It's surprising to be disappointed when I started with no expectations, but here I am. It happened somehow after the first quarter of the movie. In the first few scenes I felt surprisingly enthusiastic about the about the subject. I’m not one for mid-life crisis movies, but because male characters are so frequently afforded unlimited screen time to indulge in aimless 30s-onset existential angsting I was glad to see a movie wherein a female character gets to do the same thing. The opening launch of the protagonist homeward, mix-tape in hand, felt very High Fidelity. Halfway through the movie, though, the boyfriend fixation was a bit too much, and when Mavis revealed that the seemingly sole core of her widespread and indiscriminant social and geographic loathing were rooted in her inability to have children this lost me. It just lost me. This movie, essentially, is about hysteria. So that’s unfortunate.
Forbes ran an article in which the author, Victoria Pynchon, responds to internet outcries against Young Adult’s main character. It's not surprising that people are hating on Mavis. She's pretty much hateful. And while I get Pynchon's desire to distinguish between immoral behavior in a movie and an immoral movie, I can't get on board with her analysis.
Pynchon’s article links to another text at Baltimore Magazine that points out how consistently Diablo Cody’s movies put the most redeeming characters in incredibly homey, traditional roles. The author, Max Weiss, seems to praise Cody for unexpected choices here. I don’t feel the same way. Motherhood isn’t the most redemptive quality women can have, and middle-American values aren’t the only ways to be a decent human being in a crowd of irredeemable criminals. Dial it down, Cody. People are cruel for a lot of reasons; you can lay off the Single Victim of Infertility for a while and try on any of the more likely causes for Mavis's behavior: laziness, vanity, boredom. Girls can be jerks too, without men or babies framing the picture.
I sound super disgruntled, but I'm not actually because seeing this movie led me to read the wikipedia articles on hysteria and female hysteria, both of which are pretty swell.
3 comments:
The use of scare quotes in the Pynchon article makes me grind my teeth. If she's quoting "the blogosphere" it would be easy to link to the quoted bits. If she is just talking about general impression that "people on the internet" are disgusted, don't put "disgusted" in quotes.
I couldn't read the second article because I physically cannot click on another link about "subversive hipster" Diablo Cody.
I'm grouchy and intolerant!
Me too! RAWR!
Thanks for mentioning my review. I felt compassion rather than pity from Beth, but not because motherhood is the be-all, end-all. Mothers are just people with children. Good people. Bad people. I judged Beth based on what I saw - she let her husband have time with his ex without spite or jealously and she was concerned about Mavis' emotional well-being. I never saw her judge Mavis. Even though Beth says something like "I felt sorry for you" at the end, it didn't seem condescending, but sincere. Still, what we see and hear in any movie is at least 50% of what goes on in our own minds while watching it.
Which takes me to "what was Pynchon thinking." I'd love to tell you that I'm a saint; always understanding and compassionate and lacking in judgment of other people's life choices. Alas, I have a dark heart as well as a light one. I try to lean toward the light, but I do judge.
One of the things I judge is my hometown. I can't imagine having stayed there and can't fathom why anyone would have wanted to. And yet in the new Facebook era (I'm 59, so it's newer to me than to you) I have the privilege of seeing the full lives being lived by high school classmates that are happy within large families, satisfied with their work, and not, I'm sure, envying my more wandering life path.
Even my husband says "what is it about you and the suburbs?" even though he's not much for suburbs itself. It's probably more related to having a splintered family that caused as much pain as it did security and I notice that those people who remain happy in my home town have loving relationships with family members that I lack.
So Young Adult was very resonant for me even though I'm an Old Adult at this point. At least I have enough distance on my own foolishness to acknowledge that I too have bad thoughts that would make people think I'm just as bad an actor as Mavis, and, frankly, without the tone deaf disdain for others, I've done worse than what she actually manages to accomplish in this movie which is pretty much nothing but her own humiliation.
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