- My Brilliant Friend — Elena Ferrante, 2011
Two girls grow up together. One becomes celebrated, the other tells the story. Ferrante is uncomfortably honest about the small betrayals and recalibrations that happen when one friend’s life starts to register on a larger scale than the other’s.
- Amadeus — Miloš Forman, 1984
Salieri tells the story of the friend whose gift quietly destroyed his sense of his own. The film catches the specific, hard-to-admit grief of watching someone you know personally become someone the world knows differently, and of no longer being sure which version is yours.
- So — Peter Gabriel, 1986
The album that took Gabriel from the friend of famous people to one of them. Listened to with this in mind, it sounds like the strange threshold record it was: still intimate, suddenly enormous, made by someone whose phone was about to start ringing differently.