Though this season of The White Lotus has largely been greeted with bemused shrugs, there seems to be at least one thing audiences can positively agree on. No, not the taboo brother love happening on cursed party yachts: It’s Parker Posey, who is so shrewdly, terrifically awful as North Carolina lady of means Victoria Ratliff. Her pinched drawl, her blithe snobbishness, her addled assessments of the world around her—it’s all a wicked delight.
It recently struck us oldsters here at Vanity Fair that there may be a contingent of nascent Parker Posey admirers who, due to their boggling youth, are not familiar with the work that first endeared Posey to a legion of fans decades ago. To help bridge that generational divide, we’ve compiled a short list of iconic Posey performances that are well worth seeking out once The White Lotus has concluded and Victoria is no longer livening up our Sunday nights. The good news is that a whole wonderful world of Parker Posey awaits you.
Dazed and Confused
Though Richard Linklater’s 1993 first-night-of-summer-break masterpiece is mostly an amiable hang movie, some villainy does lurk at the edges of the film. There’s Ben Affleck’s aggro bully O’Bannion tormenting the freshman boys—and there’s Parker Posey as the menacing Darla, who takes great pleasure in hazing the girls she will mercilessly reign over at school in the fall. Posey is indelible in just a few short scenes, precisely rendering a particular kind of casual upperclassman cruelty. She’s a riot, too, deftly playing beer-blast drunk and doing a sloppy pratfall. This was one of Posey’s very first film roles, and it’s plain to see why so many interesting directors wanted to work with her immediately after.
Party Girl
For many Posey acolytes, this is the defining role of her cool-girl epoch. The film, from director Daisy von Scherler Mayer, was a hit at Sundance in 1995, and would go on to achieve cult status in the girls-and-gays realm of film fanaticism. For good reason: Party Girl is a weird, dishy satire of New York’s club kid ecosystem, with Posey as a clueless but also totally clued-in emblem of its vanities, excesses, and forward thinking innovation. It’s impossible to imagine Party Girl with anyone else in the lead role, and it’s difficult to imagine indie film history without Posey’s declarative presence in this movie.
The House of Yes
While Mark Waters’s 1997 adaptation of Wendy MacLeod’s darkly comedic play is uneven—though certainly worth watching; Tori Spelling is in it, for heaven’s sake—Posey is undeniably transfixing as Jackie-O, the delusional daughter of a fucked up family who is obsessed with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and, well, her own brother. Yes: this was Posey’s first foray into the arena of incest, largely done in a pink suit and pillbox hat. We have no idea how this season of The White Lotus is going to end, but maybe the sight of Jackie-O wielding a revolver with the intent to pull the trigger gives us some kind of hint.
Waiting for Guffman/Best in Show
It’s impossible to pick just one of Posey’s great turns in Christopher Guest films, so we’re listing two. In Guffman, Posey is the lackadaisical but nonetheless ambitious ingénue in a community theater production of an original musical, dreaming of life in the big city but not putting much effort into the task at hand. Posey is a marvel here, perfectly embodying a local girl’s mounting passion for a project she is beginning to think might deliver her to stardom. (Who but Posey makes the banal line “Just drive in, get a Coke” such poetry?) In Best in Show, Posey completely shifts gears to become a nightmarish Type A yuppie neurotically obsessed with her prize Weimaraner at the expense of her marriage and her own happiness. Guest makes expert use of Posey’s talent for flat, seemingly vacuous line delivery that actually contains a wealth of deeper, grimly hilarious meaning.
You’ve Got Mail
Posey is a mere supporting player in Nora Ephron’s last great movie (sorry, but the Julia part of Julie & Julia is so much better than the other half!), but she makes a memorable impression nonetheless. As hard-charging book publisher Patricia Eden, Posey is the obvious wrong-match romantic obstacle in the film’s love story. But she and Ephron round out the character with actual smarts and humanity, turning her from easy villain into someone you’re actually kind of rooting for, too. This was one of Posey’s rare forays into high-gloss studio filmmaking, and probably her most successful. While we love the bizarre sight of Posey strutting through Blade: Trinity and Superman Returns, she’s a better fit for Ephron’s shimmering, cozy vision of Manhattan whimsy.
Scream 3
Among the worst films in a venerable horror franchise, Scream 3 has at least one great asset: Posey as a self-involved actress playing Gale Weathers in one of the Stab movies. Posey adds much needed cleverness to a movie that is otherwise straining pretty hard to be funny. We know she’s probably going to get killed by Ghostface, but she’s maybe the only red shirt we actually want to survive. One bit of a physical comedy is enough to seal the deal: Posey, in one graceful motion, leaping up into Patrick Warburton’s arms like a needy cat. It’s easily the best moment in the whole movie.
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