Monday, December 12, 2011

Bitter Sweet Valley Girl Getting High

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If you've never thought that the sight of a seemingly benign Staples office supply store could set off the sort of leering hatred usually reserved for someone who oh I don't know let's say just murdered your mother in front of you, then you don't know Mavis Gary. Returned to her quintessentially bland America hometown of strip malls and fast food she cruises the streets her first night back looking for something to do where there is nothing to do, and the sneer Charlize aims in the direction of the nondescript storefront is maybe my single favorite shot in the film. Staples didn't do anything to you, lady!

But then that sneer is just her face, and it gets tossed at all kinds of people places and things. It's a way of life and Mavis has been well-trained in her attitude of utter self-involvement - the TV set constantly screaming out Kardashians underlines that. You could say Mavis is the the female Patrick Bateman, no less a symbol of our times than Patrick was of his. A pretty surface painted and sculpted and carved and faked - you could call her American Psychette.

There's a moment where she's discussing a wall chart of emotions that a child psychologist uses to teach children with learning disabilities about what faces match up with which feeling and she pointedly asks where the face is for someone who feels nothing. Which well I refer you to...


"There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there."

It's not too tough to swap their names there. Mavis' daily facade up-keep is just as relentlessly detailed by the movie - the trimming of her cuticles, the application of foundation, the fleshy breast cutlets - she stand half-naked in front of us in one scene looking like a malformed manhandled sex doll.

Did I mention Young Adult is a comedy? Hardy har... har? Yes, and a really rather  brilliant one at that. (Although if we're going down this road I'll have to admit I think American Psycho is pretty damn funny, as well.) The laughs come from the painful frission between realities. Instead of deconstructing the empty suits of Eighties corporate culture Young Adult tackles a gender swapped Aughts take - the way real human emotion has been supplanted by the empty platitudes of beauty magazine cover tag-lines - Eighty Wicked Ways To Win Him Back! Romance is a section on the book-shelves now, a brand of reality programming, commodified to meaninglessness. What Reitman and Cody do is set the whole thing up as a funhouse mirror version of your standard Romantic Comedy - Smart Pretty Successful City Gal braves Small Town to win back her One True Love! - but the problem is its only playing out in Mavis' head that way. Everybody else sees right through her.

More or less. It's the ways in which the film upsets its own agendas every chance it gets that makes it such an arresting experience. You're on edge. You feel a little bit sick most of the time. But there's enough Mavis in all of us to keep us eyeing the car wreck. I might have stared at a Staples hatefully the last time I visited my relatives, hating it for not being something awesome, worth my awesome time.

The film's most gratifyingly gut-churning genre upheavals come in the form of a pair of speeches given towards the end. I won't spoil them, you'll know them when they come. There are always these kinds of moments in rom-coms - the big reveal arrives, everything gets laid out on the table, so we can all weep and fall in love. Young Adult isn't gonna make you weep, and it certainly ain't gonna make you fall in love. Bless its cold dead heart.

5 comments:

Adam said...

Jeff Wells said the same thing to me about American Psycho after we saw it, but I don't get that comparison whatsoever. The character's not a psycho. She's a realistically portrayed pretty woman who's entitled to the point where she lacks some fundamental social skills.

Jasper said...

How is this movie's Diablo Cody-ness?

Jason Adams said...

Adam I def. agree that Mavis is painted far more realistically than Bateman is, for sure, but I also think the film pretty insistently nods its head towards Psycho (the movie) so it's a hand way to talk about it. I think they're going for similar things about the way our society hollows out people's humanity and turns them into zombies of different sorts. Bateman is a cartoon version in comparison, yes, but Mavis seems to have misplaced most of her humanity.

Jasper, I love Diablo Cody so if you're coming at it as someone who doesn't, I am not the person to ask. But it's not hipster cutesy like the first ten minutes of Juno or anything.

MrJeffery said...

fabulous film and lead performance. adored it! and sadly, i found myself really relating to her!

Jasper said...

Hmm, okay. I found all of Juno to be equally obnoxious, not just the first 10 minutes. I didn't like Jennifer's Body either, but I can't really just fault her dialog because JB wasn't a movie where the characters spouting it were supposed to be cute and endearing. That movie had tons of other problems too.*

Young Adult seems like something I'd really dig — I adore protagonists that are prickly and severe and have their dark sides — but I can't lie: I was into the trailer, and then when I saw Diablo Cody's name, it was like my heart sat on a whoopee cushion. So I guess I'm wondering if it's overwritten in that aggressively showy Juno/JB way. I mean, It ultimately doesn't matter. I'm seeing it either way. I just wanna know what I'm in for.

*Admittedly I did laugh at: "Ow, my tit."