Where would we be without our ingénues? Our Amelies and Mary Pickfords, and of course the tragic ones like Cosette from Les Misérables? Everyone’s heart goes out to the lonely, the sad, the existentially concussed young woman. Throughout art history there are legions of moping naifs within a hair’s breadth of O.D.-ing on one of life’s bitter pills. And there they are, frozen in time, and we, completely ignorant of the fact that a but moment before and a moment after, they were spouting inanities like, “If I have to like, clean my room, I’m going to just totally die!”
