everyone’s an apatow by elizabeth burch-hudson

What happened to the good old days when you could write quietly and die just as quietly?

When you were kept in your father’s upper middle class home scribbling poems full of environmental metaphors and convoluted lesbian romance and died a nobody. When you maybe published a book about solitude while hiding out in your friend’s backyard, having your mom do your laundry and lusting over sycamores. Perhaps less specifically and more generally, when the drunk white men lived off nickels found under coffee tables and couch cushions and objectified women they had spoken to once while ordering coffee and thinking about staring at their tits.

When you could travel the country with a thumb alone – and okay, maybe some head or rape, depending on if you’re strapped (with a dick or a shiv, a phallus of sorts) – but you could go places in the continental U.S. and feel like you were in Europe because we knew so much less about other places even though not everyone could point Missouri out on a map (no one can still). I can’t read a road map or a compass or a non-digital watch. I am what’s wrong with the world. Well, Russia invading Ukraine is what’s wrong with the world.

What happened to the good old days when the angry white men smoked on airplanes and died at 55 because their racist hearts had too much whiskey and missionary and red meat? Why does Putin have to be so physically fit? What happened to the good old days when men died on the toilet? What happened to the quiet?

Now everyone insists on a raucous coming in and going out. I am not everyone. I prefer the Irish Goodbye. I don’t want to be known unless you seem to want to know me. But I want the masses to know me because I’m delusional enough to think the masses would like me, want me, fawn after me, obsess over me, guess my astrological sign, and finally, cancel me once they felt betrayed or bored. Give me a pedestal, then strip it away because no one deserves celebrity in an age when we are all our own icons.

Not everyone used to be famous. I read People, Cosmo, Tiger Beat at girls camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains, wishing someone would discover me and make me famous enough to wear Uggs and cutoffs to Whole Foods and feel hot, not bloated – or to at least famous enough to not care if I was bloated, which is hot.

I wanted to get misquoted and throw an adult tantrum and have kids I didn’t want because I needed another interview to stay relevant, to stay tabloidable. To begin my second act as a mother before my third act as an award-winner and executive producer or die somewhere before my climax. I never dreamed about my wedding, but I did dream about shaving my head and gaining thirty pounds and finding my new look plastered across town under the hot pink lettering

“NEW FACE OF JUICY COUTURE FOUND MASTURBATING IN THE EREWHON PARKING LOT AFTER GETTING SERVED DIVORCE PAPERS WHILE COKED OUT AT THE VIPER ROOM.”

I dreamt about people speculating over my sexuality and rehearsed what I would say and how I would hint and who I would date and who I would kiss onstage at a pop culture award show and the reality shows that would ask me to be a contestant on their 22 nd season of GREATEST CELEBRITY REHAB SURVIVOR ISLAND OF BLIND LOVE featuring Flava Flav.

I penciled down memoir titles, plotting out my four-book contract that I would spend on a relapse before getting sober once my liver gave out. That was the plan. Now I can do all those things but without the fame or the fans, I’m not a celebrity, I’m just a mess. A leech. A handful. No one is rooting for me, except me, and even I need a day off or a new PR spin to stay interested. No one would care if I killed myself the way Kurt did or the way kids in small towns do. In small towns intimacy breeds celebrity. Maybe that’s what killed the icon in LA. The population.

I was raised not to believe in myself, but to make believe of myself. I was raised on Tumblr and Lana del Rey and she taught me that I am only as good as the oldest man interested in me. Not everyone used to believe in self-love. Now we are all supposed to be our own three ring circus, one woman show, three man band. We are our own celebrity and our own fan. We are our own inside scoop. We are our own exclusive. But the rules still haven’t changed, and self-love is just another way to sell self-hate, so maybe I’m ahead of the trend cycle. You’ll all be back soon enough, joining me in the trenches of being hard on yourself.

Not everyone used to believe in the indie. We wanted multi-million-dollar budget, we wanted excess. We wanted Gossip Girl and Sex and the City to treat us like the paupers we were, to be adults about the wage gap and the orgasm gap, to degrade us and remind us, to whisper to us sweet nothings of you’re nothing. The world remains a caste system because of the lie of the indie. Small Town Suzie got a book deal because she’s got grit and not because her great aunt married an Apatow.

What even is an Apatow? An Apatow is relative. For some, an Apatow is a relative. Everyone’s an Apatow these days. Everyone’s got a joke, a pilot, a podcast, a book deal, a story, a hot take, an opinion, a voice that matters and deserves to shove its way to the front of the queue like the casting line outside of Paramount in 1957. Worst of all: everyone’s an actor. No one values a triple threat anymore. I am no one. Everyone’s an Apatow but there’s not enough Vera Ellens. I want tap dancing on the verge of a nervous breakdown and stunt men risking their necks and I want everyone to stop thinking they are the resurgence of Italian neorealism because the stories they are telling are not of the working class, they are of the Frances McDormands dressed in wrinkled beige and gray couture.

What happened to the good old days when we were all depressed but didn’t say because our parents never said. When the local pervert was the piano teacher or the OBGYN. When Zeus raped the swan and Nemesis and Maia and Rhea and Cassiopeia and Callisto and Alcmene and Persephone. When we were obsessed with mole women and Jon and Kate plus eight ways to seduce your man by putting a donut on his dick and nibbling it off why are you reading this you are only 12 years old.

When celebrities entertained instead of Imagined or ran for office and actors acted and wrote fat checks during the We Are The World telethons and movies moved us away from the reality of the war torn fucked up insidious child trafficking exploitative fracking disintegrating emotionally manipulative unequal world that is filling with people and oil and polar bear carcasses instead of towards it in hopes of polishing off an EGOT. When no one was an Apatow. Well, except the Apatows.

Professionally insane. Second Rounder for Austin Film Festival 2022 and Sundance Development Lab 2023. Published with HAD, Crybaby, Rejection Lit,  Forever Mag, and soon to be with Vlad Mag. Creator of Intimacy Issues--an advice column for the emotionally unavailable, published with Substack and CUSPER Magazine.