Happy Thursday, friends! This is the first newsletter I’ve built more or less from scratch in a while, so you actually have me, not past me talking to you.
When it’s almost Friday
So … some personal news, as they say. I scored a pretty major writing milestone by having a piece published on Roger Ebert’s website about the 10th anniversary of Easy A! It’s both an intensive analysis about how the movie advanced the high school genre as well as a personal account of what the movie means to me. Ebert has long been a north star in my writing, and a note he wrote about my blog still remains in the site’s header. To see my name appear on his site is nothing short of surreal and a true honor.
Elsewhere, from TIFF, I reviewed the French sun-soaked summer romance Summer of 85 for /Film. Think Call Me By Your Name but with a film noir framing that doesn’t really work but is still nice!
I’m now slowly re-emerging to start following the news and what not to provide more timely updates in this section of the newsletter, but here’s a little bit of #NewsYouCanUse! ProPublica put together this very helpful guide to making sure your vote counts during the pandemic age.
And in terms of feeling charitable, the great Kara Brown pointed my attention towards a really great organization called Two Screens for Teachers. The idea of the group is to provide a second screen for educators so they can look at their students on one screen and their lesson plans on the other. Pretty genius and helpful, if you ask me!
Now, what you came for…
DAY 189: Easy A (available to rent through various digital providers)
If you’ve made it this far, I can only hope you also read the linked piece I wrote on Easy A. You also probably know that piece had a lot of words. Perhaps you’re asking, “Marshall, what more could you possibly have to say about Easy A?” As it turns out, quite a bit because I had to cut an entire section of the essay prior to publication! Lucky for you, I saved my notes and can give you some insight into yet another brilliant aspect of the film: its treatment of sexuality in the teen film, specifically as it pertains to women in the genre. (This presumes you have some knowledge of the movie, or at least its concept — if you need to brush up on the latter, the trailer is at the bottom below this recommendation.)
The loss of virginity is a frequent conflict in the high school movie, though it’s usually something placed as a quest or a challenge for a character to achieve by the end of a film. (Ahem, American Pie — which, in fairness, is much more progressive than others of its ilk.) Easy A gets to point out a lot of the outdated attitudes around sexuality that lingered from the conservatism of ‘80s-era Brat Pack movies by doing something doubly ingenious with the concept of cinematic virginity. The film situates the loss of virginity as the catalyst of its narrative, not the culmination of it … and Emma Stone’s Olive Penderghast doesn’t *actually* lose it, she just embraces a lie that she does. These key changes allow the film to expose the gap between how people laugh off or dismiss the pursuit of teenage sexuality and how they respond when someone (especially a young woman) dares express and embrace it.
In fairness to John Hughes and his cohort of filmmakers, there actually was cause for some moral panic in the ‘80s around sexuality — even before it became clear that AIDS was something that could be transmitted between heterosexual couples. (Not that it should take that for people to care.) According to statistics in the book I read to prepare for the essay, Timothy Shary’s Generation Multiplex, by 1990, one out of every ten unmarried teenage girls got pregnant. Seems crazy to me, but I trust a peer-reviewed academic text! That paranoia over teenage behavior clearly trickled into messaging around sexuality, both cultural and educational.
But by the time Easy A came out in 2010, teens had become more responsible. From 2002-2010, the teen sex rate stabilized … and was entering into the beginning of a 5-year decline. There was no need for the scolding and consternation from The Olds. And yet, puritanism continued to reign — not just from people like the ultra-conservative Christian clique represented by Amanda Bynes’ Marianne Bryant. Easy A takes pains to show these viciously sex-negative attitudes were not niche or fringe; they were mainstream.
The film demonstrates how society’s fear and loathing of women embracing their sexuality proves such an enduring feature of the high school landscape that Olive does not even need to actually have sex to incur their wrath and feel their repercussions. The stares, the back chatter and the vicious online rumor mill have the effect of making women inflict shame upon themselves. And, again, she doesn’t even do anything!
At the very least, it’s certainly nothing worse than the horny young men who receive celebratory narratives around their attempts to get deflowered. Teen sex comedies grant a long leash to libidinous men under the fallacious notion that “boys will be boys.” It confuses biological development with unequal socialization — the consequences for young girls are stricter for stepping out of line. Olive’s “services,” supposedly trading sex for money when she’s actually trading the story of having had sex for gift cards and trinkets, expose a fundamental and backwards truth about gender dynamics in high school. Sexual currency makes men’s reputations rise, but it makes women’s fall.
Easy A had to walk by demolishing sex-negative arguments so later, more progressive teen films like Blockers and Booksmart could more openly embrace sex-positive journeys for their teen female protagonists. Olive had to assert her right to privacy, reminding her peers that her sexuality was no one else’s goddamn business (her words), so others could choose to more openly disclose. None of this more academic analysis of the film takes away from the fact that Easy A is a fun, comforting blast to watch. But the next time you rewatch it (or the first time you watch it), consider that it’s also a significant film as well!
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall