Once when I remonstrated with a young man of my acquaintance
about his laziness and want of industry, he replied: “But being
lazy is who I am!” We live in the age of “who I am,” sometimes
varied as “the real me.” The popularity of the conceit may owe
something to the political awakening of homosexuals, who have been
historically used to keeping quiet about their sexual orientation.
As part of the process of nerving themselves to go public about it
(or “come out of the closet”), the idea of “who I am” or “the real
me” has been immensely useful to them. But the purpose of the
conceit is in its essence no different than it was for my lazy
young friend. That is, it is designed for self-justification. That
by which one chooses to identify oneself cannot be, on this
thinking, wrong or mistaken or something to be reformed or
ameliorated. If it is essential to their very existence, to who
they are, then that existential truth must be accepted by
anyone not intending, like some tyrant or cruel oppressor, to deny
or negate that existence.
Also influential in the propagation of the ideology of
“the real me” was the children’s album, book, and TV special titled
“Free to be you and me,” produced by Marlo Thomas and the Ms.
Foundation for Women back in the seventies, which taught a whole
generation of American children at the early identity-forming
stages progressive ideas about what was — and, crucially, what was
not — culturally approvable versions of who they were. Thus when
football hero Roosevelt Grier sang of how “It’s All Right to Cry,”
he was also subliminally teaching that it was not all right
not to cry, or to suppress one’s tears, as little boys had
been taught to do for generations, in the interest of “being a
man.” The suppression of one “stereotype” involved the creation of
another, politically correct one.
One of the songs from this album, “When We Grow Up,” sung
by Diana Ross, is played over the closing credits of Young
Adult, and its refrain, “We don’t have to change at all,” is a
neat summing up of the movie’s message. I’m not too fond even of
movie messages with which I agree, but I wouldn’t have minded this
one if I had thought that the film-makers — screenwriter Diablo
Cody and director Jason Reitman — had been capable of appreciating
the irony of “We don’t have to change at all” and seen that this
supposed freedom not to change means being imprisoned in the self.
Not only do we not have to change at all, we have not to change at
all. There are hints, here and there in the movie, of the
self-awareness demonstrated by Ms. Cody and Mr. Reitman in their
earlier collaboration, Juno of
2007, but the sinister ideology of “Free to be you and me” is too
strong for them in the end. The selfish, nasty, unattractive
qualities of their heroine, Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), are
treated as her ready-made destiny, as impossible to be changed or
tampered with as her much more pleasing appearance.
Indeed, much less so. Mavis, a thirty-something divorcée
who ghostwrites romantic fiction intended for young adults, is very
good at making herself look even more attractive than nature has
already made her. Feeling vaguely dissatisfied with her life and
hearing that her high-school boyfriend, Buddy Slade (Patrick
Wilson), has recently become a father, she decides to return to her
home town of Mercury, Minnesota, to take him away from his wife and
family. Her putting on her war-paint for this struggle with a
less-attractive rival (Elizabeth Reaser) is a recurrent motif in
the film and suggests just one of the ways in which outward beauty
betokens an inward ugliness, part of which consists in the
inability (or unwillingness) to change.
This self-imprisonment she shares, as we eventually
discover, in crucial ways with Mercury and with her fellow Mercury
Injuns, now re-named the Indians for reasons of political
correctness. The first person she meets on her return is a pudgy,
nerdy high-school classmate named Matt (Patton Oswalt) who used to
have the locker next to hers but whom she only remembers as “the
hate crime guy.” Matt, it seems, had been badly beaten and, in
fact, permanently crippled by some jocks from Mavis’s more popular
set who had thought, mistakenly, that he was gay. “When they found
out I wasn’t really gay, then it wasn’t a hate crime anymore,” he
says ruefully. It’s a clever line but one that smells a bit of the
lamp, as they used to say. We can more easily imagine Ms. Cody
writing it than we can some real-life version of Matt saying
it.
At first, Young Adult seems to be a fresh and
original take on a classic sort of American movie in which a big
city sophisticate returns to her small town roots to discover a
more authentic and fulfilling mode of life, as in
Sweet
Home Alabama. Matt plays the role of
chorus and gives voice to the sense of decency and social
responsibility that used to characterize small-town America in
Hollywood’s lens and that we still expect to act as at least
something of a corrective to Mavis’s cynicism and predatory
wickedness. But gradually we realize that Matt is as much a
prisoner of his self and his past and of the bitterness both have
created in him as she is, if not more so. His is a stunted growth
that ends up only reinforcing the movie’s basic idea that people
don’t really change very much and probably shouldn’t even try to
change.
Since character development is thus taken off the table,
the movie turns instead to a satire on the absurdities of young
adult fiction and the romantic fantasy world that it encourages
young people to live in. Romance itself is seen as little more than
a discreditable dodge, a cover for naked self-interest, to which
even this otherwise cynical purveyor of the stuff may be
susceptible. Thus Mavis says to Matt, who naturally looks askance
at her determination to win Buddy away from his wife and child,
“Don’t you get it? Love conquers all. Haven’t you seen The
Graduate?” We’re in a different Hollywood tradition than we
expected, it seems. And, throughout, we hear voiceover of Mavis
composing her latest (and, it seems, last) romance in the series
and are invited to draw the obvious parallel between her story and
that of her glamorous but, alas, fictional alter ego, Kendall
Strickland.
Kendall is a girl whom Mavis describes as having “a
gracious, effortless beauty that glowed from within.” Glowing from
within is of course the opposite of what Mavis’s beauty does — a
point underlined for us by juxtaposing the voiceover description of
Kendall with Mavis’s dolling herself up for her date with the long
lost Buddy — a rather hapless stand-in for Ryan, the boy from
Waverley Prep that Kendall Strickland is in love with. But the
final turn to “Free to Be You and Me” can only suggest that the
filmmakers are unable to think of anything else to say about this
desperately sad woman whose beauty, instead of glowing, pales and
sickens from within other than a Stuart Smalley-like, “That’s OK.”
I would like to see in this and the concluding song an ironic
critique of the “who I am” culture, but I just don’t think that,
with all her talents, Ms. Cody was up to that. She, herself, I
fear, inhabits the same dark prison of self that her heroine
does.
