A Review of The Only Girl in the Orchestra, or, How Do You Avoid the Spotlight When You're Streaming on Netflix?
"I liked being in the background."
The first female musician to play in the New York Philharmonic wasn’t Orin O’Brien, the endearingly humble double bassist at the center of The Only Girl in the Orchestra. Technically, that distinction belongs to Stephanie Goldner, the Austrian-American harpist who, from 1922 to 1932, was outnumbered 97-to-1 by her male colleagues in the orchestra. Goldner left her position for personal reasons, after her husband was chosen as the next conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, and her departure commenced a 34-year interregnum during which every member of the Philharmonic, including the harpist, was a man. The composer Leonard Bernstein brought that period to an end in 1966, when he selected O’Brien for the chair she would steadfastly occupy at Lincoln Center for the next five decades and change.
The Only Girl in the Orchestra, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short at the 97th Academy Awards, details the momentous-in-context events that precede and follow O’Brien’s retirement, in 2021, from the Philharmonic. Its runtime is 35 minutes, a length that affords—let’s do the math—around 38 seconds to each year of O’Brien’s tenure with the most prestigious orchestra in the United States. However, this intentional mismatch of form and content, the juxtaposition between the rigid brevity of the medium and the sprawling breadth of O’Brien’s career, becomes a key part of The Only Girl in the Orchestra’s appeal, especially as the specificity of O’Brien’s background, character, and psychology are gradually revealed. What could have been a rote female empowerment narrative about shattering glass ceilings, or a hackneyed celebration of The New York-Based Artist’s Life, operates instead as counter-programming for the elite self-aggrandizement and creative class propaganda that typifies too much documentary filmmaking in the streaming era.
A vital aspect of this uncontrived resistance to the prevailing norms in the marketplace for streaming documentaries is the close relationship between filmmaker and subject. Directed by Molly O’Brien, Orin’s niece and only surviving familial relation, The Only Girl in the Orchestra emerges organically out of an admiration (and frustration) that has been gestating, quite literally, for the filmmaker’s whole life. Molly establishes early on how her aunt’s fierce commitment to her craft, as well as the presumed excitement and romance of following one’s passions in the big city, informed her own pursuit of that path. But these grandiose ideas about being a working artist, as the documentary makes clear, were youthful projections on Molly’s part. If Orin was a trailblazer, it seems as if she was an accidental one. She is your run-of-the-mill boring old aunt, aside, of course, from the one or two ways in which she is miraculous.
The context of Orin’s upbringing comes to bear in intriguing ways on the proceedings, and they are made more intriguing by how the short doc form forces them to be only hinted at, left relatively under-explored. Both of Orin’s parents, George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill, were major Hollywood movie stars between the Silent Era and World War II, and the peripatetic lifestyle of being raised by two in-demand actors, of a childhood that afforded minimal sustained attention or locational stability, is written all over Orin in her 80s. The woman lugs around her reaction formation everywhere as she does her giant ungainly bass. Unmarried, childless, avoidant of the spotlight, the ultimate creature of habit: her genius arguably derives less from performing and teaching classical music than from outright rejecting everything represented by her now-deceased parents.
Not only has Orin had the same job for 55 years, but she has also occupied the same small apartment during that extended period. (The average NYC renter stays in the same rental for 3.5 years.) Were black mold not seeping through the walls of her longtime apartment, we can assume Orin gladly would have died inside of it, gotten her niece to seal shut the doors, and had the residence reclassified by the city as a sepulcher. Her instinctive resistance to the slightest change in address, routine, or her personal history as she recalls it, imbues her retirement and overdue move with a heroism and sweetness that’s also prickly, obstinate. Molly, as our conduit to Orin, highlights these psychological threads and personality quirks but never presses her aunt to fully unpack them, and we’re left with elisions and obfuscations that are recognizable, the open secrets that persist between close and estranged family members alike.
As The Only Girl in the Orchestra resists simplistic narratives of self-determination and a shallow lionization of its subject, it rebukes generic trends much as Orin has rejected her parents’ way of being, painting in stark contrast the shortcomings of the long-form documentaries that dominate today’s streaming platforms: the sensationalized true-crime sagas, the celebrity or athlete hagiography exercises, the retrospective “complicating” of a popular artist’s work and biography. Despite Molly’s insistence to the contrary, Orin is resolute in her belief that she is not an artist, that her talent is not exceptional, that whatever affinity she has for the instrument to which she has devoted a lifetime was retroactive. (Her school orchestra simply didn’t have a bass player when she joined). Looking back, she views her understated, solitary, and routinized existence just to the left of the spotlight as one mostly happy accident after another, which for her, perhaps for anyone, is more than enough to take stock of things close to the end and have no regrets.
What will happen to Orin O’Brien’s cherished anonymity now that The Only Girl in the Orchestra has won an Academy Award and started streaming on Netflix, which has more than 300 million global subscribers? For a woman who has never actively sought out adoration or recognition, it would be destabilizing if random people suddenly started stopping Orin in the street to compliment the documentary, commend her on an estimable career, request a selfie. After all, we have been conditioned to perceive whoever and whatever appears on our screens, big and small, as worthy of a special attention often not reserved for our everyday lives, but that hopefully will not apply in this case. A 35-minute documentary about some lady who plays a weird instrument? 99% percent of Netflix users are scrolling right past that tile, and each time they do, it’ll be another happy accident in the life quietly full of them.