Faux Real

I caught the movie Girls Town (1996) a few months ago and luckily happened across it on the Sundance Channel tonight. I meant to write about it at the time, but was so caught up in my initial reaction to the movie that I couldn’t put anything coherent together. A quick synopsis from this review:

The movie’s opening scenes sketch an easy friendship between a group of four smart/sassy high school outsiders on the verge of graduation: Patti, Angela (Bruklin Harris), Emma (Anna Grace), and Nikki (Aunjanue Ellis). But about 10 minutes into the film, we get word that Nikki has swallowed a fistful of pills and bowed out of life. The remaining girls manage to smuggle Nikki’s diary out of her grieving mother’s home, and page through it at Patti’s place, investigating the root of Nikki’s despair. What they find is cruel and galvanizing — Nikki had been raped by an editor at a newspaper where she interned, and was privately questioning the sanity and value of a world where such a thing could happen.

Shell-shocked by the truth of the matter, the three girls begin to talk among themselves and come to a realization about their own lives. Emma says she was raped last year on a date with a football player. Patti’s barely sympathetic, wondering what the hell Emma thought she was doing with her shirt off in a jock’s car. And anyway, Patti’s had her own share of guys who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Pained, acrimonious debate ensues as the trio grow more and more angry — angry about the impossibility of saying no, and angry with themselves for being weak, for being naive, for putting up with it. “Why do we put up with it?” Emma finally asks, once the argument has reached a fever pitch. “We try to talk about it, and look what happens. We fight for 20 minutes.”

Better reviews can cover the weaknesses of the film — and there are many, this is a low budget indie from the period when indies were truly independent — but my overwhelming reaction to the movie was astonishment at how the overarching feminist ideals of the film were so plainly represented. Considering the sheer number of movies I’ve been watching over the last year, and considering that I generally look for movies with strong, non-cipher female characters, the fact that I, skeptical movie watcher, was so blown away by the straightforward, if somewhat stereotypical, representations of urban teenage girls is remarkable.

Perhaps the thing that finally made me pause the movie and take a breath was the long shot of a teen mother in Chucks pushing her daughter’s stroller down the street, unapologetically and with conviction, or perhaps it was the frank conversation about whether or not the girls would get an abortion if they found themselves dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, or maybe it was calling out the guy who raped their friend, or pointing out the casual sexism they had to put up with from strangers and classmates and one another. Mostly, I was blown away at how frankly a coming-of-age story could be presented in a feminist fashion, one in which the girls discover agency, instead of discovering how to be a pretty girl or a popular girl or how to catch the boy.

Casting fabulous, feminist Lili Taylor is almost shocking as Patti, young mother with a fuck-you attitude, because of Taylor’s age, but like all the reviews point out you quickly forgive and forget Taylor’s maturity because the role (mostly improvised) is so heartfelt. The other actors in the movie are somewhat forgettable, save for Bruklyn Harris, an actress that had a few breakout roles (like Dangerous Minds and Juice) in the mid to late ’90s. Her face is is so striking and her acting so sharp as an ambitious and politically active teenager jaded by the death of her friend. Her interactions with her mother in the movie are some of the most memorable scenes because they’re so typical of daughter-mother relationships and so carefully acted.

If anything what I took from the movie was a wistful remembrance of a time when blatantly feminist discourse was widely available in pop culture, even if it was independent media that was feminist culture’s primary venue. The mid-90s were a significant blip on the radar for feminism in pop culture with feminist activism present in all kinds of musical venues from hip hop to rock n’ roll, and I wonder what the hell happened.