The Recovering Teenage Girl: A Lesson In Genuine From Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig tells us "you get only one life, so might as well feel all the feelings." But what's stopping us?
You can’t get away from women in pain. I have written before about pain and womanhood, so have lots of writers. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett writes for The Guardian “the wounded woman remains a powerful cultural myth: she is beautiful, she is on the verge... She is Anna Karenina and Sylvia Plath and Cathy Earnshaw and La Bohème’s Mimì... She is also a mainstay of tabloid media. She is Peaches Geldof and Amy Winehouse and Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe and Paula Yates and now, heartbreakingly, Caroline Flack. The beautiful, wounded woman is falling apart before our eyes and it is titillating. She is, to use modern parlance, a ‘hot mess’.” It’s not profound to recognise the inherent pain that comes back to women again and again, but it may be out of fashion to revel in it.
The media landscape I grew up in was defined by apathetic sadness. Everyone was depressed, but no one was worried about it. Why wouldn’t you be sad? What was there to be happy about? But why would you let that stop you from functioning? Or cracking a joke? This was the sentiment of the 2010’s. You add in a teenage girls insecure superiority complex and a society defined by consumerism, you get the Tumblr girl. The Tumblr girl (hailing from 2014) is characterised by indie music from the era, pastel hair, dark clothes and most importantly, dejection. This is not better encapsulated than with generation defining Skins character Effy Stonem.
Effy has been described as ‘The Patron Saint of Teenage Girls’ and it’s easy to see why. She’s misunderstood, she’s an old soul, she feels everything but shows none of it. Emma Garland writes in the article linked previously “her magnetism comes from the conflict between how she really feels (deeply) and how she acts (as though she doesn’t feel a thing).” Girls relate to the enormity of her feelings but she does not fall into clichéd stereotypes about women and hysteria. There is an impression of maturity that comes with a calm demeanour and a nihilistic outlook, one that teenage girls aspire too. Effie’s feeling were as all-consuming as theirs were, but her sorrows were deep and justified. It’s easy to see how her popularity has lasted with Gen Z.
The sentiment of Effy Stonem has followed girls into adulthood. Sally Rooney writes solipsistic and emotionally analytical characters. Tik Tok has popularised the ‘Fleabag Era’ inspired by Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s titular character. Like Fleabag, the protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation doesn’t need a something as assertive as a name. These characters are not only defined by their torture, but resigned to it. There is no want to feel better, or hope for anything more. Apathy is in. Dissociative Feminism, as coined by Emmeline Clein, rules the day.
It’s easy to see why this outlook is so popular. The human condition is inherently embarrassing. It is easier to laugh away the pain or let it roll off your back than to admit to something as vulnerable as pain. To seek connection and still end up lonely? Unbearable. To fuck, drink and quip away the emptiness inside ourselves? Quirky and relatable. There has been plenty of writing on why this outlook is understandable, but harmful. How could we expect anything but pain? Is it easier to blame ourselves than to hope for more? Can we to resign ourselves to misery and self-destruction?
But cynicism isn’t built it, it’s learned. It’s a facade we put on to seem unfazed, to seem smart, to seem cool. There is a pretence of wisdom or maturity that comes with detachment. This can offer us protection from something as uncomfortable as our feelings. This movement had to have come, at least in part, to the rollercoaster trend cycle and the unquenchable need to aestheticize and optimise every aspect of our lives for social media. We want to seem worldly in our pain but want to avoid being the victim. Suffering is deep, but misery is pathetic. Out are the days of #GIRLBOSS and self-improvement, in is the era of the hot mess. The long fight against female suffering was hard, but we did our best. Time to resign ourselves to self-deprecation and cynicism. In all, it has become out of fashion to long for more.
Before we learned this, we were emotionally unapologetic. As much as we were bright eyed, energetic and hopeful for the world ahead of us, we were also naive and, most punishably, cringe. We have all committed the unforgivable crime of being a teenager. There’s an instinctual tendency to show resentment towards our younger selves, perhaps in an effort to resolve us of our misgivings. This instinct becomes particularly strong for adults who once belonged in the most loathsome demographic: teenager girls.
It’s impossible to get away from the hate of teenage girls. They are ridiculed for their interests, their relationships, their thoughts and beliefs, even the cadence of their voice. Jessica Pishko writes for The Establishment on Medium.com:
“There was something about the teenage girl that was just too much, seductive and repulsive all at once... Teenage girls are everything that we love to hate. They are vain and naive. They are the ultimate consumer, influenced by everything from social media to what their friends are wearing. They make YouTube channels of themselves talking to themselves. They place their fingers in the makeup samples and smear too much on their eyelids. But we can’t keep our eyes off of them.”
Interestingly, the world hates teenage girls, but loves Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, Lady Bird. The film was released to wide spread acclaim in 2017. It was praised for its standout performances (particularly by Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf), its sharp dialogue and Gerwig’s direction. Lady Bird cemented Greta Gerwig within 21st century directorial canon. Following Ronan’s Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson through the growing pains of her senior year, we watch her love, long, fail, get hurt, grow and everything in between. She dreams of a life outside Sacramento, the so-called mid-west of California. She wants something bigger than herself, as she states in the opening scenes “I want to live through something.” If this movie is anything, it is genuine.
Lady Bird can be described as an epitomical teenage girl. She’s unworldly, self-consumed, explosive. She can be cruel, even unwittingly so. She is entirely dictated by her emotions. She feels like a lyrical recreation of adolescent shortcomings. The movie doesn’t just cover Lady Bird’s turbulent emotional ups and downs- the movie is her emotions. The depth of her feelings is what makes the film.
The emotional journey of the film is mundanely teenage. Her highs and lows are wrapped up in crushes, school and family. Regardless, her feelings are intense, even volatile at times. Her primary occupations are related to typical teenage centric things; getting into the college she wants, getting the attention of her crushes, impressing the popular girls at school. These are underlined by more adult problems that subtly influence her world. Her family’s financial situation, or her father’s depression may not be at the forefront of her mind, but it works to affect her world in ways she can’t fully recognise or control. It is a painfully honest depiction of childhood breaking away into young adulthood.
Her emotions are best defined in relation to each other. In the emotional high of the first half, Lady Bird kisses her crush Danny (Lucas Hedges). Her glee ruptures out of her in the form of an ecstatic scream to sky once she is alone. This is immediately followed by Lady Bird sneaking home, her parents in the midst of a tense financial discussion. Her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf) catches her to scold her about the state she left her room in. Marion is, as she often is with Lady Bird, venomous. She tells Lady Bird that her father has lost his job, her rage clearly an accumulation of things outside Lady Bird’s control. Lady Bird appeals for empathy; “didn’t you ever go to sleep without putting all your clothes away perfectly? Like even once? And don’t you wish your Mom hadn’t gotten angry?” Empathy that Marion doesn’t know how to give. “My mother was an abusive alcoholic.”
The highest highs are met with the lowest lows. The contrasting emotions of the scenes act to intensify each other. This is seen again in a mirroring sequence. Lady Bird’s heart is broken when losing her virginity didn’t go as planned. It is her mother’s compassion that picks her back up. Some of her lowest moments come from conflict with her mother, but some of her most tender interactions are between Marion and her. Lady Bird’s relationships, as well as her life, are not defined by one mood or tone, but by the tumultuous change from one intensity to another.
Lady Bird is nothing if not intense. She wouldn’t just like to go to college on the east coast, she obsesses over getting out of Sacramento and “going where culture is.” She doesn’t just like a boy, she shapes her life and persona around whoever catches her affections. She wants with her whole chest. She has no reservations about hope, or ambition. She makes mistakes that hurt her, but she’s not self-destructive. When she’s hurt, she feels that hurt deeply. She talks about it, she gets angry at those who hurt her. She thinks highly of herself despite being insecure. She longs for acceptance within her peer group, for connection with her mother. She stands alien in a media landscape dominated by the dissociative feminist.
There is a lot of comparisons to be made with Lady Bird and the cynical woman protagonist that we’re so fond of now. She’s more than a little bit selfish, she’s insecure, she wants people to love her. The dissociative feminist isn’t defined by the lack of feeling, quite the contrary. Fleabag describes her devastation after her mother’s death “I don’t know what to do with it. With all the love I have for her.” Marianne from Normal People wants so fully that she puts herself in humiliating situations. It is the constant need to distance themselves from their wants and feelings that separates Lady Bird from these protagonists. The dissociative feminist feels so much, but does everything in their power to act indifferent to those feelings.
Watching Lady Bird now, no longer the about-to-turn-nineteen year old I was when it came out, feels like a release. Lady Bird, just like its title character, is so unapologetic in its feelings and ambitions. Lady Bird is shown to have the worst traits of any teenager. She makes the same mistakes that many of us did. She is embarrassing. She is short sighted. She is naive. But the narrative does not hold the same hatred for Lady Bird that many of us hold for our younger selves. Lady Bird is never punished for expressing her feelings or ridiculed for her wants. She is forgiven as she learns from her mistakes, in ways that many women feel they are not. Her emotions are never invalidated. The honest depiction of the turbulence of young womanhood acts as permission to forgive ourselves for being hurt, for loving too hard or for wanting more than we have.
There is a catharsis in watching the self-destruction and the emotional turmoil of a dissociative feminist protagonist. The character archetype is popular for a reason. We are lonelier than ever. Social progress is long fought for with little gains. There is an undeniable allure in giving up, in being able to act poorly and survive the consequences. In real life we are very rarely able to out quip our trauma. But I find something aspirational in the emotional honesty of Lady Bird. Yes, Lady Bird is messy, but she’s trying. She wants to be better. She learns from hurt, both self-inflicted and inflicted on others. She never doubts what she wants, or blames herself for her pain. The parts of Lady Bird that are reflective of many teenage girls, her hope, her nativity and her egotism feel refreshingly genuine to me.
There is so much artifice in life. Social decorum allows us to keep up a front. We have learned to acknowledge pain as we know life is hard, but we must keep it at arm’s length. We do so much to avoid embarrassment and disappointment that we hide so much of ourselves. Cynicism gives us a layer of plausible deniability that keeps us safe. The parts of ourselves least tethered to these conventions seem most embodied in the icon of the teenage girl. Personified in Lady Bird, who is pretentious yet unsophisticated, who is emotionally chaotic. Who believes and wants with every fibre of her being. There is so much freedom in that. The freedom of sincerity without protection from being hurt.
Greta Gerwig once stated she’s interested in writing about “who we are when we think no one is watching.” I take that to mean when we are not preforming an idea of who we should be, even when we are by ourselves. What do we feel when there’s no chance of getting hurt? What do we want when there’s no chance of failure in our way? That person will obviously be humiliating, probably more than a little intense. They will hurt people, and hurt themselves. But they will feel so deeply and so freely that maybe all that is worth it. As Lady Bird herself said when her mother tells her she wants her to be the best version of herself, “What if this is the best version?” I can’t help but think it is.