The Bell Jar Is About to Become a Fashion Mood Board
Billie Eilish is standing on a Toronto street in a cherry-red knit top, a checked A-line skirt, pearl earrings, matching heels and a handbag in the exact same shade. Her chestnut hair is neatly waved. Her lipstick has not moved.
In another set photograph, she is soaked by rain in a green shirtwaist dress and dark flats. One image looks ready for a 1950s magazine spread. The other makes that polished world look far less comfortable.
We do not know how either scene will appear in the finished film. But the photographs have already revealed the biggest challenge facing The Bell Jar: the prettier Esther Greenwood’s world looks, the easier it becomes to miss what that beauty is doing to her.
The film is being written and directed by Sarah Polley, with Carey Mulligan playing Esther’s mother. It will also be Eilish’s first feature-film role, although she previously appeared in Swarm.
On the surface, casting one of the world’s most recognisable pop stars as a young writer disappearing beneath social expectations sounds risky. Look at Eilish’s public life, though, and the connection begins to make sense.
Eilish has spent years watching strangers turn her clothes into conclusions about her body, sexuality and personality. Her oversized outfits were treated as a rejection of femininity. When she later wore corsets and more fitted clothes, the change was treated as a contradiction.
Eilish has explained that both covering her body and showing it became choices other people believed they were entitled to interpret.
Esther faces an older version of the same trap.
During her magazine internship in New York, every type of woman seems to arrive with an approved costume. Doreen’s revealing clothes mark her as the sexually adventurous girl. Betsy’s neat, cheerful outfits make her the safe “good girl.” Successful women have sensible suits and respectable shoes. Wives appear in wash dresses, curlers and kitchens.
Esther does not simply struggle to choose a career. She is being asked to choose one complete version of womanhood and dress correctly for it.
The fig tree is the famous image from The Bell Jar, with each fig representing a different life Esther wants. But the wardrobe is the physical version of that problem.
Each future comes with clothes, behaviour and rules that cannot seem to exist in the same closet. Esther wants to be a writer, a traveller, a lover and an independent woman. The world around her keeps presenting those lives as separate outfits and telling her to pick one.
Clothing also exposes the class difference Esther cannot escape. She uses scholarship money to buy expensive dresses for New York, hoping they will help her belong among richer young women. Instead, she remains painfully aware of what every dress cost.
The novel repeatedly uses fashion as something that promises confidence while making Esther more conscious of everything she lacks.
This is why reducing The Bell Jar to sad-girl makeup, cigarettes, typewriters and vintage skirts would be such a perfect misunderstanding of the book.
Early in the novel, Esther describes a glamorous magazine photograph of herself surrounded by tulle, martinis and attractive men. Anyone looking at the finished image would assume she was having the summer of her life.
Esther knows that the picture has preserved the clothes and removed the truth.
A Pinterest board could do exactly the same thing.
There is nothing wrong with loving the costumes. That red sweater is lovely, and the matching handbag has already done more publicity than most official posters manage.
The problem begins when the styling becomes an explanation for Esther’s illness. She is not distressed because she reads poetry, wears lipstick or looks beautiful while standing in the rain. Her mental illness is real, while the sexism, class pressure and sexual double standards around her shape how isolated she becomes and how few futures she can imagine.
A responsible adaptation must also allow Esther to remain a full person during her crisis.
She is ambitious, observant, difficult, funny, angry and often contradictory. Guidance for mental-health stories on screen stresses that illness should not erase a character’s existing personality or turn a human being into a collection of dramatic symptoms.
If the film remembers Esther’s intelligence and dry humour alongside her pain, audiences may meet Esther Greenwood rather than another beautifully photographed “sad girl.”
Polley is a promising person to handle that balance. Her previous adaptations have stayed interested in women whose choices are restricted by the systems around them.
She has also described adaptation as protecting the spirit of a book, even when that requires changing parts of its structure. With The Bell Jar, protecting the spirit will mean refusing to let the film’s beauty soften its politics.
It will also mean resisting the temptation to use Eilish’s real experiences as an easy shortcut into Esther’s mind.
Eilish’s history makes the casting interesting, but she is playing Esther, not publicly reliving herself for an audience. The performance deserves to be judged as a performance.
The smartest version of The Bell Jar will let the red sweater, pearl earrings and matching handbag seduce us before revealing the pressure hidden inside their perfect coordination.
A perfect outfit should be the first thing we see, not the last thing we understand.