All images courtesy of the author. 

Remembering Who We Are

The early part of my life—marked with a hazy, gossamer glow—is an unrecorded relic lost to time. The sun rose and illuminated a passion I couldn’t ignore: childhood was not childhood without movies. Eventually, I found myself meandering through the curated aisles of All the Best, my family’s favorite video store. I can recall the details of it with acute fidelity, its presence a haven to me. But the more films I watched, the more my memory struggled to maintain adequate capacity for my viewings. The archival wing of my brain meant to house “firsts” was long empty, forever fashioned with a sign reading, “Coming soon!”, like those housing developments on the outskirts of town that never get built.

When I try to rummage through other areas of my memory in hopes that some random thought will lead me to a revelation, I find little respite in the dead ends I encounter. I’ve tried (and failed) many times to find the memory of the first time I ever watched Little Miss Sunshine (2006). I tell myself I need it, that it’s a vital tenet of my personhood. The film occupies a special and specific corner of my brain, a wing dedicated to stuff I like to call, “Things that Make Me Who I Am.” But an integral piece of the exhibit is missing: the story of my first time with this film. The display feels inherently incomplete.

I can recall with great precision the first time I ever watched The Breakfast Club (1985), which, for a long time, I considered my favorite film. I remember the glow, the specialness I felt I was witnessing. I always guessed that the memory of my first time watching it is so cogent because it sparked something within me. I credit it for inspiring me creatively and acting as that initial display in my “firsts” exhibit. Then, somewhere else along the way, I ran into Little Miss Sunshine, but I didn’t magically transform again. The dysfunctional Hoover family embarking on a doomed road trip to a children’s beauty pageant was a story I knew I had enjoyed, but my brain seemed to think it wasn’t a memorable enough experience to stow away and document with a stamp of authenticity.

I acquired a part-time gig in my brain’s archival wing when I began posting pictures on Snapchat every time I’d rent a DVD from All the Best. The pictures acted as my rudimentary form of documentation. Caught as a moment in time: the front cover of the DVD case and the sun casting shadows through the window of my mom’s car. Primarily, my film exploration was informed by the internet. My taste was infused with the opinions of strangers on screens, but both of my parents were just as filmically inclined as myself. One day I’d pick up Funny Games (2007) at the behest of a WatchMojo list, and the next I was renting Reservoir Dogs (1992) after my dad’s hearty recommendation. My own taste was developing slowly but clearly, like a photograph dipped in a silver bath.

I felt like I had the entire world of cinema ahead of me with so much to discover. The archive wing was expanding as I began to more easily access past films I’d seen throughout the years with technology’s assistance. But I still kept returning to Little Miss Sunshine. As I couldn’t recall my first viewing, it felt like it had always been with me. Depressed or disheartened, nostalgic or ambivalent, I would watch as the Hoover family suffered misstep after misstep and suddenly feel less alone in my melancholy. The humanness of the characters and the humble shabbiness of the world felt like somewhere I’d never been to but could wholly remain inside of forever. One day, I went into All the Best and saw a Little Miss Sunshine DVD sitting on the employee favorites shelf. I left it there for someone else to find.

My middle and high school years progressed, and I eventually discovered Letterboxd as a much more interesting and efficient way than Snapchat to document the movies I watched. After deleting my Snapchat account, I lost all the pictures I’d saved over the years, but I quickly transferred the films I could remember to the newly refurbished, Letterboxd-sponsored archive wing. This new form of documentation was a beacon that had long lay behind a guarded door; I’d finally guessed the secret code and could now access all of the information I’d needed to aid my filmic memories.

I didn’t fixate on the nature of memory until I graduated high school, a year after I’d begun using Letterboxd to stow away my collection of films watched. I didn’t think I’d ever need to make a concerted effort in remembering. The act had always seemed to me a natural thing, no assistance needed. It wasn’t until I was pushed into a world of small details forgotten, with some events and conversations erased entirely, that I feared losing the ability to reach back inside my brain and pull out the benchmarks of my life’s passion: movies. My pictures and entries hadn’t been direct responses to this approaching memory impasse, but they had inadvertently been saving my mind from redacting the years I’d spent evolving my love. Who was I if not a construction of moments, memories aglow in Technicolor hues? Without these clear recollections, my brain’s museum was not a carefully curated environment like All the Best. The potential for disorder intimidated me. But, throughout my many attempts to understand and construct the ideal memory apparatus, Little Miss Sunshine was still there, waiting in the wings.

I had grown alongside the film as Olive grows within it. Dysfunction abounded at every corner, but something about the failure, the arid desert, and the breakdowns all resonated with me. Maybe part of me loved the hipness purgatory of it all, the twee and the intrinsic specificity in the Hoover’s corner of America. I thought Paul Dano was cute if not a little frightening, and I loved seeing Steve Carell in a role where he wasn’t yelling to be funny for once. Toni Collette is a woman on the edge, and Greg Kinnear is a man already falling off of it. Alan Arkin, winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his turn as the drug-addicted patriarch, charms me every time through rants about fried chicken and nursing homes. And then there’s Abigail Breslin: the most wide-eyed and bushy-tailed of the bunch, the film’s love letter to hope. The film is a postcard from my past marked with a stamp that never expires, my love letter to my memories, to myself.

I have often confused in my mind the terms “favorite” and “most important.” I once foolishly believed that I had to maintain a favorite film for years for it to count as meaningful. I thought that because The Breakfast Club inspired me as a child that it needed to remain on this grand pedestal in the “Things that Make Me Who I Am” wing even as everything around it grew and changed. With Little Miss Sunshine, I never pressured myself to think of the film as anything more than what it was to me, which has always been a piece of art that rests snugly in my heart for when I need it the most. I never considered it the “most important” film I’d ever seen, nor my “favorite.” It just simply was. I suppose if I had viewed it any other way, I would’ve been missing the entire point of the film. The world isn’t just made up of things that are important or things that are someone’s favorite. The world is also made up of things that make you feel hopeful and loved and understood. The world is full of Sufjan Stevens songs that make you cry and sunsets cresting over VW buses. The world is much more interesting with all the things in it that make it complex and uncertain. The world housing this film I hold so dear is a world I am (usually) happy to call home. When I feel otherwise, I know where to find my DVD copy.

When All the Best closed its doors for the last time in 2021, they sold all their merchandise. It saddened me deeply to know of the store’s impending demise, but I remained grateful to have made memories there at all. As I browsed through each aisle carefully, selecting several films I wanted to keep, I felt guilty, as if I were stripping the store for parts. But during my moral crisis, I found myself back at the employee favorites shelf. The copy of Little Miss Sunshine remained there, marked with a yellow sticker like a fervent, shining sun. Marked for sale, marked for me.

I felt the sudden need to finally have it as my own, a timeless memento from All the Best. Its persistence through the store’s many years reflected my own frequent trips to the space where my passion for movies could be studied and ignited. The DVD was a sort of talisman, a reminder of the strength it instilled in me every time I watched it, and of course, of the store itself. Its cosmic force pulled me and never really stopped. Little Miss Sunshine turns 20 years old this year, and though I couldn’t tell you when, where, or how I first encountered the film, I can tell you one thing for sure: once it finds you, it never lets go. I’m glad it found me.