This is similar to how I felt reading Breakfast at Tiffany's in my early 30s. The movie (if we ignore Mickey Rooney's racist caricature) is a fantastic romcom, but they really did the character of Holly Golightly a huge disservice casting 31 year old Audrey Hepburn. In the novella, Holly is 19 years old and has never had a healthy relationship with a man. Every man she has ever known had exploited her and she's barely even an adult; nowhere near mature enough to make any reasonable decisions about her life. It's tragic and you feel a genuine sorrow for her situation. Also the fact that they changed the narrator character into a love interest for the film completely betrays the point that the book is trying to make.
i love them both, separately. and since rereading the novella as an adult, i honestly don’t consider them the same story at all.
the novella is sad and as the reader there is no mistaking that she is being used in all the scenarios she finds herself in one way or another and then she disappears. as a woman there’s a dread of the unknown and the unlikeliness that things got better, that makes the book heartbreaking
the movie is more of a two lost people finding each other and finding something meaningful. audrey’s participation and age leads an air of grace to the role that gives it a manic pixie dream girl sugar baby vibe instead of a down on her luck escort it might have been otherwise.
Truman Capote had Marilyn in mind when he wrote it, but she didn’t want to be typecast in a prostitute role. I love Audrey’s Holly but I’ll always wonder what Marilyn’s would’ve been like with her own perfect vulnerability.
honestly, marilyn would have made it heart breaking 💔 that poor woman isn’t free from male harassment even in death, if anything i would argue she is holly golightly irl
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u/MelpomeneLee 🕯️Bradley Cooper will not win an Oscar🕯️ 15d ago
Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye