I wasn’t ten minutes into Breakfast at Tiffany’s before realizing Holly Golightly had a name for a feeling many twenty-somethings know far too well: the mean reds.
This Thanksgiving break, after a delicious meal and some scandalous family-drama gossip, my dad and I settled in to watch the movie he insisted I had to see. From my limited knowledge of the film, I sat down expecting beautiful jewelry and outfit inspiration from 50s–60s “It Girl” Audrey Hepburn (which I definitely got, and which may have influenced my Black Friday indulgences). But I also found something else — something surprisingly relevant to college students. The film offers a nuanced take on freedom, belonging, and the weight of choosing who we want to be.
Most of our lives until recently were shaped by decisions other people made for us — parents, teachers, schools. As we got older, we were given small tastes of independence until college finally opened the door to full autonomy. Suddenly, many of us are choosing our own futures for the first time. Here, at times, independence becomes its own promise: the freedom to shape our days, pick our people, decide our paths, and reinvent ourselves whenever we feel the urge. After years of predetermined decisions, freedom feels like floating through an open sky: untethered, undefined, and if you keep moving, untouched by consequences and permanence. It’s thrilling. But Breakfast at Tiffany’s reminded me there’s another side to this story.
The film—based on Truman Capote’s novella— follows Holly Golightly, a self-invented Manhattan socialite, originally named Lulamae Barnes from rural Texas, determined to outrun that version of herself. She lives by a philosophy of total freedom — never settling, never naming, never letting anything anchor her in one place. She builds a life of spontaneity, keeping her apartment half-furnished, her connections loose, and even refusing to name her cat — everything kept deliberately temporary. And yet there’s an undeniable charm in the world she creates. Unlike those who convince themselves they always know who they are, Holly is transparent about her shifting intentions and unfinished identity. Paul, her friend in the film (and unnamed narrator in the book), is immediately pulled into that honesty. While most people chase stability, Holly clings to possibility, offering a glimpse into a life she refuses to let harden into one shape, a life built on not belonging to anything.
But even in her freedom, we quickly start to see another truth — how even someone as unpretending as Holly can slip into self-deception. She describes a feeling that stops her in her tracks, something she calls “the mean reds.” According to Holly, they’re different from the blues, which happen when you are just sad because you are down or “it’s been raining too long.” To Holly, “The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of.”
The mean reds are the part of freedom we forget to name. Its impermanence lets us float above the reality that every choice carries its own fear, and that the freedom to choose also means the possibility of choosing wrong.
I believe there’s a delicate balance within this paradox of freedom and cages, one we will spend much of our lives navigating. Holly steps into this balance at Tiffany’s of all places. Satirical as it is in its obvious vanity, she’s drawn there not only by its glamour, but by the calm and polish it lends to her chaotic life, a place where she says nothing bad can happen.
While Tiffany’s is not her home, the feeling it gives her is what I believe Holly is truly pursuing — a feeling we can only hope she will one day replicate in a place of her own. The film ends with Holly choosing to face her fears, finally naming her cat, and allowing herself to love the writer who has been in front of her all along. But this is not the ending Capote gives her in his novella. After finishing the movie, I picked up the book and found a different fate: Holly moves to Rio, and later resurfaces in Africa, still wandering and still free.
Both endings offer their own philosophy of freedom: one where someone becomes your Tiffany’s and one where Tiffany’s is something you carry with you. So I leave you with the question: Which ending feels right to you?
