Unit 5

The Tapestry of Friendship

Ellen Goodman

1 It was, in many ways, a slight movie. Nothing actually happened. There was

no big-budget chase scene, no bloody shoot-out. The story ended without any cosmic conclusions.

2 Yet she found Claudia Weill’s film Girlfriend gentle and affecting. Slowly, it

panned across the tapestry of friendship – showing its fragility, its resiliency, its role as the connecting tissue between the lives of two young women.

3 When it was over, she thought about the movies she had seen this year –

Julia，The Turning Point and now Girlfriends. It seemed that the peculiar eye, the social lens of the cinema, had drastically shifted its focus. Suddenly the Male Buddy movies had been replaced by the Female Friendship flicks.

4 This wasn’t just another binge of trendiness, but a kind of cinema vérité. For

once the movies were reflecting a shift, not just from men to women but from one definition of friendship to another.

5 Across millions of miles of celluloid, the ideal of friendship had always been

male – a world of sidekicks and ―partners‖ of Butch Cassidys and Sundance Kids. There had been something almost atavistic about these visions of attachments – as if producers culled their plots from some pop anthropology book on male bonding. Movies portrayed the idea that only men, those direct descendants of hunters and Hemingways, inherited a primal capacity for friendship. In contrast, they portrayed women picking on each other, the way they once picked berries.

6 Well, that duality must have been mortally wounded in some shootout at the

You’re OK, I’m OK Corral. Now, on the screen, they were at least aware of the subtle distinction between men and women as buddies and friends.

7 About 150 years ago, Coleridge had written, ―A woman’s friendship borders

more closely on love than man’s. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts, whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment.‖

8 Well, she thought, on the whole, men had buddies, while women had friends.

Buddies bonded, but friends loved. Buddies faced adversity together, but friends faced each other. There was something palpably different in the way they spent their time. Buddies seemed to ―do‖ things together; friends simply ―were‖ together.