The Girl on the Train

I am the girl on the train

I am played by Emily Blunt who is a much better actress in this movie even than she is usually because she has been allowed by the director and producer to retain her British accent.

I don’t exactly know why they call me a girl. As I am a woman.

Oh well.

I have a problem.

It is difficult for me to talk about the problem because, well, it’s difficult for me to talk about pretty well anything as I am an alcoholic.

You can tell I am an alcoholic because my hair has not been washed recently and I speak slowly and with difficulty and I walk down roads in the rain looking lonely and I gaze at you pitifully looking for some sort of pity because I am so pitiful

Every day I ride on the train and you think I’m going to work at first but it is revealed at a later point that in actual fact I am just traveling on the train every day for no reason because my life is hopeless

And every day I see a beautiful young woman with slanted eyes named Megan Hipwell who is much more beautiful than I am and who has a handsome boyfriend with an extremely well-toned body who is constantly having sex with her

I know this because they often have sex with all the windows open or on the deck of their lovely Dutch Colonial house

I wish I had her life, I wish I was blonde and had slanted eyes and a boyfriend who screwed me constantly in front of other people

I wish for what any woman would want because I am just that, I am any woman, no pardon me every woman

I want to have a baby like every woman does but I cannot have one and because of that and because I am a nasty drunk my husband dumped me like an old sack of potatoes which is what I look like and feel like every day when I ride the train

Emily Blunt who plays me aspires in fact, to embody the mood and general demeanour of a sack of potatoes when she plays me

And let me say she completely succeeds.

And then one fateful morning I wake up and I discover as I slowly open my bleary eyes that oh no I blacked out the night before and I actually have no idea at all what I did

Wow.

Can you imagine such a thing?

Let me tell you Amy Schumer the feminist comedian made a movie about the same thing called Trainwreck  i.e. alcoholism in women — only she treated it in a lighthearted manner

But I, the girl on the train do not think that a woman getting drunk is a laughing matter

For I know that being drunk is a very bad thing, nay tragic, and I know this ever since I woke up on that fateful morning and I had blood on me (why? why blood? whose blood was it?) and there was an empty liquor bottle that happened to be lying near my face so it made a great closeup shot and my hair was even dirtier than usual which as you can imagine was nearly impossible and then my roommate yelled at me

And then a mean detective played by Allison Janney accused me of killing the blonde girl with the perfect life and the slanted eyes named Megan Hipwell

Did I kill her? is it possible that I killed the girl with the perfect life in my drunken blackout just because I was so jealous of her? Could I be that evil?

This is certainly my darkest night of the soul that I am experiencing now.

Experience it with me. 

I think I will stagger down another alley and perhaps fall down and you will pity me and someone will call me a slut.

But then just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, lo and behold, they don’t.

All of a sudden I meet Lisa Kudrow who is being very brave in this movie for showing her wrinkles for the first time on screen. (Wow, a closeup! Wow what wrinkles! Even TV stars get old. At least some of them do. Jennifer Anniston doesn’t. I guess it must be the fabulous wrinkle cream she uses.)

Anyway Lisa Kudrow tells me not to worry and reveals to me that in fact to my surprise and chagrin I never got drunk at her party and never embarrassed my husband and I am not a messy drunk at all

Lisa Kudrow changes my life, just as she changed the lives of so many on the TV show Friends, by just being her cheery empathetic self but in this case specifically suddenly revealing to me in the nick of time that I am a good person and that my husband is the evil one and everyone knows that he is evil because he can’t keep his dick in his pants

So, ergo, therefore, his new wife and I — she is another blonde woman I forgot to mention who I am also very jealous of — well I bury my jealously and we act — two women — as one, and we stab him to death with a corkscrew

It’s lots of fun but what else can you do with a man who can’t keep his dick in his pants?

Wow this is a feminist movie after all!

Now it’s the end of the movie and I have finally washed my hair and bought my self a new white coat.

I am going to visit the grave of my husband who I killed with a corkscrew but of course he deserved it and I am also visiting the grave of Megan Hipwell the girl with the blonde hair and slanted eyes who I was very jealous of but that’s okay because I didn’t kill her

You are allowed to imagine that I will probably hook up with Megan’s boyfriend who used to screw her with all the windows open on the deck of the Dutch Colonial House

even though he is a little violent

You probably shouldn’t imagine I will end up with him, but I know you will.

I mean, come on who cares if he’s violent and throws glasses against the wall — I mean all men are violent, aren’t they?

And isn’t that kind of sexy?

Where are you going to meet a guy who is not abusive? I mean isn’t that just after all, part of what it means to be a sexy man? So don’t you usually just pick the least abusive guy and hope for the best?

But I probably shouldn’t say this or even think this 

And in the movie I don’t actually get together with Megan’s ex, but you can imagine that I might

That is your right as a woman

It is also your right as a woman, to watch this movie

We’ve come a long way, baby, from Joan Crawford starring in Mildred Pierce in 1945

Unlike Mildred Pierce I don’t have a job, or struggle as a waitress, or pinch pennies

We’ve gone way beyond that

And anyway you’ll be glad to hear

I’m not a bitch like Joan Crawford.