In Tamara Jenkins’ Slums of Beverly Hills, Vivian’s (Natasha Lyonne) breasts are, in terms of external response, a social detriment. The very first thing that we learn about Vivian is that her breasts were nonexistent, but burst forth suddenly, just as she is heading into high school. They are similar to her mother’s, but her father, Murray (Alan Arkin), is the active parent in her life, nervously chattering about Vivian’s breasts with the saleswoman sizing his daughter. As the saleswoman finishes assisting Vivian, she assures her, “Breasts are wonderful.”
This does not seem to be the case for much of Vivian’s daily life. Vivian’s breasts appear as an invitation to constantly mediate and critique her. Her father insists she unfashionably and awkwardly wears her white bra underneath her halter top, her brother tells her that the only part of her that is changing or improving is her tits, the girl who lives in her apartment complex tells Vivian about how her mom got a breast reduction to avoid appearing tacky.
In the midst of all this newly misogynistic noise, Vivian meets Eliot (Kevin Corrigan) — her new pot-dealing neighbor — in the laundry room of her family’s dingy apartment building. Vivian lifts her sweater and shows Eliot her bra before pelting him with questions: What do they make you think? Do you think they look deformed? Do you want to touch them?
Eliot answers how one knows a teenage boy is going to answer (though perhaps the still very young and inexperienced Vivian wants to finally hear them for herself). He thinks they’re beautiful, he very much does want to touch them.
After Vivian makes it clear there will be nothing but a few moments of second base, Eliot touches Vivian’s breasts, and Slums of Beverly Hills lets all of the outside narratives around Vivian’s breasts fall to the wayside. Vivian’s eyes glaze over, becoming lidded and thick with pleasure. Her lips part, breath coming out in soft pants. Only the buzzer of the dryer brings her back to adolescent reality; she pushes Eliot off of her and accuses him of stretching her friend Kelly’s loaner sweater. But Vivian has had, even if for just a moment, a positive, connective, pleasurable, and interiorized connection to the previously most divisive part of her body.
Immediately after this interaction—I hesitate to call it a mutual sexual interaction, because the event is under Vivian’s strict, single minded direction, and Eliot is only really there to offer his fumbling hands—Vivian reconnects with her older cousin, Rita (Marisa Tomei). We see Rita in jumpy, spliced, repeated cuts of her beautiful body stepping out of the shower, an editorial signaling of how Vivian is overcome visually.
While Vivian and Rita are seeing each other for the first time since Slums has begun, we as the audience have seen a few glimpses of Rita so far. When the saleswoman assures Vivian that “breasts are wonderful”, Slums cuts immediately to Rita, newly escaped from rehab and utilizing a flash of her own rack for a ride in a truck. Shortly afterward, Murray finds Rita and loops her into his newest money making scheme. Rita will live with him, Vivian, and Vivian’s two brothers while attending nursing school (a life path Rita and Murray come up with on the spot, based on a bus ad), and the whole Abromowitz crew will benefit off the funds Rita’s wealthy father will eagerly send her to stay out of trouble.
Rita is twenty-nine, but may as well be Vivian’s young teenage cohort in terms of maturity. Everyone’s hopes of keeping Rita in check and in nursing school is a shared delusion. Rita is an addict regarding nearly every vice: pills, booze, men, a general good time.
But Rita is a necessary balm to Vivian’s obliterating insecurity in her brand new world of adolescence, because Rita is an expert in unseriousness. On their first night as roommates (as well as sisterly bedmates) Rita unpacks her vibrator from her suitcase, introducing the sex toy to Vivian as “her boyfriend”. When Vivian blanches, Rita provides her with a collection of sexually positive assurances — Vivian is welcome to use it, Rita thinks it’s great, Vivian should try just holding it.
In perhaps the most transcendent moment of Slums of Beverly Hills, Rita and Vivian put on some music and dance with the sex toy. They toss it back and forth, pretend it’s their own dick slung low on their hips, shimmy it up and down in the air. No tangible sexual pleasure is derived, but the allowance of curiosity and play allows for Vivian to access a glimpse of sexual pleasure and experimentation as a part of understanding herself.
It feels not just unsurprising, but inevitable, that shortly afterwards, in a moment alone, Vivian turns on the vibrator and brings herself to a quiet, eye-fluttering orgasm on the bathroom floor. The normalizing of the toy that Rita provides allows for Vivian to guide herself to a healthy sexual experience on her own terms, once again distanced from all outer social intervention.
When Eliot and Vivian eventually have sex in his car, we see a curbed version of events. They begin with an urgent kiss in the sunset, and we only return to them when they are fumblingly redressing in their twin Charles Manson shirts (Eliot collects these due to an obnoxious indie boy obsession with the Manson Family — another external indignity for Vivian to process in her young teen brain).
The pleasure that may or may not have been accessed from the sexual event isn’t told to us, and is quickly overpowered by more judgments on Vivian’s sexual selfhood. Any afterglow regarding the sex itself quickly becomes derailed by the fact that Vivian was younger than Eliot, as well as a virgin. Eliot is agitated by the blood on his car seats and what they represent. This is the second time Vivian has bled on seats in this film; her period comes unexpectedly through her mini-dress and onto the needlepointed seat at her dad’s new girlfriend’s house, and an equal fuss is made there. Slums isn’t afraid to reiterate just how often women are forced to be vigilant, to divert, to rely on inauthenticity, or risk being shamed and policed for simply having bodies; for menstruating, for inheriting your mom’s boobs, for letting the guy that wants to fuck you, fuck you.
It doesn’t feel like an accident that we only are permitted to see Vivian in unfettered, genuine, resplendent pleasure and delight in private or close to private. Vivian is in limbo between childhood and adulthood, often cowed by the fact that adults genuinely do have control over so much of her as a minor, but startled by the ways womanhood is coming with its own fresh set of social limitations. It makes sense that the rare moments where Vivian is accessing something new, sometimes even something coming from this tumultuous transition period, come in moments of quiet, away from all outer mediation.
In Slums, Vivian’s pleasure is ultimately an interior matter. It’s not that Vivian’s “first time” with Eliot is better or worse in comparison to her first time alone on the bathroom floor, it’s just that Slums isn’t worried about Vivian ticking off the traditional narrative boxes around female adolescence and sex. Instead, Slums follows a sexual trajectory entirely centered upon Vivian learning her own meaning of pleasure through tenets like comfort, experimentation, gentle encouragement, silliness. Slums is concerned with Vivian learning to access raw and earnest pleasure whenever she pleases, with tools available to her without any permissions or additive presences if need be.
In the final moments of the film, when Vivian’s father’s latest pseudo-con has fallen through yet again, and when this falling through has lost Vivian both her off-the-rails “big sister” and her first paramour, she is struck by an almost nirvanic thought in voiceover:
“I used to think the good life was somewhere just outside the window of my father’s car. But now I see it’s on the inside. Sure, we didn’t know where we were going to live, but we knew where we were going. For us, the Abromowitzes of Beverly Hills, a meal at Sizzler meant we were halfway home.”
Vivian’s revelation about Sizzler’s and her father’s car can feel a little trite on its surface. Vivian is, after all, just barely a teenager. But the thesis of her adolescent revelation, that a house is not a home, and that home is where the heart is, doesn’t just apply to her nomadic family. Vivian’s accessing of “the good life”, even if it’s just what can be found under her shirt, in her cousin’s suitcase, on the floor of her bathroom, is always available to her, and there to be accessed when she pleases.
