Fashion Corner!! Minnie Should Have Lived

July 7, 2021 4:26 pm Published by Kelsey Lawrence

The boys get to be wild, and the girls die in car crashes for it. That wasn’t the message I wanted to get from Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum, and it probably wasn’t the message the movie wanted to give. It was mostly a movie built for a good time, which is a genre I value and would be a simple-minded loser to be very critical of! Either way, Isla Fisher’s character Minnie has loomed large in my mind because she begs the question that the internet once asked: “Who is she?”

From her 34 minutes in the movie, we learn that she is very rich, lives in Miami, loves lingerie both La Perla and Snoop Dogg’s character’s name, and loves her wayward husband even more. But we never learn what drove her, what made her fun, what made her have a crazy life but a normal daughter, things like that. “His mother spoiled him” she says in the movie, but we don’t learn what her mother did. Either way, Minnie is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen!

The Beach Bum is all lighthearted, deranged behavior, Zac Efron’s panini sideburns and Martin Lawrence’s dolphin enthusiasm. The only devastating occurrence of consequence is Minnie’s absolute freak death. It’s a car crash we don’t see after she and her husband have spent their daughter’s wedding night on piers and in bars, flirting and smoking and dancing and drinking.

A writer from film publication Bright Wall/Dark Room who remembers names and concepts (I rarely do!) wrote well about this:

It’s key to The Beach Bum’s worldview that Minnie is the one behind the wheel for her fatal car wreck; Moondog, sitting shotgun during that head-on collision, has almost certainly imbibed more than his wife, but it’s inconceivable that the universe of Korine’s film would extend such fatal consequences to him. Minnie is intoxicated as much by Moondog’s cheerful disregard for consequences as she is by the substances in her system, and—cosmically unfair as it may be—she’s punished for her belief that his impossible immunity could extend to her.

Out of all the positively wacky people in this movie, Minnie is the most enthralling. Someone who bounces between normal life and insanity is way more captivating to watch than a person who sticks to either extreme. In the summer, I think extra about her. In my fan fic, Minnie lives long and wild — no drunk car crash, only the best of both worlds and Roberto Cavalli is still around too.