Joy Press

Helfand couldn’t dismiss scrapbooks altogether, however. Although they were often cheesy and sentimental and generic, this was also hands-on design as practiced by regular people rather than artists — an attempt to represent everyday experience through visual culture. Digging through archives, she was amazed by the medium’s rich pedigree. The result of all this research is her captivating new book, “Scrapbooks: An American History,” which explores American life over the last two centuries through the prism of the humble scrapbook.

This beautifully illustrated coffee table tome suggests that the scrapbook is an amazingly flexible medium, one that adapts to and reflects the times. In fact, it may once even have been ahead of its time. Helfand calls it “the original open-source technology, a unique form of self-expression that celebrated visual sampling, culture mixing, and the appropriation and redistribution of existing media.” That may sound a little too highbrow for an artform that thrives on ribbons and roses, but Helfand’s text points out that all kinds of lively minds have kept scrapbooks over the years, from playwright Lillian Hellman (who hilariously kept track of her running feuds and pasted in nasty clippings about herself) to poet Carl Van Vechten (who maintained a clandestine and artful compendium of male pornography) to Anne Sexton, who gathered telegrams, recipes and fledgling poems into a newlywed’s memory book, 25 years before she commited suicide. Mark Twain not only recognized the importance of the format but also profited from it, patenting the first “self-pasting scrapbook” back in 1872.

But “Scrapbooks” doesn’t dwell on famous names. Helfand is more interested in peeking at the historical shifts embedded in the way people recounted their lives: the episodes they chose to describe, the objects they included (newspaper clippings, gum wrappers, dance cards, dog tags, family photos), and even the way they laid out the pages (sophisticated modernist visual styles like collage had somehow already been absorbed by ordinary scrapbookers of the early and mid-20th century). She zooms in on an antibellum society woman whose marriage is (shockingly, for the times) falling apart, the privacy of the scrapbook’s pages liberating her to record her life as she wanted it to be. Then there is the Seattle doctor, an immigrant who crams his meticulously laid-out book with portraits of presidents and newspaper clippings on wartime health — “a kind of self-initiated primer for good citizenship,” as Helfand notes.

These books are remarkable to look at — so individual and specific, each becomes a “repository of evidence” from someone’s life. An early 20th century young woman’s scrapbook veers between movie star worship and suffrage marches, whereas a WWII soldier’s volume gathers together enlistment papers, medals and Japanese money. In fact, war and danger seem to spur the desire to preserve memories and make one’s mark, and Helfand partly traces the current mega-boom in scrapbooking — now a nearly $3 billion industry with its own national holiday and a vast network of Web sites, groups and retreats — to the trauma of 9/11.

Helfand spoke to Salon by phone from her design studio in New Haven, Conn., about the beauty of homemade things, religious scrapbooking and the future of memory in a digital era.

The piece you originally wrote about scrapbooking in Design Observer got people very angry. The scrapbookers felt insulted, but the serious design people were pissed off, too, because you didn’t completely dismiss this practice. Why did people get so agitated about such a humble hobby?

The design people called the scrapbookers “crapbookers,” and the scrapbook people thought I was being a Yale elitist professor. There was one woman who said, “I’m a thoracic ER nurse, my husband is on disability and I have three kids and no money — this is the only pleasure in my life. How dare you criticize me?” And I thought, yes, how dare I?

Writing this book was very hard, because I couldn’t soft-pedal my willingness to accept this as graphic design under the standards I believe are important. But I do recognize the instinct to want to put pen or paste to paper and commemorate some aspect of your life. It’s just when you see this $2.6 billion industry and people critiquing each other’s work as “cute” — it makes me break out in hives. But we’re talking about raising money for a documentary about this because, in a kind of Morgan Spurlock, “Supersize Me” view of an American phenomenon, it is a world unto itself. Why are women targeted in this treat-them-like-13-year-olds way? I went to one of these scrapbooking retreats, and it’s all these women in their pajamas with snacks — Hostess Twinkies everywhere! There’s something about junk food being part of this. It’s like, no husbands, I’m going to let myself go and look at pictures of my family and eat Twinkies. It’s not really about design, so it’s out of my league in terms of a critique, but it fascinates me sociologolically.

There’s a huge boom in DIY crafting, with everyone from indie-rock kids to stay-at-home moms selling their wares on Etsy and at regional craft fairs. Does crafting and scrapbooking come from the same impulse?

I don’t know. What I found was that in the past, it wasn’t always a gendered activity. I have marvelous scrapbooks in my collection by two or three men that are as beautiful and as detailed and as soul-searching as ones by women. In this most recent boom, which to my way of thinking is since 9/11, it’s been very much targeted to women. A number of sociologists have done studies about what this is about. One of them was called “Making Me Time,” about the creative crisis of the stay-at-home mom who needs to feel she’s doing something with her day. The physicality of putting pen to paper and grease pencil to word fetti is making them feel they’re doing something.

You object to the way today’s scrapbooks are so schematic, right? There are rules and guidelines for how to do them, and every element of them is premade rather than just gathering the flotsam and jetsam of your life and organizing it in a beautiful way.

By and large, what is so beautiful about scrapbooks [historically] is that they are so messed up! They are messy. They are not chronological, and they go back and forth and change things, and they rip out pictures of guys they broke up with. They’re so idiosyncratic.

I found this scrapbook of a woman from about 1912 who was clearly notoriously late to everything. Every note says, Please be on time to my party. Please come at 8:30. And in the middle of the scrapbook is a little gold watch and card that says, “Kitty is always late, it seems to be her fate, so here’s a little watch, to help her keep her date.” This woman was like my grandmother’s generation.

There’s something so humanizing and humbling about realizing, it’s not now and then. It’s us. It’s part of some greater human need to mark what you were doing.

In the book you point out that there was a huge range of preprinted scrapbooks designed for soldiers or newlyweds or new mothers. My own mom kept a baby book about me that is crammed with so much data and detail that it’s almost illegible. There are all kind of titles and headings that came with the book telling her what kind of information she should be noting down about her infant. Was that kind of instruction very common by mid-20th century?

Yes, and the enabling is very interesting. In these memory books I found from the late ’30s and early ’40s called “The Log of Life,” there’s a place for you to put your fingerprints, and it actually says, if you ever lose your memory take this to the nearest police precinct and they’ll tell you who you are. This was right after the war, and I guess people were worried you’d have too much shrapnel in your brain and you’d need help getting home.

You think these are just silly scrapbooks, but then you start to see how they codify our expectations and our fears, and it’s quite moving.

I thought it was interesting that the increasing popularity of psychoanalysis in the 20th century brought ideas of self-interrogation being therapeutic to the fore — but was that bad for scrapbooks? It seems like people need these books less, now that there are other opportunities for expression.

So many scrapbooks these days seem to be about other people, like — I’m going to make this about my son or my dog or the prom. But 100 years ago, a scrapbook was about you, about your experiences. And that’s why I became so absorbed by them as biographical receptacles of people’s lives. That’s why the banal things could be the most important thing. My critique of current scrapbooking materials is that it creates a meaningless visual grammar. Why would you want to follow a pattern? It’s like you take a giant piece of tape and stick it up to the wind and see what catches — that’s the residue of your day. I see a million things lying around my house that are going to say more about the life I live than going to the art supply store and buying something new.

I have a theory that contemporary scrapbooking is a little bit of a reflection of reality TV. You look at a show like “The Biggest Loser,” or take Joe the Plumber — he’s famous for 15 minutes and now he’s gunning for a singing career. People want to gussy themselves up.

They’re ready for their close-ups.

Yes! So you take this scrapbooker, and she’s thinking, I’m overweight and I don’t want a picture of myself in the scrapbook, but I do want to show off my cute kids and pretty pink ribbons. It’s this externalizing idea of, I want this to look good for everyone else so if I ever get famous my scrapbooks will show that I’m perfect. But the whole purpose was to celebrate the everyday.

The problem is that there is so much stuff in our everyday lives. It’s hard to distinguish what’s important or special. You have a zillion receipts. Which do you choose? What is special?

And you’ll always have more. Whereas if you go to the art supply store and you buy Martha Stewart’s pretty paste-on initials it’s going to cost you $3.95 for six of them, and you have to use them judiciously. So then you have the fear, what if I put it in wrong? As opposed to just grabbing an old pencil.

Some of the examples of stuff people saved in your book are just gorgeous — and weird. There are the tickets and flowers and calling cards, but my favorite is the girl you mention who pasted in her blisters. As if she needed to commemorate her suffering feet for all time.

Can you imagine someone doing that today? Unless Martha Stewart comes out with a “Beautifying your blister” collection!

I was fascinated by the way people I know, normally unsentimental people, were saving Obama campaign objects after he won, and even putting together scrapbooks of election material. Why do you think that was?

It’s the most emotional thing that has happened in a public way since 9/11. And 9/11 was another time people grabbed everything and saved it.

Tell me about “faithbooking.” I had never heard the term until recently, but I guess there’s a huge number of faith-based scrapbookers?

If you are a Mormon you are required by the church to document your family history. The scrapbooking community is really huge in Utah. But people that are religious of any faith — I was educated in Quaker schools, and I could see Quakers liking this because it’s kind of a daily meditation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about Jesus and the church, but it can be about ethics and morals.

But what is interesting, in conjunction with faithbooking, is the notion of “journaling.” Serious hardcore scrapbookers talk about anything handwritten as journaling. But any sentiment you’d want to express probably already exists on a sticker so you don’t have to say it, because a lot of people don’t trust their own handwriting, they can’t spell, and they equate writing even in a scrapbook as something that has to be professional. So you buy these sound-bite cards and daily affirmations that have a Stuart Smalley quality to them.

In the book you write very excitedly about tracing the way people absorbed the visual grammar around them through old scrapbooks. Someone with no interest in avant garde art might reflect very modern ideas in the way they laid out a page.

That was so fascinating to me. I found a scrapbook of a woman in the 1920s who had decapitated the heads of everyone in her family and stuck them in a birdcage — at a time when Dada was happening. A light bulb went off, and I thought, could you actually show that people had gleaned things from their environment that might change the way they visualize things in their scrapbook? And you find a girl in Iowa or a boy in Santa Fe who has done this even though they were nowhere near the salons of Paris — so where did they see this? There were no movies and so little access to pop culture. But in the tilting of a word, or the collaging of something on top of something else, you can see modernism coming to America in these scrapbooks.

How much of scrapbooking is about preserving memory, and how much is about self-presentation?

On the topic of memory, they are using scrapbooking with Alzheimer’s patients and victims of abuse now. They even use them with children who are moving — real estate companies create scrapbook kits for kids so they can have some daily activity with the memories they’re going to build in their new home.

What is happening to the scrapbook in the digital era, when nobody writes letters or prints out photos anymore? There is a whole community of digital scrapbookers, of course, but is the print version of the memory book going to vanish?

I was lecturing Yale undergrads, and some 19-year-old said, isn’t Facebook a scrapbook? I’m sure there’s some artist out there saving every single status update, but the digital is ephemeral and you have to actively pursue the fleeting digital evidence of our existence.

Right, you can’t just put it in a box. You have to make an effort to archive it.

But those people who are choosing to print out their photos and make scrapbooks may have the last laugh because the materials they are working with now are much more [durable] than they were before. Archivists are struggling to maintain old scrapbooks, but in 100 years these things will last, they are indestructible. There will be an entire world of material culture studies that looks at just this, these scrapbooks.

That last category might explain why I chose ESP and other supernatural subjects for my school science fair projects in grades 4, 5 and 6: too much time poring over Lois Duncan books like “A Gift of Magic” or “Stranger With My Face.” Or perhaps it was the wonderful Meg Murry of “A Wrinkle in Time,” the first of Madeleine L’Engle’s protagonists to “flit across the boundaries of space and time,” as Skurnick puts it, “even more flummoxed by adolescence than they are by being whipsawed across the universe.”

While reading these mini-essays (penned mostly by Skurnick, with a few guest appearances by YA novelists such as “Gossip Girl” scribe Cecily von Ziegesar) it occurred to me that I couldn’t possibly quantify how deeply these books had sunk into my own youthful psyche. But it reminded me of the intense connection I felt with “Harriet the Spy”; the original gossip girl, she skulked around New York jotting down scathing observations, inspiring me to buy my own diary (with a lock, since Harriet gets her comeuppance when schoolmates discover the harsh things she’s written about them). I know that I learned about periods from “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?”– but also I gleaned something about religious confusion, since, as Skurnick reminded me, Margaret’s 1970s parents have decided to let her choose her own faith, leaving her adrift in a town just like mine, where everyone went to Sunday school or Hebrew school.

“Shelf Discovery” styles itself as a memoir through books, but revising youthful opinions is encouraged. “Good in Bed” author Jennifer Weiner is slightly horrified to discover that “Blubber” is not “the ne plus ultra of fat-girl lit” but in fact is rather callous about the book’s chubby heroine. And Skurnick’s reading list doesn’t entirely skip boys, giving props to minor classics like Roald Dahl’s “Danny the Champion of the World,” Paul Zindel’s “The Pigman,” and “Farmer Boy” (written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, about her husband’s childhood).

 I’m sure Skurnick read plenty of books growing up, from Tolkien to Salinger; yet it’s great to look back and see this girl-centric canon, waiting to be reread by the grown women who loved them and a new generation of “monsters in training bras.”

Check out previous Critics’ Picks:

“Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading”

“Coraline” in 3-D on DVD

Bowerbirds’ CD “Upper Air”

“Mad Men” second season DVD

Phoenix’s CD “Wolfgang Phoenix Amadeus”

Comedy is always tough to explain, but the magic of the Mighty Boosh is particularly elusive. The show’s opening sequence calls it a “journey through time and space,” but it’s more like a fantastical children’s show for pop culturally overloaded adult brains, a mash-up of fairy-tale plots, surreal humor, nimble dialogue, twisted musical numbers and homespun visuals and animation. (Its closest reference point might be “Flight of the Conchords,” but tonally it’s a galaxy away.) The series is the mutant brainchild of comedians Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, who met in 1998 and started a shambolic live show that eventually grew into a British radio and TV phenomenon.

Noel is the genuine heartthrob of the duo, a scenester and intimate friend of Amy Winehouse, Russell Brand and Courtney Love. Impossibly charming, with a permanent grin of dazed glee on his face, Noel has a shag haircut and a penchant for dressing in glam-rock clothes: Imagine T-Rex singer Marc Bolan if he’d joined “Monty Python,” and you’ll start to get an idea. Julian acts as Noel’s more levelheaded foil, a perfect straight man with his mustache, his more settled personal life (he has two small children with comedian Julia Davis of the series “Nighty Night”) and his avowed love of jazz. In the series, they play exaggerated versions of themselves: Noel’s character is Vince Noir, a beguiling poseur in glam clothes who aspires to rock stardom, while Julian plays Howard Moon, a slightly dejected jazz fan with lofty artistic aspirations.

Over three seasons, the duo tumbles headfirst into dozens of wacky adventures: Howard is challenged to a boxing match with a kangaroo; Vince accidentally summons an evil demon disguised as a granny; Howard enters Vince’s bloodstream in order to rescue him from a rogue jazz cell that causes him to scat. Although they bicker hilariously, our two heroes are inseparable and usually end up saving each other from catastrophe, accompanied by a cast of characters that includes a shaman called Naboo (played by Noel’s brother Michael) and a talking gorilla.

Animals are everywhere in “The Mighty Boosh,” inserted blithely into plots as if it were normal for a London hipster to stumble across a crack-addicted fox or Mod-obsessed dancing wolves. Vince even claims that he was raised in a forest by Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry: In a cartoon flashback, he explains that while Ferry was on tour, “he used to leave me with various different animals. I remember one time he left me with Jahooli the leopard. He used to take me out killing gazelles, knowing full well that Bryan was a strict vegetarian.”

Often Vince and Howard’s escapades force them to face down scary-but-comical beasts and villains, like the Hitcher — a green cockney boogeyman who has been known to break into a ravey tune on occasion, or Old Gregg, a lovesick hermaphrodite merman (like the Hitcher, played by Fielding) who emerges from the sea to dazzle Howard with the light that pours out of his “mangina.”

My favorite villains, though, are the dopplegängers in the third season who steal Vince and Howard’s style. When the copycats arrive at their shop dressed in a sparkly silver jumpsuit (à la Vince) and Hawaiian shirt with porkpie hat (à la Howard), the Boosh guys scramble to find a new look for their band’s concert that night. Vince digs through the dustbin of subcultural history, coming up with a “future sailor” look and then, “taking retro to its logical conclusion,” goes back even further to concoct a medieval theme, complete with lutes and codpieces. Eventually they vanquish the imposters in a “crimp off,” crimping being a wonderfully goofy yet oddly addictive form of rapping the Boosh invented, which has only added to their massive following.

“The Mighty Boosh” is a hodgepodge of stuff that Noel and Julian love (including ’80s synth-pop star Gary Numan, who makes repeated cameos, and their friends and their parents, who play bit parts). But the glue that holds it all together is their odd-couple affection for each other. As Howard remarks in one episode about their partnership, “I’ve got a dark, fractured, paranoid sort of side to me and he had the light, sunny, simpleton feel. Together we made one whole person.”

Salon spoke to Julian and Noel at their New York hotel as they prepared themselves for a week of American appearances — and the unknown.

Is this your first attack on American public consciousness?

Julian Barratt: It’s always so violent with the Americans, isn’t it?

Noel Fielding: Why is it always attacking and storming? We’re not Nazis!

Have any other English comedians who’ve done well here — Sasha Baron Cohen, Russell Brand, Steve Coogan — given you advice?

N.F.: No! We thought we should start with the standpoint that everyone would hate it.

J.B.: We’re not changing what we do. When we started out, it was a little bit in a reaction to what was going on in the comedy clubs that we went to at the time — men standing around in shirt and tie and white sneakers, talking about their dicks and their girlfriends. We wanted to do a weirder sort of comedy.

N.F.: Something that would talk about fashion and music. We just thought, all our mates who like to see bands and wear cool clothes, let’s do a show for them.

J.B.: I don’t have any friends with cool clothes.

N.F.: Yeah, you just like to talk about jazz. Julian needed an outlet to talk about jazz.

So that running joke in “The Mighty Boosh” that Noel is the ultimate hipster while Julian is this earnest jazzbo — that’s actually based on reality?

J.B.: Maybe it looks as though we have this strange, detailed writing process that created these characters, but it’s just us.

N.F.: We’ve always incorporated elements from our own lives. The show is quite fantastical and magical so we try to pepper it with stuff from the fashion and music we’re into, so that it’s anchored in some sort of reality.

Has music been part of the Boosh from the beginning?

N.F.: The first show we ever did, we had this idea of a zookeeper trapped in someone’s Afro. And we thought, “He’s gotta rap.” That was the first song we ever wrote.

J.B.: We were listening to a lot of Wu Tang Clan and Beastie Boys at the time.

N.F.: Then we realized you can’t really rap in an American accent if you’re English. It’s ridiculous. So we started doing more music that was English, like folk or glam rock or electro. And then eventually we figured out a kind of English rap, which is “crimping.” It’s sort of nursery rhyme rap, folk rap. I can’t imagine what the Yanks will make of it.

For Boosh freaks, the crimping segments are probably the most popular bits in the show. Have you ever checked out all the amateur crimpers on YouTube?

Both: [looking slightly aghast] No!

N.F.: I haven’t got a computer. There’s a lot of people on YouTube that … It’s terrifying. There are 40-year-old women dressed as the Moon [a recurring character in the show]. You just think, “What are you doing?” I hate computers. I find YouTube and MyFace and Google really boring.

J.B.: It’s a tool, Noel. It’s just like using a pencil. It’s all about what you do with it.

Are the crimps improvised, or is there a lot of work and advance preparation involved in crafting a crimp?

N.F.: It’s not spontaneous! It’s very complicated. It takes about nine years to write one.

J.B.: You have to find the exact right kind of nonsense. To find something that’s surprising, that has odd angles.

N.F.: There’s a pancake crimp and a soup crimp — that kind of crimp is a bit easier, when there’s a theme. But the ones that are just free-form — ooh! I wouldn’t recommend trying to write one of those bad boys.

J.B.: We were writing the shows and doing these raps and people started saying, What are those things? So we had to call them something. Which I think came from crumping, that clown-dancing thing in that David Lachapelle documentary.

When you mentioned earlier about the first Boosh performance and the zookeeper who gets trapped in someone’s Afro — it sounds like your entire act was there right from the start. Did you just meet and say, “Let’s do really psychedelic, animal-based comedy?”

J.B.: The weirdness, the dialogue, the music, the animal stuff, everything’s there already in the first gig. We should have retired. We had a tight nugget and now we have a big, loose poncho of stuff sprawled everywhere.

Is it all coming from childhood influences, that magical sensibility?

N.F.: Our parents were both quite into psychedelic music — Frank Zappa, Beefheart, Santana, all that.

J.B.: My dad listened to a load of jazz — Mahavishnu, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock.

N.F.: It is our parents, really, isn’t it? They were quite young, my parents — I don’t think they knew how to bring anyone up. They were 18 when they had me, so even by the time I was 10 they were still just running around in the garden having parties, quite irresponsible.

J.B.: And my dad wanted to be a musician, so when I started playing guitar, he was like, “Go for it.” That is what I did for ages, I was in bands. And then I went to university and got into comedy somehow.

N.F.: I went to art college. I did a cabaret act as Jesus there. Everyone else was doing serious performance art and mine was all jokes about lepers, and some Mick Jagger dancing as Christ. But I don’t think either of us went into this thinking, “We’re going to be comedians.”

When “The Mighty Boosh” started, the reigning style in British TV comedy was what I call “the comedy of cringe”: “Alan Partridge,” “The Office,” and over here, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Ultra-realistic, and pretty mean. What you guys do seems like the complete opposite: fantastical and basically sweet-natured (if a little foul-mouthed).

N.F.: This is why it took us so long. We had a lot of affection for a lot of things we were taking the piss out of, like jazz.

J.B.: And the monsters and the villains were often quite sympathetic. Also, we wanted to create a world, a visual universe. If you come away from a show thinking of an image, that’s as good as remembering a joke. A lot of those shows, like “The Office,” they are brilliant but they’re not visually interesting.

N.F.: We want magic forests! Epic adventures! “Alice in Wonderland”-type stories and quests and voyages. It wasn’t very fashionable at the time. It took us a long time, because everyone was really into “The Office.” “The Office” changed everything in England. It made it very difficult to do anything different because it was such a success.

J.B.: And “The Office” was so cheap to make!

N.F.: Whereas we were trying to make things like a stylized forest that probably cost the same as doing half of a series like “The Office.”

You have all this stuff that relates to children’s storybook stuff, the marvelous and the grotesque. But there’s a whole other side of the Boosh that’s about witty, ultra-knowing pop culture references, like the dancing Mod Wolves or the retro-electro band Kraftwork Orange. How did Gary Numan end up being the patron saint of the Boosh?

N.F.: Numan was massive when we were kids, he’d be playing stadium shows in the U.K. My dad’s best friend did the sound engineering on “Cars” and I went with him to get his gold record award. I was only about 7 or 8, and that was the first pop star I’d seen in real life. I thought, “Oh my God, how can you dress like that as a man?” I thought it was the best thing ever. And then when I found out Julian was into him. So we thought we should get him in the show.

Recently there’s been all these diatribes in magazines and Web sites about hipsters as superficial trend-hopping poseurs, with strongholds in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and of course the Shoreditch area of East London [where the third season of "The Mighty Boosh" is actually set]. But you are pretty affectionate in the way you lampoon hipsters, aren’t you?

N.F.: Vince Noir, my character, is probably the ultimate scenester. He wants to be famous, he dresses up like he’s famous, and all his friends are really trendy. Howard Moon, Julian’s character, thinks Vince is absolutely ridiculous, but … it is pretty ridiculous. We went for that a lot in the third series of Boosh. We tried to make all the extras like they were our friends, so they wore all their own clothes.

Is there another series coming?

N.F.: We finished touring, we did six months of that. So we needed a break. There’s talk of a fourth series. Or an album. Or a film …

What would the film be about?

Both: [vague, blank faces]

Are you not excited about the prospect of doing a movie?

J.B.: I’m just trying to imagine what it could be. We always wanted to do a big epic, a Sinbad-type adventure. But then we went ahead and did it on the TV show. A big epic journey in a half-hour — that’s quite a stupid thing to try to pull off. 

“This is 10 years’ worth of tension and hormones and chemistry and everything in one moment. We had to ace it,” Emma Watson, who plays Hermione, told the press last week. She got more specific with MTV about shooting the scene with Rupert Grint, whom she has known since she was 9, explaining, “We were both just like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe we have to do this. This is so awkward. Really awkward.’ So I could take comfort in the fact that Rupert felt the same way. We were both giggling. We were like 12-year-olds.”

Growing up in public is always a dicey affair — whether you are a wizard inheriting the weight of the world, or a young actress with a multimillion-dollar movie franchise partially resting on your pale ivory shoulders and rosy lips. But the dangers seem much more perilous for young women than men. I did a double take a few months ago when I spotted Watson — pure as the unicorn-driven snow, beloved of 8-year-old boys the world over — staring saucily from the cover of Interview magazine, mouth open like a blow-up doll. Is this Hermione’s get-out-of-child-stardom card, I wondered? Daniel Radcliffe had already plotted his escape route last year with a quick shortcut to instant adult status: full-frontal nudity. Since it was for a serious role in a serious play (Peter Shaffer’s “Equus”), Radcliffe was feted for artistic credibility and bravery (especially after he talked in interviews about the shriveling effects of a live audience on the male member).

But shifting your image into a more mature gear has very different ramifications for a young woman than for a young guy. I doubt many people actually wanted to glimpse Harry Potter’s wand, whereas at least one creepy Web site counting down the days till Watson’s 18th birthday popped up back in 2004. The media had been chasing after a glimpse of Hermione’s magic underpants since she came of age. In fact, London tabloid the Sun ran a picture of Watson on her 18th birthday, inadvertently flashing a little too much skin getting out of a car. (They kindly placed a little photo of Ron Weasley’s head in her crotch to block out the offending view.) Her more recent “wardrobe malfunction” at the London premiere of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (her elegant vintage gown flipped open while she signed autographs, exposing her flesh-colored panties) sent seedy ripples across the Internet — repeated again when David Letterman showed the photo to his audience while interviewing her.

To her credit, she coolly shrugged off Letterman, saying, “At least I was wearing underwear.” And though Watson told the London Times that she would consider doing nude scenes for an artsy director like Bernardo Bertolucci (“I’m not getting my kit off any time soon, but it is part of my job,” she explained reasonably), she seems in no hurry to expose herself. Flashing skin — or, in Miley Cyrus’ case, wearing hooker boots — may be the quickest route to tabloid fame for a female performer. Watson’s many high-fashion shoots in magazines like Italian Vogue and her Burberry campaign seem to skew more toward powerful, edgy chic than flaunting flesh — though this spread-eagle pose on the forthcoming August cover of British Elle looks slightly uncomfortable.

Despite a recent rumor that she’s considering co-starring with Marilyn Manson in a goth-flavored version of “Cinderella,” Watson assured Letterman that she was headed for an Ivy League American university this fall, rumored to be Brown. “I’m young and indecisive and not quite sure what I want to major in,” she said, like a normal 19-year-old. But it won’t be kissing. “Maybe English, maybe art.”

Could so much really depend on this thin slice of foreskin? That’s what Danae Elon set out to explore in her documentary “Partly Private,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this week. Elon lives in Brooklyn, but she grew up as a secular Jew in Israel with an American mother and an Israeli father, the well-known author Amos Elon. In her first documentary, “Another Road Home,” Elon went back to Jerusalem and to the West Bank looking for the Palestinian nanny who had cared for her as a child, using her own experience as a way to touch on deeply complex issues about class and Palestinian-Israeli relations. Likewise, Elon places herself at the center of “Partly Private,” making her own pregnancy into a fraught and funny investigation into circumcision.

Sitting in the filmmaker’s lounge at Tribeca, Elon looks both radiant and a little anxious. She says that she tried to avoid taking an overt pro- or anti-snipping stand in the film, preferring to survey the whole world of circumcision with an open — if amused — mind. She introduces us to a broad cast of characters, from the mohel (a Jewish specialist who performs the procedure) who keeps all of his clients’ foreskins in a jar, to the anti-circumcision activist who expresses his own penile trauma in a children’s book, to the employees of a skincare company who use discarded foreskins in their antiaging cream. “Every bottle is not a foreskin,” one of them assures the camera.

Elon also ventures further afield, visiting the Italian town that once supposedly housed Jesus’ foreskin (it was stolen) as well as a Turkish party hall called Circumcision Palace, where she films dozens of little boys (aged 6 to 9) dressed in white suits going under the knife in front of their families and friends. Finally she journeys to Hebron on the West Bank, looking for the exact spot where Abraham is said to have received the order from God, and finds instead a wasteland decimated by war and religion. As she says in the documentary, “Did he really say to Abraham, ‘Cut off the tips of your dicks?’ What if we got it all wrong?”

All of this serves as research for Elon’s own charged decision, which she has to make not once during the film but twice. When the movie opens, she is pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Philip, a French-Algerian Jew, feels the strong pull of tradition, and she ambivalently goes along with his desire. But when she gets pregnant with another boy after several years of immersion in the topic, she is forced to decide what she really believes is best for her son’s penis.

Was it always your plan to make a movie about circumcision?

I had always wanted to make a film about it. I thought about extreme rituals, things that might be anthropologically interesting and contradictory, but I could never find a story structure that made sense. So I kind of let it go, until one day I was two months pregnant with my first child and Philip came through the door. We used to live in the East Village in a railroad apartment with a bathtub that was in the kitchen. So he comes through the door, and I’m kind of in this pregnant bliss in the bath, and he says to me, “What are we gonna do about the circumcision?” with a really solemn face — knowing what I was gonna say to him. So at that moment, it clicked. That’s the film!

You come from a secular Jewish family. So was your resistance to circumcision a matter of wanting to shake off that element of religious tradition?

Well, everything in my family is political and to me, creating the mark of circumcision meant also identifying with something I had a very hard time with. So it wasn’t so much the issue of, am I harming the child or not? It’s: What kind of a mark am I giving him? As someone who was born in Israel, that took on a very deep meaning.

In the film, I decided not to make a political statement. But when I went to Hebron, and I realized that this tradition comes from here, and [I saw] this ritual taking place in one of the most conflicted, horrible places in the world and it’s done in such a primitive, very nationalistic way — I was basically saying, you know, why is [what we are doing] different? We’re all doing this because we believe that we belong to this group. And I don’t want to belong to this group, but I do.

Whereas Philip does want to belong. He wants to feel part of this Jewish tradition.

He doesn’t come with the baggage that I have, being from Israel and having such strong reactions to the politics there. He emigrated from Algeria when he was just a month old, came to France to a very hostile environment, and his parents clearly hung on to what they brought with them from Algeria, so for him it’s not even a Jewish rite. Belonging is what it means to him. For me, my belonging is highly politicized.

I know a lot of people who have had these issues come up, but it’s usually from intermarriage. In this case, you were both Jewish, but it was two very different upbringings colliding.

This whole idea of intermarriage was also one of the major forces in my very deep enthusiasm to explore the subject: why it meant certain things to him and why it meant certain things to me. For Philip, his father had died when he was a very young boy. So it was, this is what my father would have wanted.

And on the other hand, your father called your decision to have your first son circumcised “sheer conformity.”

He did call it conformity. But you know, my father, he’s a well-known intellectual — and he would have left it up to my mother. He would not have faced this question. It’s an uncomfortable thing to question, and even the most rational and intellectual of us feel insecure as to what is the right thing to do.

Did either of you have regrets about it afterward?

Both.

Both of you did?

Yes. I think it’s a question of — there’s a certain degree of courage that you need in order to face up to who you really want to be. And I think that having circumcised our first son was the initial mistake. Because it took on so much meaning and we’d documented it and really blew it out of proportion. I was making a film, so of course we became representatives of a certain kind of argument or issue.

How much did the subject seep into your regular life? Did you ask men you met at dinner parties if they were circumcised and unhappy about it? I imagine that would provide some awkward social moments.

The best moments happen off camera. Like when you have a man that’s circumcised and he has a circumcised child, and the wife starts saying well, you know, actually, I didn’t want that … It creates all these uncomfortable moments between couples. Ultimately, I don’t believe [being circumcised or not] does have an impact on your sex life. But it’s kind of funny once people start comparing and contrasting, and men feel a little bit insecure. That’s the kind of stuff that’s very hard to capture. I tried very hard to find someone who was going through the process of getting circumcised as an adult. I couldn’t find someone, and once I did, he kind of flipped out on me.

I met someone recently who was circumcised as an adult because he married a Jewish woman, and I was shocked. It’s an extreme gesture — of love or faith or both.

I know somebody who did the same and ended up getting a divorce two years later!

That’s worse than getting a tattoo!

To me, the interesting part of making this film was exploring life through the prism of circumcision. So I don’t want to become this advocate of what’s good or bad, but I think if you look at something that’s both so significant or insignificant — can you think of anything else that has those two complete opposites in one gesture?

You try to avoid getting overtly political in the film. But I have seen people compare circumcision to female genital mutilation.

I absolutely think that it’s offensive to women to think that there’s any parallel here. Of course, they both involve genitals but are done for very different reasons, and I ran away as far as I could from anything to do with female circumcision, which has to be stopped. It’s not comparable. But what does interest me is why the movement against male circumcision needs to be so extreme? They have such a valid point, but they come off as such extremists.

One of the anti-circumcision activists you interview even gets you arrested while you are filming him. They come across in your film as really, really loony.

They are! Both sides of the equation are crazy, the whole thing is crazy. Those who believe in it and those who believe it must be stopped because it is genital mutilation — they all have valid reasons and all are insane. I love the idea that we look at ourselves through this insane prism, my family included.

In the film, you capture a lot of different contexts for circumcision. But to me the most startling was the Circumcision Palace in Istanbul. Circumcision is treated like a wonderful rite of passage, but there’s one little boy who is screaming because he is being forced to let a man take a scalpel to his penis. I found it hard to watch. What was it like to watch your own son go through it?

It is beyond words. You feel like you’re sucked into this dimension. There’s the supposed spirituality, everything that you’re supposed to buy into, and when it’s all over you feel that you’ve been completely fooled. When you hear your child scream you realize that this was very wrong. Both Philip and I felt it.

Is it a very different experience if you get your baby circumcised in the hospital rather than the synagogue?

I just talked to a woman who gave birth in the hospital and after day two, the doctor came in and said, so are you doing this or not? Her husband’s like, “Well, maybe he should look like me.” That’s it. And that’s how it happens to most people. They don’t even think about it. So I kind of wanted to take you on this journey where you are going to think about it.

You end up having to make choices about whether to circumcise each of your sons. And at the end, you worry that they will be mad at you when they grow up and understand what you’ve done.

Who do you betray? A son who has been circumcised, a decision you’ve just spent nine months ridiculing? Or a son that is intact? I was gonna betray both of them, no matter what way I chose.

Aren’t they going to be more mad about the fact that you made a movie about their penises?

They’re delighted. They don’t know it’s about their penises, but they’re delighted they’re in a movie.

Twenty years after “Grey Gardens,” Albert Maysles released “The Beales of Grey Gardens” with leftover shavings from the original; then there was the celebrated Broadway musical, (accompanied by a documentary about the making of the musical). There are high-fashion photo shoots inspired by Little Edie’s flamboyantly disheveled style, memoirs by people who knew the Beales, CDs — even a jewelry company (the Grey Garden Collection) founded by a relative. And now, on Saturday, HBO premieres the two-hour feature version of “Grey Gardens” with Drew Barrymore as Little Edie and Jessica Lange as Big Edie, her mother and captor. What could possibly be next? A Nickelodeon cartoon called “Little Edie and Big Mama”? Or perhaps a Bravo reality show: “America’s Next Top Eccentric”?

I emerged from the screening of “Grey Gardens” blinking with confusion at the ass-backwardness of it all. A documentary often fleshes out the back story of a real-life event. Yet here I was watching a feature film in order to get the “truth” behind a cinéma vérité classic. The Maysles’ portrait of this extraordinary duo was subtle and invasive in equal measures, bearing very little resemblance to the current genre of reality TV (starring Bonaduces and Baios) that thrives on the rotten luck and poor choices of the formerly famous. Watching the original “Grey Gardens,” you couldn’t help wondering how these women had tumbled into this state of decrepitude and how the filmmakers had inveigled their way into the Beales’ good graces.

The movie answers both of those questions, flipping between the Beales’ glamorous glory days in the 1930s (glimpsed only via old photos and anecdotes in the original doc) and their shambolic existence at the time the Maysles met them in 1971. It’s a strange project, working backward from the snippets of a life as gathered from a documentary, developing a narrative from the flotsam and jetsam of two not-quite-there creatures’ competing memories.

Barrymore has diligently studied Edie’s every move and utterance, trying a little too earnestly to re-create everything from her dancing to her diction (the latter a strange soup of dragged-out syllables that sounds both old-world posh and New Yorkish). She plays the young Edie — the one we don’t know very well — as an ebullient bombshell, a cup perpetually running over. Serenely walking on the Easthampton sand in a white swimsuit with her awestruck little niece Jackie Bouvier, she is a golden-haired It Girl on the verge of coming out to society, courted by the likes of J. Paul Getty and Joe Kennedy Jr. But as the film makes clear via its chronological leaps, the seeds of the 50-something Edie (with her upside-down skirts, impracticality and withering wit) can be traced straight back to her youth. Evidence of her skittish streak: Edie runs out on her own debutante ball. Her mother doesn’t seem all that surprised by Edie’s misbehavior, chiding her, “Always the queen of the dramatic pause.” 

Is Little Edie’s behavior heroically rebellious, stupendously self-destructive or some tragic mix of the two? She’s chasing after pleasure in an era when women of all classes are expected to settle down and hush up. Spurning the attention of suitable bachelors, Edie chooses to sleep with married men, knowing that a husband would snuff out her dream of becoming a performer (just as Edie’s father had curtailed Big Edie’s career as a singer). In a scene taken directly from an anecdote in the documentary, Edie assails the Broadway producer Max Gordon in a restaurant and does a charmingly amateurish little song and dance number for him. It’s hard to know whether Gordon really means it when he compares her to Judy Holliday, but that moment is forever lodged in Edie’s gut as her big chance — a chance she didn’t take. Pressured by both her disciplinarian father (who expects her to work as a secretary until she lands a husband) and her needy mother (who wants Little Edie back home to keep her company), she buckles. And never quite unbuckles.

The glorious thing about the documentary was its ambiguity: There are no clear villains. Sure, Big Edie screeched and bossed her daughter around, but it appeared to be a symbiotic relationship, soaked in mutual affection — the familiar dynamic of so many mother-daughter relationships. But in this incarnation, Little Edie dubs her father, Phelan Beale, “the villain of the piece.” Determined to be rational (especially in the middle of the Great Depression), he crushes the very irrational women in his life, stripping them of their creature comforts. “Neither of you would know stable if it walked through your soup,” he rants at one point. Later on it will be Phelan and Edie’s two pragmatic sons who confront Big and Little Edie, begging them to be realistic about money and the irrationality of hanging on to the house. It is as if something in them demanded all or nothing — and sensing that all was not on the cards, they created their own cocoon, seemingly insensible to the decrepitude around them. 

That decrepitude has been widely fetishized, and so it’s not surprising to see such lavish attention paid here to costumes and set designs. Everything is lushly dilapidated and distressed in a most aesthetically pleasing way. First-time director Michael Sucsy has a good eye for shambles: I particularly remember the tableau of mother and daughter in strange black mourning outfits listening to JFK’s funeral on the radio, sitting primly on a bed swamped by garbage and cats. The camera devours the decay — a tree is growing through the ceiling! A cat is peeing behind the painting of Big Edie propped on the floor! But the women who once lived in luxury treat it all with a certain vagueness, as though the outside world barely registers in comparison to the intensity of their inner lives.

Jessica Lange’s Big Edie is an enigmatic, lonely figure, exuding a low-level warmth that keeps her daughter orbiting around her like a satellite. She sometimes fades into the background, allowing Barrymore to preen in the spotlight before chastening her with a passive-aggressive slap. “I don’t think you see yourself the way others see you,” Big Edie warns her daughter toward the end of the film, as the Maysles are wrapping up their documentary. “You are an acquired taste.”

Cleverly, the making of the documentary becomes an intrinsic part of the movie, used as both a framing device and a happy (or at least happyish) ending. Far from tricking the Beales into revealing themselves, the Maysles stumble upon two women ferociously eager for an audience. They happily agree to be filmed, although they seem somewhat muddled abut the nature of the project. “Is there a script?” Little Edie asks. “I’m a very quick study.”

“Grey Gardens” does a vivid, entertaining job of bringing cinéma vérité to fictional life. But as Hilton Als wrote in 2001 of the Maysles’ documentary, “What draws the viewer in are the stories around what we cannot see: Miss Beale lamenting the loss of a scarf. The suitors turned away. Mrs. Beale’s infatuation with a man whose minor musical talent is better remembered than heard. Money spent.” This movie fills in those bittersweet blanks, forcing “Grey Gardens” lovers into a trade-off: Our curiosity is sated, but we lose some of the most haunting shades of gray.