Lara Liveman

[Ryan Day]

One character I find particularly interesting is that of Lara Liveman, someone who in a specific light represented that end of an American prosperity and the beginning of the pain that this finality caused. To elaborate, Lara is of an upbringing most similar to the traditional one of American history, the daughter of an upper-middle class family out in the corn belt, moving to the city and getting heavily involved in the youth movements of the sixties. This sort of prosperity, in the American sense, essentially means extreme levels of self indulgence and excess, which is exactly what those years meant to Lara. Despite the veneers of an artist or activist or anything, the curious part is what she remembers most about the time period, which is the insane amount of drugs and partying she did. These highs cannot sustain themselves, similar to the fact that the American peaks of materialism could not last forever, and in fact broke down in the 1970s. This makes it the perfect time frame to analyze what this class of people, people who for most of their lives never faced hardship or real pain, did to cope. In Lara’s case, it came in stages. Her first order was to simply continue the excessive life, keep doing hard drugs until she physically couldn’t or else face the wrath of the state, in the form of the drug war. One interesting side note here is that her reckoning with this sea change in America first came about with her reactions to this conservative turn in American politics, through her old boyfriend turned crippled Vietnam vet and avid Nixon fan. Moving on, she then decided to try to leave the excesses altogether, her and Blaine moving to an upstate cabin and painting for a year, slowly but surely quitting all the drugs that used to envelope them, focusing on art. While this is technically better than her vain life beforehand, I still think she was coping, or somewhat living a lie. This is because she thought the best way to reconcile with this end of American prosperity, the best way to come to terms with the 70s, was not just run away and escape the coming hardships altogether, using (most likely) her families huge reserves of wealth to go into isolation, not have to face the coming immiseration of many Americans. This is best exemplified because her and Blaine relapsed, they went back to the city, still convinced they lived in this peak of art by trying to sell their work, and when they realized that wasn’t true quickly turned back to cocaine, their lives were still kind of controlled by meaningless hedonism. The ultimate wake up call, for Lara, was the car crash. This led her to realize that the only way to cope with the 70s slump, the end of that golden age of America, was to embrace the lower classes, give up her material wealth. This is, in my opinion, part of the reason why she got together with Ciaran and stopped loving Blaine, understanding her happiness could not come from any of their vain pursuits.

[abassadams]

I think your character analysis of Lara is a very solid one- she is the very representation of a middle class trying to handle a culture made of excessiveness. While she first indulges fully in this excessiveness, with the partying and the drugs, she eventually convinces herself she needs to change. As we see however, rather than find the middle ground between materialism and spirituality, she just swings the pendulum back the opposite direction, giving up everything and going to to live in the woods. While on the surface, this life would seem to make her happy (She was unhappy with the excessiveness, so she’ll be happy with the total lack of excess), the country life she imagined is actually just as hollow as the partying. Her and Blaine may have convinced themselves they’re spiritual gurus, tapped into an artistic Nirvana, but the car crash and it’s aftermath rips that veil from Lara’s eyes. She suddenly sees what’s actually happening- when the rain ruins their paintings and Blaine doesn’t care, she realizes that their artistic process has always been a lie, and when Blaine speeds away from the consequences of his actions, she realizes that their life together, too, is a lie.

[Varin]

What instantly struck me about your observation was that it was both cautious and avoids the short-sighted assumptions we easily succumb to when confronted with someone like Lara, who upon first glance embodies all the reckless stereotypes of the 1970s and has followed a linear path through her upbringing, which you accurately coined as “traditional”. But this linear path is finite, and cut short by the social and cultural restructuring of America. Blinded by the materialistic wasteland America has become, Lara resists the “sea change” of America and fails to confront the bittersweet relics of the past. How clever is it that she should abandon her old boyfriend, a Vietnam veteran and Nixon advocate, for the more self-indulgent and corrosive Blaine? I’m really not exaggerating at all when I say that you hit the nail on the head; Lara truly embodies the consciousness of America, and the nation’s duty to not only guard against but confront the ills of materialism. Witnessing the deaths of Corrigan and Jazzlyn certainly wakes her up to the more subtle and unexplained phenomena of the world, and encourages her to abandon the carefree contention of her two-dimensional life as an “artist”. Her active disposition in reversing the tides of human indifference and callousness are equally reassuring and inspiring.

[Author]

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