Actresses we love: Lili Taylor
Lily Taylor has played practically every important and compelling role that women have been given in the past 20 years—the pioneering suicidal oversharer Corey in Say Anything (a film about insufferable dudes & the awesome chicks who love them, as far as I’m concerned) (1989); the altar-ditching Jojo, one third of a classic Positive Female Relationship in Mystic Pizza (1988); some sort of prized ugly girl-turned-River-Phoenix’s-date in Dogfight (a kind of proto-She’s All That directed by Nancy Savoca, 1991); an adolescent Catholic woman determined to prove her piety through a series of self-martyring acts on the way to her dream of canonization in Household Saints (also directed by Nancy Savoca, 1991); the 1920s novelist Edna Ferber in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, 1994.
Lili Taylor played Patti, a teen mother and avenger of misogyny in the coming-of-age feminist rape-revenge film Girls Town, 1996; she played the notoriously fridged Lisa, the mother of Nate’s daughter and the Madonna to Brenda’s Whore in Six Feet Under. Most importantly, Lili Taylor played none other than Valerie Solanas in Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol (1996).
Lili Taylor is an important actress.
From Dazed & Confused, 1996:
Lili Taylor identifies with the spectacle of boxing; the hype, the corruption and the ceremony that surrounds two fighters in a ring, because she sees herself as a fighter in the spectacle of film. She fights for her choice of roles and the films she makes. She fights to prevent the press stereotyping her with lingerie and make-up, trying to make her something she’s not. She fights because she’s sick of it. “It’s like, guys, let’s expand our notion. We’ve seen this kind of woman. Can’t we just take a risk and see a woman who does something different?”
I realized all these selves were apparent throughout the manifesto. She was so unconscious. She didn’t realize how transparent she was. But still a very complicated person and very hard to understand. First she just didn’t seem real to me. I couldn’t imagine her in real situations. That was the first thing I had to do. All these assumptions that I had - she disproved them all. I thought she would be very mean with men - very aggressive. She’s very shy and nice. So, every day I was surprised…Why do some people snap and some people don’t? Why couldn’t she make it? Why? She had so much potential and yet she was such a nihilist. She sabotaged her life. And they were misdiagnosing women then so it’s hard to know, what she was, really.
…The manifesto is very funny. Valerie said in an interview - They said ‘Do you really want to kill all men?’ and she said, ‘Course not. What do you think, I’m crazy?’ She knew what she was doing, in certain ways, and in other ways she didn’t. But she was very funny. I saw the humor in the manifesto when I read it. She was started talking about her plan of killing all the men, I just thought it was so outrageous that it couldn’t really be her plan of action.
…When I read that manifesto I’d never seen anything like it, and even today I still don’t read writing like that; that’s so unapologetic, that just crushes though all these layers we have and gets right to the crux. If we had fifteen women in a room she’d be perfect for one part, to shake things up, getting us riled up and then get Valerie out and pull somebody else in who is a little bit more diplomatic. I don’t even know if she wanted to stir things up, I don’t think she knew any other way.
…I empathise with her. I wouldn’t want to be her friend, though. She was very anti-social, she was the only member of her organisation. She wasn’t really into getting along. She was very irascible, controlling, driven — and she didn’t listen that well.
…I don’t know if she was misunderstood. I feel she was dismissed and shoved into the way back and I feel she was complicated and had a lot of faults but to dismiss her completely isn’t right. I know I learned certain things from her. So at least people can read the manifesto and see this very complicated woman who lived. It’s yet one more woman to add to this narrow spectrum that we have of women in film and theater.
YES
I FUCKING LOVE LILI TAYLOR AND ALSO IF I COULD CHOOSE THE SOUND OF MY OWN VOICE, IT WOULD BE HERS. best voice ever.
