Breakfast at Tiffany's: glamour, romance, and gilded cages

 Breakfast at Tiffany’s: glamour, romance, and gilded cages

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of those stories people seem to know of but have never watched. You might know that Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard star in it, you might know Henry Mancini did the soundtrack, and that it features the song “Moon River” and perhaps you know that it was based on the novella of the same name by Truman Capote, published in 1958. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is, at first glance, utterly glamorous, and Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly is the epitome of class and effortless elegance. The opening titles are iconic, Hepburn’s rendition of “Moon River” well-loved, and the aesthetic of the film is just classy. 

But there are demons which haunt this story and its characters. There’s a yawning chasm between the glamorous way this film is remembered and the content of its story, which is itself much sadder and darker than I think people anticipate when watching this film for the first time. Yes there are parties, and romance, and fantastic fashion choices, but there’s also the sense of a foiled American Dream, the breakdown of personal relationships, engagement in criminal networks, and poverty, to name but a few issues at work in the story. Fiction is the veneer behind which lurk unpleasant truths. Holly Golightly lives a life full of parties, excitement, and raucous entertainment, all driven by her happy-go-lucky attitude. She’s an attractive character because of those things, and we’re just as drawn to her as Paul Varjak, her new neighbour, is. There’s something about Holly’s hedonism that makes the troubles of real life melt away, but that’s not enough to dispel the shadows which hang over her. 

Holly’s financial situation, we soon discover, is actually highly unstable, reliant on a relationship with a man at Sing-Sing Prison, amongst other variously dodgy characters. She’s behind on rent, she owes various people money or favours, and she frequently continues to ask people for more money and more favours. She has relationships with lots of people who all want her attention at all times, and expect her to want the same when she really couldn’t think of anything worse. Holly has a crippling fear of being tied to people, romantically or otherwise, and this is something the people in her life realise a little too late. And so we start to see the edges burn; what we first saw as Holly’s easy friendships with lots of people becomes an inability to develop long-term relationships out of fear and self-preservation, what we first saw as her miraculous ability to live a life without needing to rely on money becomes a life relying on other people whose pockets she’s charmed her way into. 

None of this is to say that Holly Golightly is a bad person and a bad role model. She’s a troubled woman, trying to live the life she wants to live by any means she can find. She’s running from her demons, but she doesn’t know where to start with any kind of healing. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of those stories which, I believe, has been wildly misunderstood and therefore underappreciated. Yes, it’s fabulously glamorous and aesthetically a beautiful film, and Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard are excellent in their principal roles, but there’s a real complexity to the story of Holly Golightly that needs to be considered deeply. Stories like Holly Golightly’s are not so far from real life, though they might do everything they can to maintain the sense of fantasy that makes life palatable. Interrogating stories like Holly Golightly’s might in fact give us a better sense of what it means to hide from the truths we’re running from, and the ways in which we might try to stop running.