The beast kills beauty
Fan Girl (2020)
In the 1940s, two teenage girls broke into Van Johnson’s house and barricaded themselves in his bathroom. This tidbit is mentioned briefly alongside other alarming and questionable fan behavior in Van’s biography, MGM’s Golden Boy by Ronald Davis.
That story fascinates me more than the rest. What happened afterwards? Who were these girls? How did they manage it? How were they caught? And so on and so forth.
Breaking into a heartthrob’s home is the central premise of the Filipino movie Fan Girl. A high school girl is so desperately in love with her movie star idol Paulo Avelino (playing himself), that she sneaks onto his pickup truck after he leaves a fan event.
When I read the synopsis, I imagined the movie would be a Bluebeard retelling. And it reminded me strongly of those two bobby-soxers in Van Johnson’s house.
Fan Girl’s name isn’t revealed until the end of the film. Almost as if her identity is overridden by her obsession. After drifting off to sleep in the truck, she wakes to a nighttime sky and finds herself in a deserted woods. A villa looms in the distance behind a locked gate. Paulo suddenly materializes behind the gate, and beckons to Fan Girl. This nighttime fantasy looks and feels an awful lot like a fairy tale, with all the sinister undertones intact.
When Paulo discovers her, he begrudgingly lets her stay. The villa is abandoned and looks exactly like a fairy tale castle with its creeping vines and candlelit rooms.
Fan Girl soon makes a startling discovery of her own: Paulo is not at all the sweet romantic hero in his films. He drinks and uses drugs. But the rosy illusion isn’t shattered, at least not yet. He’s just a regular guy. Fan Girl is still smitten. Maybe you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but they’re probably not villains either.
In Golden Boy, Davis wrote that Van’s allure to young girls was due to his non-threatening sexual virility. Turning Red also portrayed a tame masculinity that’s vastly appealing to pre-teens. The Pixar movie isn’t as overt in its depiction of sexual awakening as Fan Girl. Her feelings aren’t innocent; when Paulo parks his truck by the side of the road to pee, she sneakily takes a picture of his penis, giggling over how big it is.
The bobby-soxers were most likely just as horny back then, too. Greer Garson described Van as a big and burly Shirley Temple, but no one, including me, is swooning over his freckles alone!
But it’s not only adolescent giggling over Paulo’s anatomy. At one point, the shining gold of Fan Girl’s innocent fantasy dissolves into muddiness. It’s just like a scene from a fairy tale with her and Paulo dancing in their dream world. Then, while asleep, she imagines him removing her clothes, but it’s really her undressing herself and simulating the sex act. At first, it seems like that’s the only sexual encounter she’ll have with Paulo. But her fantasy does come true; only it’s far crueler. Her eyes become opened to how villainous Paulo truly is. He’s an ordinary guy: indistinguishable from the men on street corners who catcall and her mother’s abusive boyfriend.
Fan Girl’s name is revealed to be Jane at the film’s conclusion. A Jane Doe like countless faceless, nameless girls and women. And the bad man who hurt them too often go unpunished, their names and faces forever haloed in lights.
Van Johnson, who was born today in 1916, shocked his fans and the country when he married Evie Wynn. Evie had only just divorced Van’s best friend Keenan a few hours previously. The trio were so close that rumors swirled about their “unnatural” friendship. Evie would say later that she was forced into the marriage to quell other rumors about Van’s sexuality. A juicy scandal to be sure, but not one that I care about or that makes me look at Van any different. I don’t think it was right, and he wasn’t exactly an ideal husband, but I’ve never been inclined to think less of him. The scandal made the bobby-soxers turn their backs on Van. His marriage to Evie was a betrayal and no doubt his homosexuality would’ve scandalized them more.
One thing is true for fan girls today as it was for the bobby-soxers: the fantasy is just that. Like Jane, your only hope is to pretend for as long as you can.