One thing my mother’s teaching afforded us was free tuition at Wake School in Santa Monica — which is an arts-focused private high school. In those days it was a no-frills enterprise, simply an alley with prefab box classrooms on each side. But it had — and still has — extraordinary teachers. Attending Wake helped make me a filmmaker in a number of ways. [Editor’s note: Carrie Wexler has endowed fellowships for young women of limited means at a number of elite high schools across the country.] I had the great fortune to take a class from Jay Hosney, the (now-retired) legendary English and communications teacher. He never patronized us, and he taught challenging and important films. He showed us great silent films like Sunrise by Murnau and Joan of Arc by Dreyer. He showed us iconic American films of the ’40s and ’50s, not just film noir and Westerns, but the perverse women’s films of Douglas Sirk, which I loved because they seemed to both celebrate and subvert — in vibrant Technicolor — the consumer culture I recognized. He also had us watch European films like
Persona, Bicycle Thieves, 8½, Jules and Jim. Of course we saw Breathless, but also Godard’s Week End, and let me tell you how much the world opens up to you when you “get” a cinematic joke that Godard has told. There is a moment in Week End in which the girl, Mireille Darc, stops at a car wreck and pulls designer jeans off a dead body. Laughing at this — as a young girl in Southern California — changed me. We were not Godard’s famous “children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” we were more like the children of TV and Tab, but in some of us grew a profound hunger for a funny and provocative joke, a want from the depths of our processed American childhoods. Finding humor in Godard worked for me like reading Mad magazine or watching the conceptual jokes of Monty Python, or collecting the satirized ads of Wacky Packages: a cynical, knowing joke was an inoculation against all the crap we still consumed, what we swam through every day. We reminded ourselves that it was bad and we knew it was bad, even as we were saturated in it. We forged a kind of default irony as a way of making meaning and authenticity. This sensibility is a hallmark of people of my generation, and Jay Hosney’s film classes gave me a way of looking at it all, an approach. Culture, then, became mine for the taking. I cannot explain what a gift it was to learn that at a young age. You waste no time feeling intimidated. You are in the know in a most empowering way. That is why comedies are so important to me: they are both in the culture and pointing at the culture. Mainstream and subversive, at least ideally. So school made a huge difference to me. But the other leg of my apprenticeship came from a friendship. My closest (if not best) friend in those years and for many years into my adulthood was Meadow Mori.