Why Julia Allison Has Potential
Shelton Bumgarner
Allison could be a breakout star in the American mind pretty easily.
Today, it hit me: in the American unconscious she could become
something of a "real" Gloria Cleary from the Wedding Crashers.
Despite our Puritanical ways, modern Americans can't enough of what
you might describe as the Slut with a Heart of Gold. Something about
the idea of an attractive, sexually aggressive woman who fucks her man-
of-the-moment's brains out leaving him feeling used and flummoxed is
very, very endearing to us. We want to believe that such behavior is
possible devoid of the obvious destructive downside so we can cluck
about it in a knowing way and collectively smirk, thinking "...and girls
will be girls..."
Now, I've been outside of the States for going on three years now, so
maybe I don't fully understand what's going on. But something about
Julia is special. She seems to get the joke about how people might
view her given her behavior and what she seems obsessed about. Similar
behavior by Gloria was what made the Wedding Crashers so powerful -
the Gloria Cleary character was the cornerstone of that movie's
success.
As you may recall, Gloria first entered the movie as a "virgin" who
totally blew away Vince Vaughn's OCD commitment-phobe character. The
more we knew about her, the more realized that she was much more
complex than we thought. So when Vaughn's character falls hard for
her, we the audience can have a knowing laugh about The Way the World
Really Works.
Now, the question is how will Julia use this potential. It will be
interesting to see. America wanted Paris Hilton to be the real Gloria
Cleary and we all know how that turned out.