Isabel has baited me now. And honestly, my hating Taylor Swift as Eponine doesn’t come from this song, but still I had to post Lea Salonga singing it because she is awesome.
Also, call me when Taylor Swift has a drop of the complexity necessary to pull off “A Little Fall of Rain,” the happiness and sadness and irony and unselfishness and knowing in that song. She knows Marius is lying, he wouldn’t save her if he could, she knows she spends her life pretending and she’s gonna live that last bit like it’s everything.
It is not an accident that my favorite Les Mis characters are Enjolras and Eponine, the ones who willingly die even when they know their cause is lost, because why bother living without it?
(I say that at the end of a weekend that beat the shit out of me emotionally, staring down the barrel of a week that’s going to do more of the same, but knowing that I’ll make it through to the other side because there’s more to come and because people are here for me. That I have what they don’t have which is a life beyond the Cause and beyond One True Unrequited Love.)
And also I love Eponine because she represents the fall from the middle class. That Fantine is the working-class woman (and also as Molly said the other night the object lesson in not sleeping with art students cause good GOD we never see him in the musical but the guy who knocked up Fantine is a horrible, horrible mansplainy selfish dick) who shows us exactly how bad society is to women, but Eponine is the child of parents who go from the petty rottenness of middle-class capitalism (ripping off hotel guests) to the streets and Eponine from petted luxury (at the expense of another child) to abject poverty. And she’s a survivor until she decides to die.
(Molly also told me that Ayn Rand’s favorite Les Mis characters were ALSO Enjolras and Eponine, and that combined with the Ron Paul dude who tweeted at me the other day from the Twitter handle 24601—Jean Valjean’s prison number—really makes me wonder if people really read Les Mis at all.)
So. I don’t wonder if Taylor Swift can sing a song about unrequited love on her own and sell it to us. Sure. That’s the easy part of this role.
The hard part is that we’re introduced to her as a spoiled rotten child and Cosette as the abused, neglected angel-waif who collects all of the feelings we have for Fantine whose fall we have just watched. She has to sell to us not only that we should feel for her, but that we should feel for her more than that angel-waif who’s grown up to be petted and perfect and boring as hell.
Which, once again, comes to why I would be A-OK with Taylor Swift playing Cosette, because the depth she’s capable of showing is pretty much all around boys and love (and I’m not gonna knock that cause I have been listening to sad pop music all weekend and having #feelings and I’m 31, damnit) and Amanda Seyfried is actually an actress with some range and also with her huge eyes she’d look awesomely haunting as a bedraggled, former-beauty desperately trying to say with her eyes above the wreck of her clothes and body “love me love me love me I am more than what this world has done to me.”
Which is the fucking theme of the show/book and why Eponine is a far more important character than Cosette. Cosette is an extension of Fantine and Valjean and Marius. Eponine is herself.
(I HAVE FEELINGS ON THIS SUBJECT.)
