The new film Young Adult, the latest from the writer/director team of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody of Juno fame, features Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary, a writer of young adult fiction living in the Twin Cities who returns to the small town of Mercury, MN to relive her glory days as a high school prom queen and to reclaim her former beau, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). Although it is not without its funny moments, Young Adult is hardly a pleasant film. Yet it is a compelling and instructive one; in a Hollywood culture that celebrates perpetual adolescence, Young Adult is a rarity, an unsparing depiction of what it is like to remain trapped in adolescent fantasy.
Theron’s performance as a hard-drinking narcissist is garnering her the sort of critical acclaim she received for Monster, in which she played a sexually abused prostitute turned vengeful serial killer. Hollywood fell all over itself praising her transformation from a delicately gorgeous blonde to a disfigured, coarse, and violent woman. Here, she keeps her physical beauty but that only serves to highlight the harsh and unfeeling soul that lurks beneath the facade.
When we meet Theron’s character, she is desperately lonely and facing unemployment, as her once-popular series of books is being cancelled. An alcoholic who ends her days with Maker’s Mark and begins each morning with Diet Coke, she is, with little success, trying to write the series finale, when she is a recipient of a group email with news that her now married high school flame, Buddy Slade, has just had a baby. With memories of their youthful romance and of her dominance of the social scene in Mercury, she decides to return to her town and repossess her boyfriend. That she never pauses over the implausibility or impropriety of her plan provides us with an early indicator of just how astonishingly self-absorbed she is. The film’s writing and the supple performance of Theron make the character of Mavis, despite her delusions, believable.
She encounters her parents only by chance, not having thought to alert them that she was back in town. During an uncomfortable dinner conversation, she broaches the topic of her drinking and they change the subject. The awkward silence strikes just the right disconcerting tone and is highly suggestive concerning the roots of Mavis’s disordered psyche. Mavis’s odd friendship with another classmate, Matt Freehauf, a guy she knew in high school only as the object of cruel humor and a brutal beating, is at once twisted and revelatory of her longing for human fellowship and understanding.
Young Adult keeps its distance from its main character’s disorder, but another critically acclaimed film released in recent months, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which also features a deeply depressed young woman (Kirsten Dunst) incapable of adapting to adult life, embraces the main character’s deeply hostile judgment about the human race, namely, that it is evil and merits destruction. Dunst’s performance is at times arresting, as are the film’s visuals, mood, and music (Wagner). But von Trier is less interested in developing her character than it is in deploying her as a vehicle for the expression of a cynical cosmic truth that she alone apprehends.
Young Adult is a more measured film, which does not end up confirming the worst judgments of the depressed, perpetual adolescent, even if, in a convincing twist at the end, it portrays her as retreating to that comfortable universe in which “everyone” in her hometown, is “fat and dumb.”
The denigration of small town life is common enough in Hollywood films. One of the refreshing things about Young Adult is its rather straightforward portrayal of the ordinary families of this small town, particularly the family and friends of Buddy Slade. They are not fashionable or particularly clever or well informed about life beyond their town. But they aren’t fat and stupid either. They are decent, hard working members of their town, intent on building families and supporting one another.
One of the women does call Mavis a “psychotic, prom-queen bitch,” but they also feel sorry for her and thus Buddy’s wife, even after being warned by her friends about Mavis, makes sure she is invited to their house for a party for their newborn baby. Oblivious, Mavis elects to use this public occasion to declare her intentions to Buddy. What follows is public humiliation for Mavis, who is forced to see not only that her plan never had a chance but also that she has been the object of pity from folks she would have spent most of her life pitying, had she ever had a thought or feeling for them.
Mavis has moments of fleeting insight, issuing confessions such as “I’m crazy and no one loves me” and even “I need to change.” Yet, the closer she comes to realizing how much such change would cost, the less likely it is. If that makes for a somber ending, it is, I think, superior to many Hollywood films in which confronting the limitations of prolonged adolescent fantasy leads to an all too facile conversion and a happy ending. As somber and unpleasant as it is, Young Adult is a refreshing take on the motif of the perpetual adolescent.
Thomas Hibbs is dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. His first book on popular culture, Shows About Nothing (2000), is being rereleased in a revised, updated, and expanded version by Baylor University Press.
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Dostoevsky said stories are about one of two things: a native leaving his hometown or a stranger entering a new town (something to that affect). The 'external' world or, as some say, the 'real' world, does not exist. We might want it to, much like we want the afterlife to exist; because somehow that 'other' world answers bigger questions; therefore we are small when we don't enter it.
But, like a good 'twilight zone' episode, even in our 'small' worlds we make a profound effect on those around us. And that effect resonates widely into the external world.
1) The film “…features a deeply depressed young woman (Kirsten Dunst) incapable of adapting to adult life…” She is not capable of adapting to the company of adults who refuse to live any deeper than the surface of life, contented in superficial arrangements that have no real depth and are essentially egocentric and fear-based.
2) The film “…embraces the main character’s deeply hostile judgment about the human race, namely, that it is evil and merits destruction.” The main character’s judgment is not that the human race is evil and merits destruction, but that adults have lost all sense of their innocence and haven’t a clue as to how to recover it. This becomes clear in the main character’s relationship with the child who has not yet been corrupted by a materialistic world that has humanity embracing Scientism in any of its empty expressions. The stylistic scenes reveal the beauty of God’s creation, and it is our corrupted, and in fact puny, idealistic vision of it that is evil.
3) “…von Trier is less interested in developing her character than it is in deploying her as a vehicle for the expression of a cynical cosmic truth that she alone apprehends.” It is no secret that von Trier develops Kirsten Dunst’s character as a mirror of his own existential state, and it is no more cynical than Kierkegaard’s, Ingmar Bergman’s or Stanley Kubrick’s, all great artists who never shied away from actually looking deeply through a glass darkly to find evidence of the Beautiful, the light that shines in darkness (for example, Bergman's "Winter Light"), and if any great artist has a problem with finding that light other than in an artistic expression (which is not cynical, but beautiful), the search is admirable strictly in terms of not shying away from what most of us invest so much energy in denying. In other words, great artists don’t want beauty if it doesn’t resonate with truth.
nuec
The ancients, pre-psychoanalytic, had a different view of depression. It was called melancholy. It not only suggested that a person was low in spirits, but it also signified a meditative posture, a time for deep reflection, an opportunity to look a little deeper into the darkness. In other words, it wasn't so much an affliction as a place to look more honestly at problem of human existence.
Because Dunst's character is a representation of Trier's character, I suppose he, too, can be dismissed as a person who is "just depressed", a "metaphor for the apocalypse", but in fact von Trier is a great artist, and Dunst's character represents the artist who does not run from the darkness he finds himself in, but goes deep into it (incarnational, I would say, the opposite movement of separation from the problems of the world, as in so many Eastern mysticisms) explores it, for whatever he can find, usually a unique angle to look at our perennial problem of willing the good on our own terms, which is at the heart of so much of our psychological and emotional difficulties. Sometimes a refusal to play the games of denial is a good in and of itself.
I’m really not at odds with how you interpreted "Melancholia" from your own experience. That's what great art is supposed to do, often going beyond what the author intended, and often surprising him, for the viewer can sometimes see some aspect of what is represented in the film but hidden from the artist himself. I was questioning your and Mr. Hibbs dismissal of what is so clear in all of von Trier's work: a microscopic lens on what is pretense disguising as a superior moral vision of the world. And there is plenty to dislike about von Trier if that is your penchant, even in "Melancholia"; for example, when Dunst's character (Justine, no doubt alluding to Marquis de Sade's character in his novel of the same name, an innocent who fights the good fight against all the corruption of the world, and seemingly wins the battle with the help of a kind heart only to be struck down by lightening) is whipping the horse. Because I know von Trier is a big fan of Andrei Tarkovsky (the Russian filmmaker), my favorite film artist of all time, and that Tarkovsky saw the beauty of life and the world in the beauty and life of this animal, there's a good chance that von Trier is confessing how he sometimes strikes out at what is good from the oppressive weight of a corrupt world. In any case, I think there are some helpful words from the Apostle John in exploring this film, from 1 John 2:15-17:
"Do not love the world or things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world--the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life--is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever."
Like John, von Trier is not condemning the beauty of God's creation, but our idolatrous gaze that mangles our vision of it, and thus corrupts our movements in it.
For me, the planet Melancholia in the film represents a reflection of the Sun; in other words, not the source of Light, but its reflection. Melancholia’s light turns to darkness, and it cannot emit light from that darkness, but instead points to the end of the world. Only the true source of light can save us.
Some of us may wish we left our small college town. Or the sheltered, small town environment of the academy. Even our small town church. For the real world.
THough that external "world," to the cloistered, always seemed too big and threatening and disordered, finally, that is the larger world we must face, if we are going to grow up, ourselves.