Indie Star Award: Susan Seidelman

She certainly stands out against the backdrop of grimy, gritty New York—full of energy and verve in a city that, in the 1980s, was spitting out the remnants of rebellion (without much conviction). Soon the yuppies would arrive, but for now the streets were filled with groupies, sex workers, artists hunting for opportunities, and people simply searching (for something). Desperately.

Susan Seidelman was that girl. Well, not exactly—the description above belongs to the opening of Smithereens (1982) and its protagonist, Wren, played by Susan Berman. The name similarity is coincidental, but not entirely: Seidelman searches for Susan in her life and work. Desperately.

So Susan was that girl — a twentysomething wandering New York, determined to define herself somehow. Cinema came into her life by accident (along with a certain lecturer), but once she stumbled upon it, she decided she might as well become a director. And since no one had told her that women in film were an aberration, she finished film school, won awards for her shorts, and debuted with Smithereens — the first American indie ever to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

She was one of many such women we remember only occasionally today. Even as second-wave feminism seemed to open doors to women in male-dominated professions, cinema remained resistant to change. In the 1980s, alongside Seidelman, Martha Coolidge, Penny Marshall, Lizzie Borden, and Kathryn Bigelow all began their careers. Yet most—despite making hits like Valley Girl, Big, and A League of Their Own—stayed in the shadows of more celebrated colleagues: John Hughes, Jim Jarmusch, Tim Burton, or the New Hollywood giants Scorsese, Coppola, and Lucas. Bigelow is the exception, still active today, with her greatest successes in the war-film genre. The rest were pushed to the margins—because they stumbled once and were no longer considered “reliable,” because their films were deemed trivial, because they told stories about heroines that clashed with Reagan-era conservatism.

With this Seidelman retrospective, we want to spotlight one of those women directors who had the courage to elbow their way in, wedge a foot in a closed door, and shatter glass ceilings.

Confessions of Susan from the suburbs

Seidelman was born in Abington, Pennsylvania, and when her father—an entrepreneur and hardware store owner—began earning more, the family moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia. Escaping the suburbs, and everything they represented, would come to define both her life and her art.

Of course, around the same time, David Lynch, Tim Burton, and Steven Spielberg were also uncovering the dark side of suburbia. But the director of Confessions of a Suburban Girl insists that the suburbs are not only breeding grounds for perversion, broken families, and demonic forces, but also for momentous boredom, from which women struggle to escape.

Like other girls born in the 1950s, Susan was being groomed to be a Stepford wife—a model, modern homemaker and mother whose duty was to maintain prosperity and secure her daughter’s future by finding her a suitable husband. In Confessions of a Suburban Girl (1992) and in her 2024 autobiography, Seidelman notes how such patterns were encoded into her and her friends from childhood. Rebellion was inevitable: the 1960s and 1970s were coming, and the desperately maintained model of the nuclear family was falling apart. Women either rejected their assigned roles early, like the teenage rebel Seidelman, or painfully realized their inadequacy later, having to take up jobs and divorce the husbands they had met in high school.

Rebels by choice

The heroines of Seidelman’s films are runaways, who have left (or are leaving) behind social expectations, conventional appearances, and masculine values. Their rebellion is so radical it obscures the horizon, no one knows what lies beyond.

Wren in Smithereens wants nothing more than to exist as a fully fledged person, which makes her daily life chaotic and random, but certainly rich in new experiences. Teresa (Mira Sorvino), the silent heroine of The Dutch Master, experiences an erotic awakening that pulls her from a doomed marriage, while Ruth (Roseanne Barr), the titular She-Devil, blows up her old life (literally) only to discover that rebellion suits her. Sweet revenge, however, raises the question: what comes next? That’s where the story ends.

The patron saint of all these women desperately searching for Something Else is, of course, Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) from Desperately Seeking Susan (1985). She senses, with her whole body, that something is wrong with her pastel-colored life. She doesn’t know what, but her diary fills up with trivialities. Her only excitement comes from newspaper personals and the lives glimpsed in them. The feisty Susan (Madonna), the ad’s addressee, gives her the impulse to change: to swap a sensible suit for a skimpy dress, a quiet life for adventure.

If a short dress and adventures call to mind another blonde heroine whose diary became a column, that’s no coincidence. Seidelman helped set the tone for one of television’s defining series at the turn of the century by directing the pilot of Sex and the City. There, she showed what women think and do without restraint or soft filters. She poured all her incarnations into it: the liberated one, the creative artist, the family-minded dreamer and the woman who rejects this concept completly. Each of them loves New York.

Susan's dream house

Yes, Seidelman creates cinema devoted to women (though always with great actors in the background: John Malkovich, John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Steven Wright, Richard Hell). Most of her heroines are in the process of completely reinventing their lives. And Seidelman herself is also a connoisseur of looks, a collector of styles that fit her characters like the perfect outfit.

Her films often begin with an inventory of artifacts—we meet the cast and crew against backdrops of perfume bottles, lipsticks, nail polishes, punk sunglasses, or promo posters scattered around a room. Seidelman seems to believe in the stylist’s mantra: details make the look.

She builds worlds out of pop culture trends, fads, and even trash. From the cauldron of the 1980s, she fishes out what’s most enticing: on one side, the nonchalant eclecticism embodied by Wren from Smithereens and Susan from Desperately Seeking Susan; on the other, the plush splendor of romance writer Mary’s mansion (Meryl Streep’s first comedic role!), alternating with the postmodern jumble of marketing exec Frankie’s home (Ann Magnuson). These are dollhouses — Barbie Punk, Barbie Housewife, Barbie Executive.

Susan <3 cinema

In fact, Seidelman had planned to study fashion. But when she enrolled in film classes—just to earn credits and pass the year easily—she unexpectedly fell in love with cinema. Especially with Godard, whom all aspiring filmmakers adored then: his narrative nonchalance, his bold experiments. Combined with the guerrilla spirit of 1970s indie filmmaking—the same ethos that drove Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, and other New Hollywood names to shoot “in the wild”—this love blossomed into a new kind of cinema, and Seidelman became part of it.

The fragmentary feel of the new wave also lingers in her stories, built from ideas scribbled on napkins, scraps of paper, even her own forearm. In each of her films, showpiece scenes sometimes interrupt the narrative to delight viewers with an unconventional idea: an absurdly touching conversation between a sex worker and van-dweller Paul in Smithereens, or the social-skills lesson an android learns by watching trashy talk shows in Making Mr. Right.

Seidelman also loves cinema in a more direct way: Desperately Seeking Susan is an American variation on Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating, with a nod to Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Wren from Smithereens is an ’80s version of Giulietta Masina’s heroine in Nights of Cabiria. Making Mr. Right blends Frankenstein with the Pygmalion myth, and even riffs loosely on the Soviet sci-fi We Called Him Robert.

Desperately seeking Susan

The director begins her autobiography with the line: “My parents named me Susan,” immediately placing herself among other famous Susans. To that pantheon, her films have added Susan Berman’s Wren and Madonna’s iconic Susan. It’s true: every Susan is searching (and sometimes others are desperately seeking Susan). And it would seem that these searches are always destined to fail.

But what if the point is not to find, but to keep moving? To keep searching? At 72, as her autobiography shows, Seidelman never stopped. That’s what allows her to keep telling stories. Above all, it’s what sparks her curiosity about the world. And she “can’t wait to see what the next Susans will come up with.” More women desperately searching for themselves, and leaving us with more stories along the way.

Patrycja Mucha
Translated by Barbara Feliga