*originally published on flipscreened.com on 05/26/2022
Diablo Cody once wrote, “Hell is a teenage girl.” In The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola writes, “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.” The formative female filmmakers of this generation can agree on one thing— being an adolescent girl is a fucking nightmare. To survive the turbulent teenage years, girls must adapt— often clumsily. The ultimate goal, at any age, is to be loved, but for a teenage girl, it’s to be loved or to die. There’s a whole sub-genre of movies proving this notion across every generation; it’s easier to sacrifice and discard your entire identity than risk rejection for being yourself.
Before directing 2008’s Twilight, Catherine Hardwicke co-wrote her debut film with her close family friend, fourteen-year old Nikki Reed. The story revolves around Reed’s own tumultuous teenage experiences that Hardwicke observed at the time. Released in 2003, starring actual teenagers Reed and Evan Rachel Wood, Thirteen explores Tracy’s (Wood) downward spiral into a complete loss of innocence. As teen movies from the past have taught us, life comes at you fast. Tracy goes from donning pigtails and wearing pastel Gap polos to getting her tongue pierced and dropping acid in the blink of an eye. The insecure, pre-pubescent girl inside her is starving for popularity. She watches the queen bee, Evie (Reed), strut around campus with effortless cool. Tracy’s feelings surpass admiration or jealousy—she doesn’t just want to be like Evie, she needs to be Evie. Don’t underestimate the lengths girls will go to achieve the validation they are craving. For Tracy, all it takes is a grommet belt, black eyeliner, and ridding herself of her own identity.
When your individuality is tethered to some external factor, it’s only a matter of time until an identity crisis begins to chip away at you, and with Tracy, it manifests as merciless self-mutilation. By the end of the film Tracy loses everything— Evie, her childhood friends, the admiration of her mother, the respect of her brother. But worst of all, she has no remnants of a sense of self. No virtue, no disposition, no youthful vigour, no hope. Without forming her entire existence around how she can change herself to be envied by everyone, she has no purpose.
Tracy is not the first and most definitely won’t be the last teen girl on screen to endure this brutal metamorphosis. Look at any Molly Ringwald movie ever, the same narrative unfolds, however in a much more palatable depiction. Look at Ginger Snaps— Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) would rather become a cannibalistic werewolf than be a normal teenage girl. In the seminal Mean Girls, Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) abandons all of her best qualities, even that of being a math genius, to become a Plastic. Even recently, we’ve seen Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) in Euphoria wake up at 5am to start her beauty routine, just to be the kind of girl Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) wants. She betrays her best friend and goes full blown padded-walls insane.
An exemplary case study of ‘girl reducing herself for the goal of mass adoration’ is 2010’s Easy A. Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) invents an entirely made-up persona of a sexually active girlboss in order to fit in. You know the formula now— Olive’s actions isolate those who really cared for her, and her true personality is blurred by her fictionalized scarlet A. What sets Easy A apart is its clever use of the familiar formula to both follow and critique the genre. It literally tells us we shouldn’t be like the girls in Molly Ringwald movies. And don’t think for a second that I won’t mention Jennifer’s Body—a perfect film— wherein Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) actually sacrifices herself, like satanic ritual vibes, in order to feel wanted by the brooding frontman in local pop-punk band Low Shoulder.
Audiences can learn a lot from girls like Tracy, Ginger, Olive, and Jennifer– primarily what not to do. But no matter what, teenage girls will continue to be pummelled by the crushing weight of the social ladder. It’s almost impossible to avoid the pressure of being the prettiest, the coolest, the most desired— but at what cost? As cheesy as it sounds, there is no one braver and more admirable than those who are being authentically themselves. Think about Juno, Cher from Clueless, Enid from Ghost World. Those characters have achieved their iconic status because they were cool, not because they were trying to be. For all the teen girl movies before us, those to come, and the essays that dissect them, the unremitting message is a simple one— you are better off being yourself.