on the relationship between a girl and her spiral mind.¹ 

Horse Girl does such a good job showing the viewer the web of forces that act on someone who is being crazy. Sarah’s experience isn’t just an experience of herself, or of her anxieties, or of other people, or of institutions, but rather it is an experi```ence of all of those things at once, combined through one person’s dynamic life. The picture looks something like this: Sarah has a support network, but it has its gaps. It has these gaps in part because of her avoidant behavior, which is informed by her family history with craziness. Her family history is affected by politics, gendered oppression, and medical institutions. These systems, which affect her family history and herself, also affect her modern community. Her relationship with her community keeps her grounded and supported, but it is also strained as a result of the community’s place within our larger culture, which is affected by our history with politics, gendered oppression, and medical institutions. The culture influences the community which influences Sarah which influences her community which makes up the culture which influences the institutions which influences the community and so on and so on. 

When you watch Horse Girl, you try to figure out where the spiral into insanity began, if Sarah could have lived a different life, and if she’s even acting entirely irrationally or if perhaps her anxieties are just misinterpreted. You try to figure it out and you begin to see the large and complex structure that Sarah lives within. You put your finger on the paper and you trace lines to the best of your ability, but the loop just keeps spinning, getting larger and encompassing more and more, until you really see how everything is connected, how everything in a person’s life touches everything else in the world. Time and space warp, your mind expands, and you are suddenly aware of other realities. Is that really so different from being abducted by aliens?

Without spoiling it for you too much, I will say that the end of Horse Girl is very much open to interpretation. I think there’s a way in which it can be interpreted as a tragedy, but that is not how I see it. I personally interpret the ending as a happy one, in which a woman takes ownership of her craziness. This is a bittersweet win, because it’s not the ending that the Sarah we meet at the beginning of the movie would’ve wanted for herself. If taken literally and medically, the ending also implies that we’ve kind of “lost” Sarah to her mental illness, which is particularly painful in the context of her family history and her anxiety towards it. But I’ve seen this movie so many times that I’ve lost count and I’ve had a lot of time to consider my interpretation, and I think it’s really more of a metaphorical scene. She’s not giving up on life, she’s giving up the fight against her mind. She chooses her mind and her lineage of “crazy” womanhood over the psychiatric ideal she has spent so long trying to adhere to. Interpreted symbolically rather than literally, this choice is deeply feminist and anarchist. I see her as a kind of anti-hero, a patron saint of crazy girls, a woman who chooses to know her mind and fall in love with her mind even as other people pathologize her, even when that same decision has been punished to the point of homelessness and death in those that came before her.²

Now I’m not saying we should all go off our meds and ghost our therapists. I like medicine (the field and the object). Horse Girl isn’t an example to emulate, and if you watch the movie I think that will be abundantly clear. I just think this is a worthwhile parable to keep in mind, kind of like Abraham and Isaac. Should you read about Abraham and Isaac and then go kill your kid on top of a mountain? No, probably not. But does the story communicate concepts that may not work well in another medium? I think it does. 

Horse Girl is about the beauty of the spiral. It’s about who and what you have when you are living in a reality that your loved ones do not share. It’s about men and women, medical institutions, the looming threat of homelessness, eroticism, and divine, bizarre beauty. It’s a thriller dramedy about a girl who loves a horse. And as of right now, it’s on Netflix. Go ahead and give it a try. If you watch it, comment your thoughts on all this below. But fair warning, it is genuinely odd, and some of my favorite movies are movies that other people absolutely hate.

-Talk to y’all later! Penny

P.S. I’m going through a kind of insufferable film bro phase right now, so if you have a deeply cherished movie that you can’t recommend to anyone you know, go ahead and put me onto it.

1. I don’t believe it’s ever explicitly stated in Horse Girl that Sarah is schizophrenic, but it is heavily implied. It may be worth mentioning that Sarah is a white woman with money somewhere in the family (stepdad?). Her story is a very different picture of schizophrenia than it might have been if she were, for example, a Black man. Personally, I think this is part of what makes the movie work. Sarah’s insanity is downplayed by her community even as she begins to show signs of going crazy, not in spite of her political identity, but because she is this archetypal demure, quirky white woman (a horse girl). To me, this is part of the meaning of the movie. That said, I’m talking about craziness here in a kind of casual, familiar way, and that’s obviously not how everybody feels. It’s true that we are not all punished equally for seeming strange in public.

2. One way in which Sarah’s craziness threatens patriarchy specifically is her sexual and intellectual self-sufficiency. She no longer relies on anyone outside of herself for any kind of enrichment because her mind creates its own experiences. For all the nightmarish logistical and social consequences to this predicament, there is also this strange result: She becomes a woman with no earthly desire for the things men often provide for us. She already experiences sex, love, and security within her own mind. This is scary for a number of reasons, some which are rooted in an impulse to control and suppress women, and many which are not.