Mavis Gary. Any film character who is described by the Daily Mail as a “cold-hearted, scheming sociopath with an unwarranted superiority complex” must have something going for them. And Jason Reitman’s latest anti-hero(ine) in “Young Adult” (2011), played perfectly by a skeletal and snarling Charlize Theron, is a breath of fresh gin. ‘Young Adult’ is the story of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Failing teen ghostwriter, divorcee ex-prom queen and pseudo-alcoholic Mavis Gary decides to return home to small-town Minnesota for a baby shower, in an effort to win back her old flame (Patrick Wilson). The only problem – it’s the old flame’s baby shower, and he’s happily, blissfully married, not that Mavis cares.
The film starts with her slumped frontward on the bed, an empty bottle of wine perched jauntily nearby, while the Kendra Show drones on in the background. Kendra, a young blonde glamour model and notoriously one of Hugh Hefner’s three girlfriends, berates her looks in a high-pitched American monotone. Mavis, who is by all accounts anything but ugly, is shown throughout the film going to great lengths with her beauty regime. Fake wigs, false eyelashes, incredibly painful-looking mani-pedi’s, and eye make up and face slap of Essex-like proportions, are the arsenal to her arse-kicking. So she’s a feminist in falsies? Not quite, not really, well… yes!
Mavis may be a bitch beyond belief, may be entirely narcissistic, is willing to break up a happy marriage and a new family, and uses feminine whiles and chicken fillets (somewhat along the lines of what the dreaded Catherine Hakim argues in her theory of Erotic Capital) to get what she wants. BUT – and here’s where I bat away all the reasons for why she isn’t ready to be nominated for Feminist of the Year: she is a brilliant, truth-speaking, and hilarious kick-ass cow of the greatest order, and what’s more, she does it in a lead role. Mavis tells it like it is – to the surly teenage hotel receptionist, to Buddy’s wife (Elizabeth Reaser), to her mother. She doesn’t take no shit from no one. Just one glacial snare of the lip is enough to freeze oceans of small-town ennui. She is that child-woman that’s never been shown on screen in a world of Adam Sandlers and Mathew McConaugheys. She sleeps around! She drinks buckets! She doesn’t want kids! She says, eats and does what the hell she wants! And often at the detriment of others! She’s a failed writer, a dislikeable gin-soddled wreck, and she’s bloody hilarious. Hell, shouldn’t there be more women on screen farting, eating rubbish and acting like adolescent buffoons who never grew up?
Diablo Cody is one of few people in Hollywood who can truly write a funny female lead (Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo are two others with “Bridesmaids” , which similarly features women screwing up, swearing, drinking and talking about sex (in a way that doesn’t align the act of love with a pair of Manolo Blahniks)). Okay, okay, there was the questionable abortion morality of so-twee-you-could-choke ”Juno”, but aside from the burger phones and anti-folk, Cody gaves us a teenage heroine, sharp as tack, with deadpan humour, high-grade pop culture references, and a guilt-free baby. Diablo, speaking to feminist blog “Women and Hollywood”, said:
“The idea of a cold, unlikeable woman or a woman who is not in control of herself is genuinely frightening to people because it threatens civilization itself or threatens the American family. But I don’t know why people are always willing to accept and even like flawed male characters. We’ve seen so many lovable anti-heroes who are curmudgeons or addicts or bad fathers and a lot of those characters have become beloved icons and I don’t see women allowed to play the same parts. So it was really important to me to try and turn that around”.
Diablo Cody’s prom queen bitch isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. The American prom bitch has ruled over teen flicks for years, most famously in the likes of “Clueless” (1995), “Mean Girls” (2004), and “Jawbreaker” (1999) and is captured in all her bitchy bulimic glory in “Heathers” (1988) – arguably one of the darkest, most surreal, and most hilarious teen films ever, and a heavy influence on Mark Waters’ bitch group The Plastics in “Mean Girls”. Nothing before or since has matched Heathers for its scathing critique of teen angst, American high-school hierarchy and meaningless consumerism. And it is infinitely quotable: “Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw. Do I look like Mother Theresa?” and “Dear Diary, my teen-angst bullshit now has a body count” – I could go on.
So Mavis Garey is basically Heathers Chandler, but 20 years on, with an escalating drink problem, and a chihuahua. She is what happened to the prom queen who never left high school, reliving old feuds and romantic successes through her career as a ghost-writer for teen fiction series “Waverley Prep” and fantasizing about the romance that was with high-school hunk Buddy Slade. Though the college hicks she mocks haven’t moved on from small-town Minnesota, they have – if Buddy Slade is anything to go by – moved on from high school, forging a new life for themselves, while she remains trapped in the role of perpetual adolescence. The only one who hasn’t – Matt Freehauf (the brilliant Patton Oswalt)– becomes her sidekick. Flawed but loveable, he is both physically handicapped, after a gay hate crime from high school leaves him paralysed and with a bent cock, and psychologically handicapped, unable to get over an accident that happened twenty years ago, and still living with his geeky sister, listening to heavy metal and making bootleg whisky in his garage. I say the last two like they’re bad things: Matt is the ultimate cool geek, revealing impeccable taste in rock t shirts, one-liners and bootleg booze. Mavis and he are the perfect antidote to small-town America and the flawed ideal of the American dream. In Matt’s garage and Mavis’ whisky glass, they are able to transcend all the bullshit, even if, in the case of both, it may not bring lasting happiness.
As the saying goes, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Mavis may be an ex prom queen with a more than questionable morality, but the film suggests, as I see it, that she is just the victim of a bullshit consumer culture where people like the Kardashians and Kendra – a double whammy of krap – are hailed as modern-day icons. It’s no accident that Mavis in down-time dresses like Paris Hilton, with pink trackies, pink hangbags and a yapping dog foetus thing that she carts around along with all that emotional baggage. She’s equally inseparable from her Mac, her gallon of Diet Coke and Kentucky Fried Kendra, and her Iphone. She self-medicates on a diet of junk food, junk shows, and the biggest and most damaging legal drug of all – alcohol. Mavis may be the Big Plastic Bitch, but society around her isn’t doing better.
A shortened version of this review is on The Harker website.
