mirrorball

The first thing about Mirrorball that stood out to me as being very different from the "British style" was Mary Gaitskill's intense focus on the characters' internal issues rather than having the plot be externally based. Because the actual physical plot is minimal, Gaitskill had to spend a lot of time getting deep and exploring and analyzing the emotions of the boy and the girl, so most of the story is a really drawn out (not necessarily in a bad way), narrative of the different emotions that they both experience as well as elaborate personifications of intangible things like souls and desire. I think that the way Gaitskill shows us what is going on in each of their minds is really honest and clearly shows how conflicted they both are. For example, the boy shutting of his emotions toward the girl: "Thoughts of the girl came to him, and with those thoughts, fear that he didn't understand. Because he didn't want to be afraid, he had contempt for her. He thought that would work", or the girl projecting her feeling for the boy onto other things: "She would suddenly weep at the sight of an old woman on the bus, or bewilder a friend with her excited analysis of a television character. But the intensity of feeling was misplaced and did not satisfy her. Her mind seized on triviality and substance without being able to tell the difference between the two". It is clear that they are both thinking about each other a lot and in a romantic comedy would be reunited at the end, but I think Gaitskill's ending is so much more honest and realistic because of all the weird, subtle, obsessive insecurity and doubt that goes into a relationship like that and ends up crumbling it.