Do you have to kill your inner Party Girl to grow up? Watching the cult 1995 film for the first time, 21-year-old Elle Daji finds herself reflecting on the same swirling questions of identity and purpose that come up over Friday night drinks with her friends – and imagines what a 2025 party girl in Tāmaki Makaurau might wear as she dances through her own unpredictable, sparkling 20s.
To say our early 20s are a turbulent and torrential time is an understatement. Our own potential and opportunity are at war with crippling anxiety and confusion. Disparate possibilities flutter past, enticing us with promises of satisfaction and happiness.
Fleabag's plea for someone to tell her what to do feels apt here. While this period of life can often feel like your own modern psychological horror film, there are parts we cling to, unwilling to let go. I realised this after watching the cult 1995 film Party Girl.
If you've been hit with post-The White Lotus Parker Posey blues, it is the perfect cure. For the uninitiated, Party Girl follows Mary, a flawed and sickeningly well-dressed 24-year-old. She flits from house party to club and lands herself a job as a clerk at the New York Library, where she stumbles across The Myth of Sisyphus and, incidentally, her life's purpose.
Party Girl is a modern fable about how one young woman exchanges her life of illegal raves and evading eviction for the opportunity of a career she's oddly perfect for. Embedded within the downtown club culture of 90s New York, Mary's character was based on the amalgam of scenesters director Daisy von Scherler Mayer would encounter during nights out in the city.
We've all met Mary – in fact, we've probably all been her at some point in our lives.
She's fun, quick-witted and has a Ferris Bueller-esque talent for getting out of a snag. She is present in the irresponsible decision to buy $800 worth of clothes instead of paying your phone bill, and in the string of parties you attend to avoid having to think about the direction of your career, or worse, life. But despite her weaknesses, you can't help but love her. Without Mary, you would not have any of your 'for the plot' stories and figurative medals shown off over a glass of wine.
Thirty years later, there is still so much to take from Mary. As Ultra Naté’s Party Girl (Turn Me Loose) played and the credits rolled, I couldn't help but feel slightly dissatisfied. Mary trades in her vintage clothes for the Dewey Decimal System in service of character development. To be clear, this is a good thing. She learns to place someone else’s needs before her own and discovers a passion that she can turn into a career.
These days, Mary's job at the library is the equivalent of a corporate gig in consulting. And as the pressure to sort out our lives mounts, I wonder: what else, besides vintage clothes, might have to go?
But first: what does the ‘correct’ life path look like? While this is unlikely to exist in totality, Mary's comes from the quiet purpose she finds helping others as a clerk. Simple enough.
Translating that to today, does it mean a steady corporate job? A tight-knit circle? A regular sleep schedule? Daily reformer Pilates or whatever the ‘clean girls’ are doing this week? Does it look like an onslaught of self-help books and sickeningly positive quotes from a 19-year-old influencer stating she has it all figured out? A rise-and-grind mindset that equates self-worth with productivity?
More and more, one's purpose and subjective experience of the world cedes to the bombardment of the expectations of others. I'm not convinced this is all life has to offer.
There's something galvanizing about revelling in the chaos of your early 20s, when it's normal to have an hour-long phone call dissecting the romantic implications of how the stranger in the library looked at you, and when it's acceptable to say you have no money but a new pair of jeans mysteriously appears in your closet.
There's a humming undercurrent of anxiety, punctuated by moments of reprieve. Moments that are not necessarily marathons, morning journaling sessions or reading the latest self-help book stating that our phones are ruining us – but the six Negronis you drank, the co-worker you accidentally went out with and the slew of diabolical fashion choices you'll look back on and regret.
I'm not quite ready to tenderly kiss this version of myself goodbye - to put her on the train to nowhere, only to come back to town on the occasional night out. That seems cruel, and I'll miss her.
While I don't want her to leave, I know that one day she'll be gone and I'll hold onto her memory in the way every woman before me has. The light comes in the form of women older than me who tell me that I'll get out of this tunnel, I just have to be patient. Travelling through it, we balance personal, family and societal expectations with the intention of finding the elusive right thing.
Sometimes, our career might not be the complete answer to a life's purpose. In fact, the more I explore it, it's unlikely to be. In the face of this, I turn to Party Girl.
I've recently entered my own version of Mary's New York City Library; thrust into an environment that screams ‘they don't know how to have fun’. I've seen so many young women let go of the beautifully messy parts of themselves to conform to what an employer thinks they should be. I fear I may let a more formal, work-appropriate version of myself bleed into my personal life and take over. This causes a dichotomy where I'm constantly scared of losing myself when who I am is not fully formed yet. How much of myself am I willing to forgo in pursuit of stability? Honestly, in this economy – a lot. Consider my soul sold. But how might I maintain my colour in this sterile and fluorescent environment?
Perplexed, I turned to my real-life Party Girl: my mum. After reading parts of this piece, she told me that growing up and getting serious doesn't always mean you give up the most delicious parts of your essence. Entering different environments, your identity shifts, and different qualities may take centre stage, but that doesn't mean you have disappeared.
It’s comforting to know that the path taken through our 20s is well-trodden. People make it out the other side with fully developed frontal lobes and engaging personalities intact. After all, Mary does end the film dancing.
Mary, the timeless club kid and modern-day Sysiphus, adapts to each girl navigating her early 20s. She provokes questions about identity, purpose and whether sky-blue shoes go with striped red tights. Mary finds her boulder to be the art of library science, and gives up her fast-living and even faster-talking ways in the process.
As this chapter of life begins to close, maybe we don’t have to shelve the gorgeously messy and fun aspects of our personalities. Learning from our mistakes and becoming more functional does not mean succumbing to a boring and banal adult life, if you don't want it to. Knowing that, I don't think Mary is going anywhere anytime soon.
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