Truths, mirrors, and homosexuality in The Goldfinch and Y Tu Mama También
A still from The Goldfinch, 2019 dir. John Crowley
August 2023. I’ve finally watched Y Tu Mama También after hearing about it from friends for ages. I couple the watch with my favorite worst movie of all time, The Goldfinch. The former is as old as me, featuring actors I’ve only seen in adult roles playing 17-year-olds. The latter, the first movie I saw at university, also after hearing about it from friends. The only thing I knew about both going in is that they were about repression. And what is repression but a lie, carefully hidden, even to yourself?
Y Tu Mama También, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, tells the story of two boys, Tenoch and Julio, in Mexico. Tenoch is an aspiring writer, the son of a wealthy politician, who grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth and a loveless family. Julio is a hick, the child of a broken marriage, who dreams of traveling. They are best friend in the world and after this summer, they will never be again. Both boys are desperate to get laid after their girlfriends leave the country for the holidays, and after meeting a beautiful relative at a wedding, Luisa, they convince her they can take her to the best beach in Mexico, Heaven’s Mouth. This is a lie.
The Goldfinch, directed by John Crowley, is an adaptation of the novel by Donna Tartt. It follows Theo, a New Yorker who recalls his adolescence from a hotel room in Amsterdam as he is about to kill himself. When he was a teenager, he was caught in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, in which is mother died. Shell-shocked and concussed, Theo finds a dying man who begs him to take one of the paintings. Theo leaves the museum with Fabriatus’ ‘Goldfinch’. Briefly living with his alcoholic father in Las Vegas, Theo meets Boris. Boris is a Ukrainian immigrant, following his father who digs mines. The boys strike an unlikely friendship, trying to survive a neglectful and lonely adolescence together. They shoplift, do drugs, get drunk and maybe have sex. After Theo’s father dies in a car accident, Theo realizes he must escape Las Vegas. He begs Boris to join him but Boris stays behind, leaving him with a kiss and a promise to meet him in New York. This is also a lie.
Both movies deal with lies, and consequently, truths. Y Tu Mama También has an omniscient narrator, telling us the truths behind the lies. Not every emotion is anger, sometimes they are what you felt when you saw your mother cheat, when you heard your father was a crook, when you saw your nanny’s birthplace and realized she loved you more than your mother. Not that you’d tell anyone that, of course. In The Goldfinch, lies are plain, in every expression and word choice from the characters. Theo, the emeralds are beautiful but they’re not my color (I don’t love you). This is a genuine American Chippendale, Mr Reeves (It’s a changeling, made of scavenged pieces). I need some money for a liquor license, Theo (I owe money to loan sharks).
A still from The Goldfinch, 2019 dir. John Crowley
Theo deals in lies. He sells lies, for a living. He looks at himself in mirrors and sees a cultured young man who wears bespoke suits, and swims twice a week. This persona is also a lie. He is carefully treading a web of lies around himself and getting surprised when he is eaten by the biggest lie of them all. The ‘Goldfinch’. The last piece of his mother, Theo’s heart. Stolen by Boris in Vegas, lost around the time Theo gets engaged to Kitsey. The one thing that should never have been his to take. A heart, concealed in newspaper and stashed under beds. Lost and found, again and again.
In Y Tu Mama También, Tenoch and Julio claim themselves 'charolastras', a group of friends proud and united. As they tell Luisa their manifesto, she comes to realizes their friendship bonds them as one.
'Five: Don’t sleep with another’s girl.'
'Ten: Truth is ideal but unreachable.'
They tell Luisa anecdotes, selfishly embellished but always true, and always incompletely so. They know truth is impossible. There’s always the little lies that no one needs to know. Julio lights a match when he uses Tenoch’s toilets. Tenoch lifts the toilet seat with his foot even at Julio’s house. And there’s the big lies. The impossible to comprehend lies. Not because they’re unbelievable, but because they’d never expect them to be shared. Both boys slept with the other’s girl. Their friendship is irrevocably broken. They are no longer as one, they always appear separated by mirrors. Even from Luisa, as she cries over the payphone and, reflected in the booth glass, Tenoch and Julio play babyfoot.
A still from Y Tu Mama También, 2001 dir. Alfonso Cuarón
Every lie has its equal opposite truth. Over the course of the road trip, sex, lies and truths mingle as we ask ourselves if these boys will ever find a way to figure it out. Figure out how to live with betrayal, how to live with a lie revealed, with a truth hidden. Do they fight over Luisa because they want to fuck her, or fuck each other? Is the real truth that, to love a boy, one would have to surrender ? Or is it that they have wanted it for so long and despite having words for it that it has become as natural as gravity?
Believing a lie is easier than accepting a hard truth. Even if Tenoch and Julio’s kiss did not shatter the world, it is easier to believe that it has, that it could. To push back in its corner, to unknow it. After coming back home, the boys stop seeing each other. They meet accidentally and grab courteous coffee. An excuse. Catch up. Did you hear Daniel came out? Daniel, the fourth member of the 'charolastras’, always mentioned but never seen, looms over the narrative like a spectre. A shadow of what these boys could be if they decided to be true to themselves. A saint, a martyr, a cautionary tale. He got kicked out of his house, but he’s happy. The untold question: could we? Tenoch tells Julio that Luisa died. Cancer, she had it everywhere. She knew she was going to die when they met her. The biggest lie of them all. Luisa outdid them. Truth is always ideal but impossible. It would require to confront oneself with fear. The overbearing, all-encompassing fear that comes with being alive.
The movie ends on a lie. 'Keep in touch.' The narrator tells us they will never see each other again. It makes you think back on what the narrator chooses to mention and why. Why he chooses to tell us the truth behind the lies of the characters. Or why he chooses to tell us that a car crash happened moments before the characters were here. Both movies deal with death. Witnessing it full on, like Theo’s mother’s or like the pedestrian getting run over at the start of Y Tu Mama También. The aftershocks of it, a second car crash in a small town, long before the characters ever drove through, or Theo’s father’s car crash, that is never shown but tilts an entire world off of its axis. The death you live your life alongside of, like cancer or addiction. The deaths that hit harder than you’d expect, like Luisa’s or Theo’s friend, Andy, who always said he hated sailing and drowned. Deaths you’re only told too long after they happened. Death, truths, and mirrors.
'You see, her death was my fault. Everybody used to tell me that it wasn’t. That it was a terrible accident. Which is all perfectly true. And I don’t believe a word of it.'
There are objective truths and subjective truths. Truth you believe so hard you sometimes forget they are lies. You are responsible for your mother’s death. Theo knows he is not yet he has come to believe he is, because he is. He was the reason they were in the museum. He carries this secret with him. And what is a secret but a lie?
When Pippa, the other victim of the bombing who survived where her caretaker died, tells him she also blames herself for what happened. Walty, the dying man who urged Theo to steal the painting, was taking her to a rehearsal. She tells Theo that because of what happened to them, they will be forever both connected and separated. For, in the middle, is the painting. Theo tells us. 'Before and after. Everything would be before and after. And, in the middle, is the painting.' Pippa’s before was music but after the accident, she becomes unable to listen to music as it makes her too unstable. Theo never seems to understand that, taking her to Glenn Gould’s concerts and wondering why it makes her cry.
Sometimes two people are too similar and if one were to fall, the other would follow, and sometimes two people can carry each other and not fall because they are so similar. Theo laments over Pippa not loving him, while trapping himself in a loveless marriage. Pippa spends the first half of the film not even knowing who he is. They are both similar by what happened to them at the museum and complete opposites. Pippa closed the door on her past while Theo locked himself in with it. It would take Theo too much to look away from Pippa and stare in a mirror and realize that Boris stands right beside him. Boris knows the worst of him. The best of him. Boris who knew Theo at his lowest and saw him sink some more. Boris was the one who saved his life, who saved his heart. But it would take a far bigger mirror for Theo to look past the lie he’s hidden even from himself. The lie, and thus the truth, half remembered of a Thanksgiving night.
What both movies tell us is as simple as this: Truths don’t matter. Maybe Heaven’s Mouth is real. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe Theo was responsible for his mother’s death. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe all would have been better if a boy had just been able to love another boy. Maybe it wouldn’t have. A lie is a truth as long as it exists, and as long as there is a mirror to reveal it.
A still from Y Tu Mama También, 2001 dir. Alfonso Cuarón