Lady Bird

[osprey_archer]

My New Year’s Resolution this year was to watch at least one film by a female director each month, and I kicked off the year right by going to see Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird in theaters on January 1st.

I pretty much went in expecting to loathe this movie, because the preview made the heroine (Christine, who calls herself Lady Bird) look like everything I hate in a teen protagonist: bratty and self-absorbed and just generally all-around unpleasant. She jumps out of a moving car to get away from her irritating mother. Grow up!

This is one of those cases where the preview seriously misrepresents the movie. It’s not that any of those things are untrue, exactly, because Lady Bird is sometimes bratty and often shatteringly self-absorbed and she does, in fact, jump out of a moving car to get away from her mother. But when she does so, her mother is going on at considerable length about how Lady Bird is bratty and self-absorbed and she’ll never make anything of herself, so clearly jumping out of the car is an ill-considered decision but at the same time, can you blame her?

Yeah. Pretty much the reason that I changed my mind about the movie is that the way Lady Bird’s mother treats her makes most of Lady Bird’s behavior seem perfectly reasonable and justified, and sad rather than irritating. Of course she’s desperate to go to school on the East Coast! Sure, it will bring her closer to culture and blah blah blah all those other reasons that she gives, but it will also put an entire continent between her and the mother who is always undermining her!

There’s a particularly heartbreaking scene where Lady Bird’s mom has just found out that Lady Bird might be going to school on the East Coast - Lady Bird applied behind her back. And she’s standing at the sink furiously washing dishes as Lady Bird alternately defends herself, apologizes, begs her mother to speak to her, to argue with her, to shout at her even, just acknowledge her! Anything but standing there stonily clattering the dishes in the soapsuds.

Most of the reviews I read about this movie (which are generally, justifiably glowing) are much more positive about Lady Bird & her mother’s relationship than I am, so possibly I’m being unfair.

And certainly this is not the only thing in the movie or even its main emotional note. There are a lot of things here that are touching or funny or beautiful: I really enjoyed Lady Bird’s fitful attempts at romance, and her best friend Jessica. And for all that Lady Bird claims to loathe Sacramento, there are some beautiful shots of the city in here - and a lovely exchange with her teacher, about Lady Bird’s description of Sacramento in her college application essay. She describes it “so affectionately and with such care,” her teacher says.

Lady Bird is caught off guard; she has been raging against Sacramento for most of the movie. “Sure, I guess I pay attention,” she responds.

To which her teacher replies: “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?”

Comments

[asakiyume]

That's an interesting thought. Love and attention being the same thing. What do you think? I'm going to think about it some more.

... maybe attention is applied love, as opposed to theoretical love.

[kore]

....I heard something similar to that, but damned if I can remember where (so convincing!). But yeah, when you love something, you know all the details of it. That's really nice.

[sovay]

... maybe attention is applied love, as opposed to theoretical love.

I like that. It's close to Proginoskes' "Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do" in A Wind in the Door.

[asakiyume]

I agree--and Progo really got child-me to think about love in an expanded way, one that's still ramifying for me now.

[osprey_archer]

I think love & attention are related but not the same. People sometimes pay lots of attention to things that they hate, after all. But then there is the idea that love and hate are two sides of the same coin, and both are the opposite of indifference - which is, among other things, a lack of attention.

I do think attention is an important part of love, though - applied love, as opposed to theoretical love, as you say. It's less poetic than warm & tender feelings but often more useful, especially if the warm & tender feelings just stay bottled up inside and aren't expressed. Presumably expressing them is a form of attention, in itself.

[asakiyume]

Yeah: there's not an identity relationship between the two terms. Attention may be (I think?) necessary for love to be meaningful, but attention can be applied to any number of things. Like taxes, or getting the proportions right in baking, or, as you say, hate.

[osprey_archer]

Attention may be (I think?) necessary for love to be meaningful

Yes! I think you're onto something with this. At any rate, it's hard to feel loved by someone who doesn't pay any attention to you - no matter how much that person may insist and really feel that they do love you.

[kore]

Oh, that's a great resolution. I've heard really good things about the movie, too.

[osprey_archer]

It's definitely worth seeing if you get the chance! I have high opinions of both Greta Gerwig, the director - she's also an excellent actress - and Saoirse Ronan, who plays Lady Bird, and they are both in top form for this movie.

[missroserose]

I hadn't seen the trailers at all, just heard good things about the movie, and I enjoyed it a lot. At times it reminded me a lot of my relationship with my mother, which is kind of odd - she was always much more supportive of me (and also more constantly emotionally needy) than Lady Bird's mother. But we had the same sort of similarly strong personalities and the conflicts that arose from them, and God knows I was that self-absorbed. (Aside: it's really strange to see your high school/early college experience played out onscreen and then realize it's a period piece.)

I loved that scene too, even though I'm not sure that I agree. I like the idea of attention as applied love.

[osprey_archer]

YES about the period piece thing. Lady Bird is a few years older than I am, so I wasn't graduating high school when she was - but I was old enough that I can remember that time period, and it's weird that it's not long enough ago that nostalgic movies are appearing. The time before Facebook! Truly a different era.

[missroserose]

I graduated the year before her, so it was pretty spot-on for me, although admittedly in Alaska some things were different. :) I listen to a podcast hosted by three sisters (one who's a teenager now and two who're roughly my age) about how teenagerhood has changed, and one of the biggest surprises for the oldest sister was that (according to the youngest) teenagers don't really talk to each other in person anymore - they're much more likely to hang out in group texts or online than in person. She mentioned at one point that that was why teens loved emoji, because it was a way to convey emotion with even less talking...she meant it jokingly, but it struck me as a pretty profound change.

[osprey_archer]

That strikes me as really sad, honestly, which may of course just be a sign that I am becoming a cranky "in MY day, we walked to school uphill both ways and talked to our friends FACE TO FACE" old person. I love my online friends, but there are times when they just can't take the place of having someone there in person, and it seems like a mistake to only (or mostly) hang out online when you could be hanging out and actually doing stuff together.

Especially in the teenage years. It will never be this easy to schedule things again, kids! Never again will so many of your friends live together all in one place!

[asakiyume]

Isn't this strange: we talked at length about that last line here, when you wrote this, and yet I just saw the movie last weekend and when that line came up--the whole scene, which, as you wrote, was very memorable--I didn't flash back to the conversation at all. It was only coming here to refresh myself about your take on the film and **seeing** what we all had talked about that brought it back. Sad.

It was such a beautiful sentiment and scene, and yet I felt like the director hadn't done enough to establish the links between the filming, which **is** loving, and Lady Bird's own views. Maybe it's that with films even more than books (or at least as much as books), I think of the director (in the form of the camera's view) as giving us a viewpoint that *contrasts* with the viewpoint character's. Lady Bird insists she hates Sacramento; okay--I take her at her word. The film shows us Sacramento in its beauty and its quirks--I enjoy this. But Lady Bird never once seems to notice anything about Sacramento beyond the blue house she wishes she lived in and the fact that her own house is literally across the tracks. So when the nun says Lady Bird writes about Sacramento so vividly, this, for me, is new information--it's as if at this moment we suddenly found out she ran track. And then from there comes this insight that suggests that maybe in some respects Lady Bird loves Sacramento--it would be as if we not only learned that she ran track but that somehow her running revealed something important and story-relevant from that--all in one scene.

But I think maybe I'm demanding more with words and explicit narrative than the film wants to do; I think maybe your response is what the film is intending and hoping people have.

The healing angel pointed out that the line about love and attention is also meant to make you think of the mother and daughter. Maybe the mother is as monstrous as she is because LOVE!! Her constant bitching and running down of Lady Bird are attention and therefore LOVE! Which I think reveals a flaw in the statement altogether. It's like when people tell you that the boy who taunts you does so because he actually loves you. Well. He's definitely paying attention to you, but if that's love, I think we need to talk about how we express love.

Maybe it does go to show how hard it can be to identify what our strong emotions are, sometimes, and how our personalities or our experiences can warp how we express them.

I really HATED the mom. She was so unrelentingly negative, not only undermining Lady Bird, but also humiliating her husband in front of their daughter, always hyperfocused on money--yes, I can see how their situation was precarious but man, she was NOT HELPING. I think we were supposed to see from her taking the time to alter the prom dress Lady Bird got at the thrift store that she cared about her daughter and just couldn't express it well but--I really, really wanted to see more of this. We saw her being kind to the priest at the hospital, too, but those two moments weren't enough to counteract the stream of negativity, for me.

However! I really **loved** Lady Bird's forthright pursuit of the boys she liked. She liked them, she introduced herself, and she had fun talking with them and being with them, and that was great. And I did like her friend a whole lot too.

[osprey_archer]

After I watched the movie I read a bunch of reviews and I remember being really baffled by how many critics were positive about the mother-daughter relationship - not necessarily in a "this is a great mother-daughter relationship" sense but in a "this film really captures the complicated nature of the mother-daughter relationship" sense.

And complicated is just not the word I would use to describe Lady Bird's relationship with her mother. Lady Bird's mom is relentlessly negative and Lady Bird (very understandably!) wants to get as far away as possible. It's an unusual dynamic for a movie, but not complicated. Pretty straightforward, actually.

I think we are meant to believe that Lady Bird's mom loves her - and in a way I do believe it; I believe she feels love for Lady Bird - but without the actions of love, what good is that? Lady Bird shouldn't have to read a pile of her mother's half-finished letters that she only got to read in the first place because her dad rescued them from the trash and sent them to her, in order to learn how her mother really feels.

And if we're meant to take this love=attention thing seriously, then what are we to make of that scene after Lady Bird's mom learns of Lady Bird's college plans, and Lady Bird is trying to talk to her mother and her mother just stands there washing dishes and ignoring her? Maybe Lady Bird thinks she hates Sacramento when what she really hates is living with all that negativity.

I agree that the scene where Lady Bird & the nun discuss love and attention - while a great scene on its own - is not really backed up by the rest of the film. I'm not sure how you show that a character who claims to hate a place really loves it, but there must be something.

[asakiyume]

It's an unusual dynamic for a movie, but not complicated. Pretty straightforward, actually.

Yeah. Disagreeable doesn't automatically mean complicated. It *can* indicate complicated, but we certainly don't see it at all in this case. There's just nothing that explains why the mom has to be/is so nasty all the time. She's stressed about money? Guess what! Lots of people are, and they're loving and supportive of their kids! Her husband lost his job? Guess what! She's got a loving husband! Lots of people don't have that! Is she jealous of Lady Bird? (That's everyone's go-to excuse for why one person is nasty to another) Maybe? But we don't see it, so we wouldn't know. Frankly, the mom just seems like a whiny, mean person.

[osprey_archer]

Honestly a thing that I've noticed in reading reviews for films directed by women is that a lot of reviewers seem more comfortable with films where relationships between women - any kind, familial or friendships or romances - are destructive and unpleasant. So maybe that's why reviewers were surprisingly chill about this aspect of the story: this is what they're looking for, expect, and for some reason want.