hick town

I’m not sure if I think the movie Young Adult is so brilliant because it is—or if it’s because I found it (at times) so painfully representative of my own life. Granted, I couldn’t relate entirely to any one character—but it was a bit unnerving how fully I was able to relate to certain aspects of every character.

The movie centers on a writer of Young Adult novels who left her small “hick town” some years ago after high school for the “big city” of Minneapolis--or what the people who never got out of her hometown refer to with doe-eyed bewilderment as “the Mini Apple”. She drinks heavily, has a small dog and buys designer clothes. Her small dog is named “Dolce” (like the designer). In a lot of ways, she’s like a smarter version of Paris Hilton—except that, unlike Paris, she chose to live this highly cosmopolitan life as a way of separating herself from her small-town Midwestern past—because status and popularity mean everything to her (just like it meant everything to her in high school). Although she’s ostensibly moved on with her life she still clings to things she valued in high school: popularity, success—basically any marker whereby she can see herself as “better” than others.

Early on in the movie, she gets an e-mail from a former long-term boyfriend announcing the birth of a daughter with the subject line “the greatest thing that ever happened to us” (“us” referring to he and his wife). This sends her into a panic—first, with her questioning what kind of life she might have had if she stayed in her hometown and married this guy instead of doing what she does now—making a career out of ghostwriting trashy Sweet Valley High type Young Adult books and having one night stands with successful city types which leave her unfulfilled in the morning.

Over lunch at an outside café, a Minneapolis friend tries to console her. She tells her that having kids is sad and that they are better off because they (her and her Minneapolis friend) “have lives” vs. people like her former boyfriend who get married and have kids.

Still not satisfied by this, she decides to return to her hometown and get her old flame back. And this is where the majority of the movie takes place—in the small “hick town” where she grew up. At times, it’s painful to watch—how desperate and unaware of her own desperation she is—aggressively throwing herself at a high school boyfriend who’s all but forgotten about her; who is now happily married and in another phase of his life. But that’s what makes this film so great: it never shies away from showing the painful honest nature of this woman’s very human dilemma. She needs to feel better than everyone. She’s defined her entire life by the faulty conviction that having everything is enough to make her happy—that what held true in high school still holds true today. Her identity is based entirely on finding ways to feel better than other people. But then she sees that someone from her past—someone who she once measured her own sense of importance by because he was someone she considered important—is now in a happy marriage and has a kid. Trying to win him back is her way of disproving the possibility that he could be happy with a life she considers so unappealingly simple and different from the one she’s chosen—the one she wants to believe he’d have chosen too because they once (she believes) valued the same things.

On her first night back she tells her plan to a former classmate—the victim of a hate-crime who is now crippled and in his own way clinging to a past that causes him much pain today. He tells her she’s crazy because he’s married and he’s obviously moved on with his life (this “moving on” thing, as you may have already noticed, and how each character defines it, becomes the movie’s pervasive theme), to which she says: “So what? I have baggage, too.”—illustrating her inability to see past her own selfishness and realize that although she doesn’t consider these things benchmarks of success or possibly meaningful to others compared to her own ideals of success and what she wants they are meaningful to others because they don’t necessarily value the same things she does.

Eventually she does realize this: but it takes a lot of awkward missteps and aggressive attempts at seducing her former boyfriend before it becomes clear to her just how delusional she is in thinking she can take what she wants because she wants it and everyone is going to kiss her ass because she was popular in high school. She is unable to see that these things no longer matter. High School is over. Sure: she’s still pretty. And now she’s successful. And the “simple” working class residents of her hometown are proud that she’s made something of herself—even if she is a ghostwriter of no longer popular Young Adult books. But there’s still a disconnect—a vast ocean of ideals which separates her from her own birthplace and the people who inhabit it. The life she leads is not at all relevant to their own lives—just like she can’t relate to them or understand why they would consider something so simple as settling down and having children and never leaving their small-town lives purposeful—which is why she thinks her high school boyfriend will want to take her back when she returns home. She exists entirely in her own head with no real perspective on how the rest of the world operates—it’s borderline solipsism but mostly just plain arrogance. While she considers herself someone who’s moved on and bettered herself—or, more accurately, someone who’s made herself “better” than others—she is still very much the person she was in high school.

The film’s climax comes with her getting drunk at this former boyfriend’s baby-naming ceremony (which his wife makes him invite her to against his will, feeling pity for her and sensing that she is lonely and going through some major depressive episode) and telling everyone there (including her mother and the former boyfriend’s wife) that there’s something wrong with them—this after getting the former boyfriend alone and trying to make a move on him but getting rejected (despite the obvious signs of non-interest leading up to this moment). She goes home that night to the hate-crime victim (who by the way is played with exceptional brilliance by Patton Oswalt) and finally admits that she “has a lot of problems.” Of course: he knows this—he’s been telling her all along that she’s deluded in thinking she can whisk her former flame away from his married life but he still plays into her horrible need for reassurance that she’s beautiful and above everyone else by telling her that “Guys like [him] are born to love girls like [her]” even when they treat them like shit and can’t see past what they think marks them as losers.

Towards the end of the film, the writer has a talk with another character—the hate-crime victim’s sister. The sister tells her that she fantasizes while working her 9 to 5 job about the writer’s life in the “Mini Apple”—and that she admires what she’s imagined her life to be. The sister tells her that “everyone here is fat and dumb”—a sentiment I’ve often expressed to others when describing my own hick hometown. And it’s this that finally gives the writer reassurance—she sees her hometown reduced to what she saw it as before—a little town full of “fat and dumb” people—so that now, with this easy reduction in her mind, she’s able to finally move on—to effectively cut ties with her “Prom Queen” days in high school along with her constant struggle to maintain that persona and create a new life back in the “Mini Apple”—like her old life in the Mini Apple but with no “baggage”, finally having ended the chapter from her high school that she was never able to end before.

Of course: this is all masterfully paralleled with the story-within-a-story frame of the writer writing the last novel in her once (but no longer—hint hint) popular series of books about high school life—a series that she is informed early on has been cancelled though she continues to work on finishing the last book throughout the movie, perhaps needing closure or because she’s clinging to a once successful venture that marked her as popular just like she clings to the person she was in high school (it’s kind of ham-fisted metaphor but it works surprisingly well in the film—it’s not as corny as it sounds on paper).

The reason the movie resonated so much with me, I think, is because I can see myself in the writer character. I grew up in the same sort of small “hick town”—depicted brilliantly in the film by all the major corporate chain stores populating the landscape (most representative: what the writer character calls a “Ken-Taco-Hut”--those staples of every American Anytown combining three major fast-food chains: KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut). And I’ve wrestled with a lot of the same identity issues—at once feeling alien to small town values and still wanting desperately to just be able to assimilate or fit in with the same working class people who hold those values. But I still, like the writer character, consider myself at home with people who don’t necessarily measure success by marriage or having kids but instead by artistic achievement or personal independence. And that I think is the central issue being addressed in the movie: At what point is it ok to move on? And is it ok to move on—to completely dissociate yourself from the place you grew up once you realize you don’t really fit in there—and that maybe you never fit in there?

Maturity is another issue in the film and it’s intrinsically linked to some of these other ideas. The conclusion the film arrives at is that maturity comes with understanding that people exist in different realities and hold different things to be sacred. Not everyone values popularity or fame. Not everyone buys designer clothing. They don’t want to. Because they don’t care about designer clothing. They buy what they can get at any mall chain like Macy’s because it’s what’s available to them (there’s a scene in the movie where the writer character goes to Macy’s and asks if they carry Marc Jacobs because she needs to look sexy—the clerk tells her she’s never heard of Marc Jacobs ). It’s in recognizing these differences and saying: “OK. I am this thing. And they are that thing. And it’s OK that we’re not the same thing.” that marks someone’s mature understanding of the world. You can’t be great in two different worlds because no one can exist in two different worlds and maintain a singular identity. Like Huck Finn’s struggle to define himself in the ‘ciz’lized world’ vs. the wayward life he knows inherently and which comes naturally to him (or the metaphor by which he uses to describe this struggle—the biblical child cut-in-two), the writer character must decide which life she wants to fully dedicate her energies to. Because she can’t be great at both—that is: she can’t be a successful small-town simple person and a successful big city type. It’s one or the other. And the sign that she’s finally accepted this is her decision to return to Minneapolis and say: “OK. Well, this is what my small hick hometown has to offer. And it sucks that I can’t be a mom and have a great marriage. But I don’t want that. I’d rather have my life in the city.”

What I especially liked about the film, though: is that it never attempted to make the decision or the issue itself clear-cut. Because it’s a very complicated issue. There are valid reasons for why the writer character (I’m going to stop calling her that because it’s making me physically ill—the character is played by Charlize Theron and she does an amazingly brilliant job of making the character not likable at all and at the same time totally relatable—her performance reminded me that she’s a good actor) feels the way she does. And who can’t relate on some level to being that obliviously desperate and selfish? Life is messy. And a lot of movies try to show the messiness of life and totally miss the mark. But Young Adult succeeds because the characters and the situations and the environments they find themselves in are balanced with such contrastingly honest truth. You don’t want to admit that these people from her hometown are simple. But they kind of are. And as a main character, you don’t to hate Charlize Theron. But you kind of do. And you hate her because you see so much of yourself in her. Or: maybe it’s just me. Either way: I found the film refreshing and I felt like, for the first time in a long time, a piece of art really resonated with me—in a way that was both visceral and insightful. I’m at a turning point now in my life: on the tail-end of my young adult years and bracing myself for all the things that come with being an “adult” and this movie was exactly what I needed. Because so many movies dumb it down—what I’m going to start referring to as the Van Wilder trope. It’s the same crisis—a college-age kid resisting change or adulthood because pretty soon he won’t be college-age anymore (or maybe he’s already no longer college-age) so he can’t be pulling the same crazy shenanigans. But the crisis gets solved in a single montage with the main character realizing that he’s no longer at an age where it’s acceptable for him to act like a doofus, so he must move on with his life. But they never show what happens next—how someone does (or attempts to) move on with their life. And how it affects the people they’re “moving on” from. They never show the actual ugly process of self-reinvention like Young Adult does—and, boy, do they make it ugly. But that, I think, is what makes the film so exceptional. At least to me.

I should also mention that the film was written by Diablo Cody, who wrote the screenplay for Juno. And the only reason I mention this is to commend Miss Cody for not making the characters in this film talk in obnoxious hipster fake-speak like in Juno. There are of course some clever neologisms (“Ken-Taco-Hut”), but the film is mostly devoid of the irritating hey-look-at-me-I-love-pop-culture meta-cool dialogue marked Juno. Not that Juno was a bad film. But if you saw these two films back-to-back, Young Adult and Juno, and you didn’t know they were written by the same person, you probably wouldn’t be able to guess that they were written by the same person (What do you call that type of desperate-attempt-at-impressing-people dialogue, anyway? Because Kevin Smith does it at times, too. Especially in his earlier films.)

Anyway: I’m spent. I’ve typed far too much about this movie. I was going to mention something about how the main character survives on nothing but Diet Coke and hard booze and how the Diet Coke part resembles my life now and how I wonder if this was put in deliberately to show that her drink of choice and how she chugs it every morning straight from the bottle like most people chug milk or orange juice in the morning (because those are socially acceptable “morning drinks”??) reflects her immaturity. But I’m too tired. So: FUCK IT.