ReBabble: Ramona at Midlife Watch Party

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ReBabble: Ramona at Midlife Watch Party
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What happens when a group of midlife women watch a film about a group of midlife women? Well, we have thoughts! Host Suki Wessling gathered a group of friends who had watched Ramona at Midlife to talk about their reactions to this story, which is unusual in how it centers women’s lives and friendships.

[Click for transcript]

Thanks to my friends Christine, Tara, Penny, and Kirsten for taking part. And thanks to my friend Patrice Vecchione, whose phone had a meltdown and didn’t upload her sound! I’m so sorry we missed her thoughtful responses.

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ReBabble: Ramona at Midlife Watch Party

Note: This transcript is uncorrected and rather… rough.

[00:00:20] Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling, and this is a hmm re babble. I think I need to do some branding here. I’m doing something new. I gathered a group of women to talk about Brooke Berman’s film, Ramona at Midlife. If you haven’t watched the film yet, I highly recommend you check it out on one of the many streaming services, But here’s Brooke with a summary of the film.

[00:00:41] Brooke Berman: Ramona at Midlife is the story of a woman making room for herself. And in the beginning, Ramona is a writer in her forties who’s put her creative life on hold in order to raise her daughter. She’s separated from her husband. She’s working in a veterinary clinic. She has told herself that her old life as a writer is over and that she doesn’t have time for it anymore. She’s resentful and she’s angry and she shut down and she’s exhausted But she doesn’t know any of those things about herself.

[00:01:13] At the end of the movie, she’s kind of removed the blinders and she’s able to open something that had been clenched before.

[00:01:21] What I discovered through writing this story is that in order to be in, um, Communion with her creative life. She has to be able to be around other artists and she doesn’t do that anymore. She’s mostly around other moms being an author is just not part of her mom identity. but she discovers that this hot filmmaker is making a project that is blatantly ripped from her work.

[00:01:47] Voiceover: I started by asking my friends to offer a few words in reaction to the film.

[00:01:52] Kirsten: Hello, I’m Kirsten. I live in California Central Valley. I am an educator, so when I heard the title, I immediately thought of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona, and then quickly found out that they’re different characters. Um, and although different, I did relate to this character too, I.

[00:02:10] Tara: Am Tara. I am in Chicago, and I was very interested in seeing the movie because I have a group of friends and we’ve been on our menopause zooms. So it. To see a movie about midlife. Um, I was a little sad by some parts of the movie, but also inspired.

[00:02:32] Penny: Oh, hi. I am Penny. Um, I live in New York City. Um, I’m also, I work as an educator. I teach as an adjunct at Columbia University and I’m also, um. A consultant in financial services. Um, I was inspired by the movie, but also very saddened. Um, it reminded me of who I was when I was young, um, and the piece of myself that I’ve lost.

[00:02:55] Christine: Hi, my name’s Christine. I live in the Santa Cruz area around Monterey Bay. And, uh, I also felt uncomfortable, uh, watching the film. I, I noted the protagonists as a woman. She struck me as very. Insecure, although incredibly gifted. And I find that, well, we could talk about that later. Um, that disturbed me, but I, I did love that she reconnected with friends.

[00:03:29] Those kind of renewed beginnings made me, I, I love that theme. So, you know, kind of a personal renaissance. Yes.

[00:03:37] Penny: Okay.

[00:03:38] Suki: so I wanted to start with a word that. Kirsten said, and, and actually I’ll take two words, one that Kirsten said and one that Tara said, um, relating and inspiring and inspired. How did you relate to this, Kirsten?

[00:03:59] Kirsten: Well being middle aged, I guess is the first one, but I think the one, the one thing that I really notice is when there’s that look back, right? To where, when you’re young, when you’re really young and you have these goals and these dreams of how you want your life to be, and then that. I dunno, the way, like the way that she looked back and then also was looking forward, right?

[00:04:31] And then she’s also comparing herself to other, to her friends. And I think that that, that we, I’d at least have done that before too. You know, I look and see what, oh, look at all the things that my friends have done and. Maybe I haven’t done as much because it, but that’s all in my mind, right? It’s, it’s all like, I’m comparing myself, not only to them, but I’m also comparing myself to what my, my own self, like my, what I thought or where I thought I should be at this point in my life.

[00:05:05] Penny: Yeah, so I can, I mean, I talked about there was a sadness of losing a part of yourself as you get older. Um, I was inspired by the fact that, um, the character in the film did reconnect with some old friends. Um, so that was inspiring, but, um, it didn’t feel real to me. Like the ending didn’t feel real to me, like it felt like.

[00:05:25] Um, I, life isn’t a fairytale ending, right? And everything got nicely tied up in a bow in the end, and I felt, you know, I, I wasn’t comfortable with the ending. I think ’cause that’s just didn’t reflect at least my life, to be honest. I.

[00:05:40] Tara: I kind of felt more like, I don’t know, this whole philosophy, like even when you get in your own way, the world has a way of like giving you what you need if you keep sewing into it. So I really liked the part where she said, I’m always writing.

[00:05:58] I write everywhere. I write in the car, I write at night, I write, you know, I’m always writing. It’s just that she wasn’t producing for other people, and so it was kind of for me, once she let go of all of these expectations and kind of let go of the movie and let go of these disappointments and just let life happen in a way it felt like.

[00:06:27] What she had been doing, which was writing, started to blossom more when she, you know, she had to stop fitting in, in a way,

[00:06:38] Voiceover: One of the differences in how we saw the movie stemmed from our own personal ways of being in the world. Christine and I really related to Ramona’s choice, not to sue the director, but for Penny. It was a let down Here’s Christine first.

[00:06:50] Christine: It reminded me of something I probably would do. It’s like change the name. But she, it seemed like she and him, if the movie is too believed, and I know this is like movie making, but it appeared that he was actually. Trying to connect with her in a, a genuine way, and she could have engaged in this huge battle, but she got enough of a genuine connection, even though really how he went about it was shockingly violating.

[00:07:21] Right.

[00:07:21] Penny: Mean, I, I thought the agent was giving her like really strong advice, um, you know, to stand up for herself and to fight back and not accept this. And, and I guess I was just devastated when she just kind of said, okay, all good. Just changed the name. I was like, that wasn’t. What I wanted to get outta that film, I guess.

[00:07:40] The Real story was she was a vet tech, which was kind of wonderful, to be honest. She was giving, she was a mother, she was giving to animals. And you know, I feel like it got obscured in trying to sort of neatly tie some bows around things.

[00:07:53] Suki: Uhhuh,

[00:07:54] Christine: Yeah, I, I mean, overall Ramona struck me as pretty crushed. She’s like a very, she was a gentle being, but it sounded from the way she described herself. In her younger days, she sounded like fiery and sexy

[00:08:08] Penny: And fierce.

[00:08:09] Christine: and all this stuff, and she struck me as crushed. She struck me as remarkably insecure in these ways that women, um, I often see women behaving as a kind of deferential and that chiefly that, that did make me uncomfortable.

[00:08:28] Um, and, uh, so I, I was really happy that she was. Beginning to reconnect with herself.

[00:08:39] Kirsten: the decision that she made you know, just to say, change my name I watched the movie two times and the first time I was very off put by that I. Very much like what everybody has been saying here. The second time that I watched it through, when I got to that point, I viewed it as something a little bit different.

[00:08:58] As if she was saying, okay, I’m just gonna take all of this crap for a lack of a better word, and put it to the side and I’m gonna start again, and I’m gonna go on my, you know, my other trajectory and just kind of leave all of that baggage behind. So it was, it was really weird for me just to see the difference in myself, the, the two times that I watched

[00:09:22] Penny: Interesting. Yeah.

[00:09:23] Kirsten: gonna, it was really odd.

[00:09:25] Christine: Mm-hmm. the agent really for me was the only character that was really grounded in self-respect. All the other women, the young woman that was like so disconnected from reality. That’s a whole discussion. It was so offputting, but very enter.

[00:09:44] Supposed to be entertaining and funny, but sadly there’s a lot of that going on for really young people. And then the splashy influencer, Gwen, I think is her name. She was like writing this very fake. World that we’re seeing. So much of that made me uncomfortable. And um, so the, and, and then Ramona was really insecure and the agent just struck me as real and solid, like a, like a real, real human being.

[00:10:12] Tara: I do agree with Kirsten about her saying, just change the name. I think for me, when she did that, at that point. I think that she was finally realizing that quite a bit of the problem was her, and that while she didn’t like this depiction of herself.

[00:10:33] It was accurate. You know, I really loved when her friends kind of said, you know, this is you. Like, you’re this person who wants this attention. You want to compete, and kind of like if you can’t compete, you just bow out. Like you just, you, you step back. And so I was hoping that that was her opportunity where she said, you know what?

[00:10:53] You’re right. Just change the name, move on. I’m gonna move on because now I need to take this responsibility and I need to move in the way that I’m supposed to move. And then the friendship was one of the things that made me really sad because when I looked back on it. I’ve always had a great group of friends, um, through high school, through college.

[00:11:15] we have a, just a group that we all together, we travel together, we talk together. Like I said, we have menopause zooms where there’s nine of us on the, and we’re all talking about, well, what happened to you this week? You know, what are your hot flashes? Like, what are you taking? So it was sad to me that. She didn’t have these friends, you know, she didn’t have any friends to help her through this divorce. She didn’t even have any mom friends to help her through raising a child as a single parent. Like she didn’t have any friends. She didn’t have any friends at work. It just was so sad to me. She didn’t seem.

[00:11:49] Happy as a mother particularly, you know, and I mean obviously she didn’t sign up to be a single mom, but she didn’t seem like she was really embracing it. It seemed more of a burden and you know, we all know motherhood is, is difficult, but it just felt like a burden. It felt like her job was a burden. She didn’t seem like she loved the, the pets either.

[00:12:09] You just kind of.

[00:12:11] Penny: Yeah.

[00:12:11] Kirsten: Yeah.

[00:12:12] Tara: I gotta go to work and this is what I can do. And that just made me so sad. It just, it, it just brought me down. And I do agree that the agent was the most, you know, well-rounded, but as a black woman, for me, that kind of felt a little stereotypical. So I kind of just kind of washed my hands of that and, and just, and just let it go. So

[00:12:41] Suki: But on the other hand, if she had made the black woman be the influencer who’s, you know, got her facelift and got her, you know, her, her boob lift and everything, that could have been cringey too. So, I dunno, what do you

[00:12:56] Tara: true, but she didn’t have to be the sensible one per se. You know, and then the little, the part where she was thinking about having a child. Just like those things were glossed over, the cancer was kind of glossed over, and so I kind of felt like it didn’t feel as authentic as it could have been possibly.

[00:13:16] Suki: yeah, yeah.

[00:13:17] Penny: the other thing that felt tied up in a bow to me that disturbed me was when she got back with her husband, because I just didn’t believe that, you know, she wasn’t a single mother.

[00:13:26] I mean, he was there, he was, and they do get back together. And that’s also not like. There’s a story that wasn’t being told because they kind of, you know, sort of tied that piece up as well.

[00:13:38] Suki: I know, I do know that they in fact, had to cut, they just ran out of money and had to cut a lot of that relationship. But I think what, what Brooke said that I think is something interesting to talk about, just sort of on the, um, general topic of women not realizing their best selves in a sense, is that Ramona’s friends, when they have the whole, um.

[00:14:01] is this an intervention scene? They tell her something that is probably very true of her, that she was very competitive and when she was first out the gate, she was not nice to them.

[00:14:13] Tara: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:14:15] Penny: was interesting. Yeah.

[00:14:16] Suki: So, so things in this, in this film are making us uncomfortable for a variety of reasons.

[00:14:24] And how do you think that it made you feel about choices you have or haven’t made in your life?

[00:14:33] Christine: I can speak to, I, you know, there, there is a really amazingly well-written and thoughtful book called Silencing the Self that was written many decades ago about how statistically speaking. Very accomplished, powerful women lose themselves once they get married, and that’s what I saw in Ramona. And I also did that.

[00:14:56] I married somebody who was very, very powerful, talented, brilliant. And I, I. I did this, I was raised in a pretty, uh, religious family and I did this accommodation thing and I had to like awaken out of it and, um, get myself back. And so I, yeah. So I feel like all that fire and competition, that’s why I say I felt like she had completely lost herself. So that trajectory of her, like getting herself back and even wanting to write to Patty Smith, that’s a really healthy sign. And that’s why I was really. Ticked off when she took her husband back so easily. And I know sometimes decisions have to be made in films, but it, but it was also like the trauma moment where, where something bad happened and she was feeling vulnerable and it felt like she took him back for that reason instead of like, I fucking love you and I don’t wanna live without you.

[00:15:54] Penny: Yeah. And her husband wasn’t like a really powerful guy. He was like a struggling actor. Right. Um, so, which was an interesting relationship ’cause he was struggl, it didn’t go very deep into the relationship, but he was struggling himself as well. Um, he was middle aged and still struggling to get parts and find his footing

[00:16:13] Tara: So you mentioned that and what was funny to me is that he was kind of like, I’m sober, I’m working out, I’m doing meditation. Let me help you. And I thought, ugh.

[00:16:27] Kirsten: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:28] Tara: Like, you know, I, I don’t know that that bo that part kind of bothered me about that situation. Like, you know, I have this, I’m this man and I have the solution to all your problems kind of thing.

[00:16:41] Penny: I mean, he was there like to help with the daughter and everything. I mean, he wasn’t like he was an absent, you know, divorced father that, I mean, he was covering when she went on dates and he was there for the daughter and seemed to have a good relationship. Um, he wasn’t, you know, somebody who was, um, self-centered or, um,

[00:17:01] Christine: He was pretty self-centered. He did

[00:17:03] Penny: Or maybe he was. Yeah.

[00:17:04] Christine: very, he was, he struck me as very self-centered, but also

[00:17:08] like showing up in a certain way, but not like fully like embodied, you know? There have been more scenes with him saying like, this is how I completely screwed things up. This is how I totally let you down.

[00:17:21] This is why you kicked me out, and, um, and I am doing better and I’m so glad because you kicked me out. But yeah, I, I agree with this thing of like, I’m doing all this stuff.

[00:17:32] Penny: And I come from an alcoholic family, so I know what it’s like to be in recovery and you know, they’re, they kind of like see the light all of a sudden and, you know, turn the um,

[00:17:43] This is Suki breaking in here after the fact. This is the point in the conversation where listening to it, I realized what a success the movie is. We aren’t talking about these characters as characters, but rather as people that were amused by, annoyed by, and frankly quite pissed off at. There’s a bit more of that to come for sure. I loved how we saw in Ramona’s Choices, things we were angry about and things that we related to. And

[00:18:07] Kirsten: When I looked at it more as, as a very big picture, I saw her. as she is right, you know, in at the beginning. Then looking back at at all the dreams maybe that she had and all the things that she thought were going to happen and having life come in and life happen and you know, now she’s working here or there, and that wasn’t really what she expected of her life.

[00:18:29] And then seeing what everybody else is doing around her and then comparing herself to that. And I think that that happens a lot more in our society than people want to actually admit that, you know, we look at what our friends are doing or, or our peers are doing and think, oh wow, I wish I would’ve been able to do that.

[00:18:50] Or I, I, I should be here at this point right now. And I thought that was really interesting aspect of the movie.

[00:18:58] Suki: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:59] Tara: That was, that was also interesting to me. ’cause I think when I talk about my friend group, I took time out to be a stay at home mom and quote unquote, I was the one that went to the best school, you know? And. I went to work at a bookstore, you know, and I didn’t think anything of it. And then I got married and I stayed at home.

[00:19:20] And I guess I didn’t put myself in competition with them because like three of my friends have their PhD. You know, they’re scientists, so that part for me was not as easy to relate to, that you would be in competition with your friends in that way.

[00:19:39] So then I kind of wondered, well, were they friends or were they, you know, I don’t know. And then so, so is this newfound friendship, authentic? I don’t know, is it her? I mean, she left her friend when she met a man at a club on a friend’s birthday. That kind of, that didn’t sit well with me, you know? Um.

[00:20:03] Penny: Yeah.

[00:20:03] Suki: I, I really got the sense that, that it was more of a friendship of three women who were really striving and each one of them. Gets someplace, one of them gets someplace really quickly and then fails. One of them chips away at stuff and gets in.

[00:20:22] You know, all of us who have practiced any sort of art know that there are people who end up in the business side of art. because they are the solid person, the person who, who can say to a, a writer with a straight face, you need to get a lawyer, you need to go through with this.

[00:20:39] You need to do this. Whereas the rest of us would be like, oh honey, I understand how you feel. What should we do about this? I’m gonna cry now. And then there was the one that was more of the, the show person, you know? so yeah. Was it a friendship? I’m, I’m not sure.

[00:20:55] Kirsten: Yeah,

[00:20:55] Christine: not a friendship I can relate

[00:20:57] Kirsten: no.

[00:20:58] Voiceover: Suki breaking in. Again, I pointed out that we were having an unusual conversation. Very few films, delve into female relationships at this level. I asked my friends how it felt to watch women characters be exposed in this way.

[00:21:11] Christine: I mean, I’m trying hard. To think of another film where a woman is the central character. And, I love to see anything that’s made about women. And, um, I think the challenge in this film are things we’ve discussed, but they did make her, uh, it was wonderful that they depicted her as real.

[00:21:35] Kirsten: I think it made it more authentic actually. I think that was probably one of the, you know, just watching her ha you know, her hair and the light coming through her hair and she’s wakes up like, Ugh, I can’t believe I have to wake up. You know, it’s, it’s a little

[00:21:51] Penny: She, she doesn’t wake up with a full face of

[00:21:53] Kirsten: Right, right. I thought I made it a little bit more authentic.

[00:21:59] Christine: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:01] Tara: that’s what makes it hard, that she wasn’t necessarily happy about anything. You know, she didn’t, I don’t know. She didn’t feel I. Fulfilled by what, what she was doing, even in her kind of private moments where she was writing. It didn’t, you didn’t really see that kind of euphoria, you know, when she reconnected back to being able to write.

[00:22:23] Um, so maybe that, that’s a little bit of the discomfort there.

[00:22:29] Suki: You know, um, not to harp on how much we hate that young mom character, but you know, she was sort of this antagonist.

[00:22:35] Tara: It kind of was a good, um, juxtaposition between Ramona and this character who was kind of like, I’m gonna do this today. I’m gonna be a, I’m gonna be a vegetarian. I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be a sub, I’m gonna be, I don’t know. I’m gonna go to hot yoga. You know, it was so, she didn’t know where she was, which that was not Ramona.

[00:22:56] When she was that age. Ramona knew exactly what she was doing. Um. She knew what she wanted to be. She was working hard at it, she was being successful at it. So to put those two together and to have this like, as Suki mentioned, this kind of odd character, be the one that nudges her, like is the one that mentioned her to Jonah, and put her kind of in this position to be written about again.

[00:23:26] Is very interesting to me. ’cause she’s the one that kind of forces her to reengage with life in a, you know, and, and not just keep going through the motions, which is kind of what she was doing anyway.

[00:23:39] Penny: But you know what I loved, I loved her daughter and the relationship the two daughters had. I thought that was very sweet. I mean, they were very bonded and their sleepover and I, I have to express a pet peeve. But man, when she was throwing back those tequila shots. S with the director dude, and then she gets a call from her kid and she

[00:24:00] Tara: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:00] Christine: car.

[00:24:01] Tara: Yeah. Yeah,

[00:24:03] Penny: Yeah, I saw that. It was like, what the hell?

[00:24:05] Christine: and that, that she thought that that ditzy woman was anybody in that family. Like not in a million fricking years I’d hire somebody like,

[00:24:15] Tara: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:16] Christine: way.

[00:24:16] Anyway.

[00:24:17] Tara: Yeah. She didn’t make the best decisions in, in, in several instances.

[00:24:23] Kirsten: Yes.

[00:24:25] Suki: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. You know, we are, we’re always saying that we want flawed, realistic characters, right?

[00:24:34] Tara: Mean, that’s why I said it was inspiring to me because, you know, we are flawed. You know, that’s, that’s what we are. We do change ourselves. We do lose parts of ourselves. I mean, I loved being a stay-at-home mom, but I gave up quite a bit in order to do that, you know, and my friends did pass me by, I was happy for them, but I also was happy doing what I was doing. But then you have this other change. Your kids graduate from college, and then it’s like, well, what now? What? You know? So I think for me it was just this, this feeling of. There’s always something. There’s always a next thing. There’s always a next thing. Just do you want it, you know? And sometimes the next thing is something that you plan and sometimes you get fired as a vet tech and you have to figure some stuff out, you know? Um. Sometimes it’s catastrophic and sometimes it’s just you wake up and you wanna do something different and you decide to do it.

[00:25:33] I think that’s one of our superpowers. As women, we always change. We always grow, you know?

[00:25:40] Christine: But I’ll say that estrogen is this like. Amazing chemical that is like a veil over us that makes us so giving so accommodating, so nurturing. I, I really would love if our culture honored that more and sought for the treasure.

[00:25:59] For which it is. And I’ll tell you, when it got withdrawn from me, I was like, wow, I’m not taking any more crap from anybody. And it was like

[00:26:11] Penny: I love that.

[00:26:11] Christine: like Mother Nature was like, let me give you a gift and take away your estrogen. And I was like, let’s do this. So glory.

[00:26:19] Tara: I love that.

[00:26:22] Kirsten: For me when like just watching how. She went through this, like it was really questioning, right? She’s questioning a lot of things, like questioning her choices and everything. And then it kind of seemed like at the end that she accepted that, okay, these were my choices and I did this for a reason to raise my daughter, and, and now I am going to do something else and I can do something else.

[00:26:46] And I think, and that, I think that that’s really pretty powerful. Pretty much what, you know, what all of you guys were saying. So it’s kind of like another reinventing, you know, we look at where we are, where we’ve been, and we kind of reinvent and then we maybe, maybe it goes in the cycle, right?

[00:27:01] Penny: I always thought as I got older and more mature, like life would just get easier and it would be this like, you know, like down hurt. Like you’ve gone up and now you’ve gotten somewhere and, and instead it’s like, you know, it’s full of so much loss and struggle and it’s gotten harder.

[00:27:17] Suki: To me that’s sort of the. The big thing I took away from this that, that so many of us stop ourselves from doing what we want to do and we have good excuses. Needing to support her family was a good excuse, right?

[00:27:32] Kirsten: Yes.

[00:27:33] Suki: But it wasn’t the right excuse and she needed to double down on her writing and you know, why didn’t her husband get a job waiting?

[00:27:43] Tables don’t,

[00:27:44] Penny: Yes, certainly he wasn’t.

[00:27:46] Kirsten: right.

[00:27:47] Tara: but don’t we always fall on the sword? You know, that’s a part of it also, right? We’re the, we’re the nurturer, so we’re gonna, we’re gonna take that job that we don’t really want.

[00:28:06] Voiceover: I asked everyone to offer a few last words now that we had hashed out our rather complicated feelings about Ramona at midlife.

[00:28:13] I hope you enjoyed our conversation and thanks for listening. Not living at all by Mr. Airplane. Man is courtesy of free music archive.org.

[00:28:24]

[00:28:24] Penny: I’m transformational.

[00:28:26] Tara: I’ll say thankful.

[00:28:28] Kirsten: How about persevere?

[00:28:29] Christine: I am, I’m gonna say rock on that a woman wrote this and directed it and made it about women.

[00:28:35] Suki: I completely agree. Thank you.

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