Ranking Carol’s Best Pickup Lines

If you thought I was going to shut up about Carol in 2017, you were wrong. I’m still a total Carol–head. I stand in solidarity with the Carol–head nation as we continue to alienate ourselves from friends and colleagues. It will be 30 years from now, the earth dusty from war, and still we will repel our community as we lap from the fountain of Carol. I hope in that time we can add to the canon something I think that gets overlooked, which are Carol Aird’s pickup lines. Sorry for partying? But Carol Aird has some bangers.

What makes a Carol Aird pickup line a Carol Aird pickup line is the finesse with which it is delivered. It’s a buttery slick down a roll kind of smooth. They’re slow burners tucked into conversations like newborn babies into blankets. Mwah, it’s a kiss, a whisper of a proposal. The creamed spinach scene? She lands four pickup lines in 20 seconds. Sweet god!

Let’s get into the business of listing and ranking them based on a set of criteria that includes casualness, flair, ingenuity, vulnerability, persuasiveness, and proaction.

10. “I’m meeting some people at the Oak Room at 9 if you want to have dinner – if you change your mind. I think you’d like them.”

If you wanted to cancel your plans and come for dinner or to meet my friends, whom as I’ve just mentioned you would like, that would be something you could do for yourself. Not for me though – you wouldn’t be coming for that.

9. “Let me take you to lunch, it’s the least I can do.”

A delivery that makes Glove Lunch seem like a reasonable outing is one for the record books.

8. “You’re welcome to [come], at least there’s some pretty country around where I live.”

This one provokes a perfect amount of charged static. Hey, this is either a proposal for interested parties or an invitation to enjoy the outdoors. No pressure among friends, but also maybe you’re beautiful to me and I plan on making you my wife.

7. “Would you let me come see you tomorrow evening?”

Going alpha and beta at the same time. Bless this mess.

6. “Would you like to come visit me this Sunday?”

This is going to have some of you saying, “This isn’t a good pickup line. There is something about it that leaves you too exposed.” Wrong. How well has “We should get drinks sometime…” worked for you? Hello? Asking someone out with a specific plan (to come visit you at your home) on a specific day (Sunday) is so efficient and direct that it becomes an answer. You want to come visit me on Sunday.

5. “Maybe you’d like to come visit me sometime.”

*pats soil*

4. “What do you do on Sundays?”

WHOO, this one lingers. Not this Sunday but on Sundays. What do I do on Sundays? Uh, not a lot, or sometimes anything at all. I’m probably free because it’s the weekend. Like, big picture? Sundays are usually for contemplating the week ahead and charging head down into the existential void that is a Sunday afternoon. Curious to know what my whereabouts on Sunday have to do with anything. Why, what do you do on Sunda–oh, wait.

3. “I’m going away for awhile. Wherever my car will take me. West. Soon. And I thought, perhaps, you might like to come with me. Would you?”

This is Carol asking Therese on a damn cross-country trip like I would ask someone if they wanted to share an appetizer.

2. “Anyway, the apartment’s a nice big one. Big enough for two. I was hoping you might like to come live with me but I guess you won’t. Would you?”

This was dropped into a conversation over tea. After months of not speaking. After months of not speaking because Carol left Therese in a hotel in the middle of the night without saying goodbye. After months of not speaking because Carol left Therese in a hotel in the middle of the night without saying goodbye and had her ex act as her replacement to drive Therese home. What in or on this holy green earth would be the driving force behind someone doing this, besides a confidence that is born from knowing the future? Then the layering here is so stretched out that you’re following her logic in real time and and you’re going, “Don’t…” and then she does it anyway.

1. “Invite me ’round.”

“Invite me ’round” is the most baller pick up line I have ever heard in my entire life. In my entire life? In my entire life! It has everything in three words. It’s a suggestion wrapped in a command, it expresses interest, it almost completely eliminates the chance of an immediate rebuff (although lol @ “No, I will not invite you around.”), and puts the ball very much in the other person’s court. Let’s roll with this basketball theme and call it what it absolutely is: a Kobe alley-oop on its way to get crushed under the weight of Kazaam himself.

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Erin

Los Angeles based writer. Let's keep it clean out there!

Erin has written 208 articles for us.

74 Comments

  1. Yes to all of this!

    The best line of that movie will and always will be:

    Carol: Do you miss your boyfriend?

    Therese: No, I haven’t thought of him all day!

  2. They should include smelling salts with the DVD because this movie is an honest to god swoon fest.

  3. I’ll still never be over this film. “Invite me ’round” is fucking iconic. And the way she slinks away after saying it…yum.

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  7. Picked up a DVD of Carol in an used bookstore the other day for $5. Already watched it a couple of times.

    • I wonder what made the original owner get rid of the DVD. Maybe they watched it compulsively and wanted to get their social life back?

      There should be health hazard warnings on the cover.

      This is serious.

      AND NO I’M NOT PROJECTING.

  9. I registered just to comment on this: Bless you, my child. May the flame for Carol Aird burn on in all our hearts, lighting the way to Carol Aird worshippers in future.

  12. I just rewatched this the other day (with my mum, which was a little more awkward than I’d imagined) and when she got to #2 I nearly busted up laughing. The absolute confidence of saying “we can never see each other again” and then following that, months later, with “move into my apartment”.

    This article is delightful and good.

  13. The creamed spinach scene. Sigh. Where Carol just looks at Therese as if she’s an item on the menu. Double sigh.

  14. Carol is really a gift. Also her expression after delivering this line.

    “Anyway, the apartment’s a nice big one. Big enough for two. I was hoping you might like to come live with me but I guess you won’t. Would you?”

  15. I will add “Would you let me come see you tomorrow evening?” To my arsenal

    • I was planning on “Would you like to come visit me this Sunday?”
      And:
      “There’s some pretty country around where I live.”

  16. Major Carol-head here, not better or healed even though it is in fact 2017. Reverse-in-fact, the Drumpf Happening has increased my pining for Carol and Therese’s universe hundred-fold. (How long until there’s a world where we can dreamily look at each other in shallow focus through windows and safely ignore men without abandoning human decency to the winds of white supremacy?)

    Erin, this is beautiful and perfect and thank you. I suppose “ask me…things” doesn’t quite count as a pick-up line, but if I’m honest, that line could pick me up with enough force to disrupt nearby phone lines (= all of Manhattan). I read this in between canning spinach and gin for the days to come when we’ll leave this universe behind, heading off into the sunset on a fleet of boats captained by celesbians we once thought were fictional.

    But in current realities, I’m writing a paper about Carol and the process of adapting it, and to get through all of the emotions I have every single day I work on it, I’ve taken to watching the international trailer every morning, ritually. The trailer alone is better than most feature-films that exist – it’s like a bite-size Snickers bar of Carol.

    I’m leaving this here for anyone who has a job or a life that requires emotionally detaching from this film for a period of minutes to hours; it gets me through:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH3zcuRQXNo

    P.S. The song is also here for you in a metaphorical and literal sense.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdiQbHdeEK4

    • ok 1st lol @ “major carol-head here” and also i was going to include “ask me” but it seemed like at that point therese had already been picked up you know?

      • You’re absolutely right, that’s full-scale projection on my part.

        But I do sometimes like to think that maybe Therese hasn’t been completely picked up until that final scene in the restaurant, you know…? Because I lived that scene like this:

        OKAY SO FINAL SCENE I BET *we’ve got some kind of pulsating music and it’s building and alright there’s a waiter passing okay get out of the way and here we have all these dudes being seated with like one single woman i mean wow there are so many men in this room i can’t see anything okay there she is and she’s turning nope hold on okay we’re turning okay she’s clearly bored oh there you have it wow that is some serious…woww…eye contact…*

        Picked up.

  17. This has such a Mae West feel to it. “Why don’t you invite me ’round sometime when you’ve got nothing on but the radio.”

  18. I like how I’ve gotten to the point where I know an article was written by Erin before I even see her name below the headline.

  19. i’ve written four academic papers on Carol (2015, dir. Todd Haynes) and now i have a topic for a fifth should the opportunity present itself

  20. This movie was a direct meteor hit to my life, an epiphany, an apocalypse even, but in the best possible sense. It changed everything for me and most especially for my wife. We were both reborn as a result of this magnificent movie.

  21. There are pregnant pauses, but Carol is the absolute master of the pregnant non-pause.

  22. “If you thought I was going to shut up about Carol in 2017, you were wrong” EXTREME SAME

  24. Why is it not at all surprising that the comments on an article (a) by Erin and (b) about Carol are particularly scintillating?

  25. Well, this is a wholly irresponsible article, and I’m not just saying that because I’m a member of the unpopular and controversial Ambivalent About Carol Club.

    It’s already hard enough to work out when a woman is hitting on you, and encouraging Carol’s weirdly accusatory and mildly defeatist bamboozlers will do nothing to improve this situation.

    We are creating a generation of protoqueers that will be too scared to leave the house on Sundays, and whose standard pick-up line will be “Hi. I guess not. Bye.”

    This may work for the Blanchett-faced among us, but I fear that for mortal gays a life of creamed spinach-for-one awaits.

  26. I first read your commentary on #5 as *soils pants* and I think that’s also a valid reaction.

  28. And yet … and yet … it’s Therese that invites herself into Carol’s motel room bed and Therese who says I love you before they’ve even kissed. She’s gutsy. And, at the risk of lesbian heresy, Therese is the much more interesting character but I guess that’s only in the book. The film doesn’t give her much to do other than gaze at Carol like a puppy.

    • This is very true! I LOVED both the film and the book though. Showed me what kind of films we queer women could have, in a perfect world.

  29. Hey, I just met you and this sounds crazy, but would you, run away with me, Baby?
    Like, in my car, but would you?

    Hey, I just left you, and this sounds crazy, but would you move in with me, like, right now, baby?
    You won’t right, but seriously, would you?

  31. So, please don’t kick me off the island ok? But who on Earth is this Carol person? What are we talking about? I’m so confused…

  32. This post almost makes me want to enjoy Carol beyond the score, cinematography, pretty people

    I won’t, though
    I refuse

  33. I saw this pop up on facebook and my first thought was “I bet this is an Erin article” and my second thought was “I bet this is gold”

    I’m happy I was right on both counts :D

  35. Not sure if “I like the hat” is a pick-up line or a pick-me-up-off-the-floor line. (for me, definitely the latter…)

  36. Had to sign up just to comment on this amazing specimin of an article and add two points:

    – totally agree with another commenter that “like the hat” and the accompanying little wink constitute a pick up line, one of the best IMO.

    – did anyone else notice Therese’s best pick up line? “If the rate’s attractive” when talking about taking the presidential suite?

  39. I’ve still never had to report a comment, I’m glad to say. This blog has been around for a few years now, and I’ve never seen it get rowdy. How many blogs can say that?

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