[Very delayed reviews of Young Adult and Tiny Furniture, which I originally wanted to make a longer essay but didn’t have time to, mashed together because they both made me feel icky:]

I’d like to say I hated Young Adult, but it’s not that simple. It didn’t make me feel very good about myself, or about anyone in it, or really about humanity at large. And largely this is because I thought I despised the main character, Mavis Gray, played ably by Theron. It took me a long time (and one long impassioned conversation about the film) to come to embrace Mavis and try to understand her perspective. 

The Gen Xers I read who saw this film found it scintillating; as a geriatric millennial, I found it less so. Perhaps I’m too young to give up hope on a redemption arc. Or perhaps that is what a redemption arc looks like, and I’m too young and naive to really embrace it.

I saw Up in the Air and liked it okay, but I didn’t really think much of Jason Reitman as a director until I saw Young Adult. The most interesting thing about the film, to me, was the attention the camera paid to Mavis maintaining and enhancing her beauty. Close-ups of cuticles and body wax and tangled hair extensions. It’s interesting that seeing the grotesque behind-the-scenes business of getting a woman looking gorgeous is still so rare on-screen. Those moments made me look more closely at the film. I guess you could switch out some nouns and from that sentence and come up with a relatively apt summary of the film: It’s interesting that seeing the grotesque behind-the-scenes business of getting an addict to grow up is still so awful on-screen.

Because she is an addict. The fact that this definition is even debatable is in my mind one of the darkest aspects of the film. Labels help us come to terms with what we’re seeing. Diablo Cody, Jason Reitman, and Charlize Theron conspire to create a character who is funny, but fucked-up, successful, but unstable. Her comedic elements are rooted in the same soil that is her deep dysfunction. I’m appalled at the film for including it and appalled at myself for actually laughing out loud at some of her behavior. It’s a strange mirror to throw back on us — that we reward the addict, or the popular girl, for this flavor of misdeed. In fact, we expect it. In fact, we think it’s pretty great, even when its ever-widening ramifications are increasingly present.

The recurring makeup montages hint at the larger coverups in Mavis’ life: that she’s popular, successful, and happy. An addict scams. A popular girl pretends.

Somehow in creating a reprehensible character, Diablo Cody has managed to show enormous sympathy towards women. Popular girls don’t get a lot of play in literature and cinema. The all-star athletes get their biopics, the geeks get their revenge, but popular girls typically have to become lowly and unpopular in order to attain perspective, grace, sympathy. (See: Quinn Fabray from Glee, Elle Woods from Legally Blonde, everyone in Mean Girls.) But those girls, made into such objects by the men around them (both the men they slept with and the men they rejected), are real people, too.

I kept thinking about Young Adult when I watched Tiny Furniture. Tiny Furniture is a worse film, and also uncompromisingly painful to watch. (Seems to be in vogue.) Unlike Young Adult’s Mavis Gray, Aura was a character I could theoretically sympathize with. Not a lot, but enough. As Aura keeps telling everyone around her, “This is a really hard time for her right now.”

The one really unpleasant but courageous aspect of this film that I liked is that Dunham is pretty honest about what it feels like to be an “ugly” girl. She’s unapologetic about her body in private, but lets other people dress her, talk down to her, dictate her desires, and push her around. Especially handsome men, who, as this movie aptly demonstrates, are pretty good at using insecure, unpretty women to get what they want.

That being said, it is difficult to imagine plummeting so hard to rock bottom as Aura does. It suggests a singular unawareness of herself that is incongruous with everything else we know about her. It was really hard to feel sorry for “being stuck” with her cool artist mother in a Tribeca loft. With her enormously rich friends and the pills. Tag this shit #firstworldproblems, or even #whitepeopleproblems, yeah?

Strangely, I think it’s supposed to be funny — like the twisted humor we draw from Young Adult. To Diablo Cody’s credit, Mavis is actually funny. Aura is not funny. Lena Dunham keeps drawing attention to Aura’s flaws, almost narcissistically, but it’s very difficult to find them humorous or take it lightly when its more grotesque than light. If Young Adult is an extremely dark comedy, Tiny Furniture is a tragedy masquerading as hipster comedy.

I saw Tiny Furniture on the recommendation of a friend (who hated it) and the question she had for me was Why couldn’t she just say no? No to these men in her life, in particular. Keith, who emotionally manipulates her into sex outdoors in a pipe on the street. Self-aggrandizing Jed’s obsessive self-entitlement and constant belittling of her. Why couldn’t she just say no? But that’s the whole point of the movie. The whole movie is examining why she didn’t just kick this freeloader off her couch, ignore the chef, and move to an apartment in Brooklyn with her best friend.

And the answer is because she’s a terrible person.

There is a point, when you are recovering from a breakup, moving back home with your parents, and feeling ugly and worthless, when you become an increasingly intolerable person. And you know how awful you’re being to your family and friends with your own issues about dependence and independence and co-dependence but you feel stuck in some weird loop and you can’t stop. And then you start trying on new personas and wearing clothes you would never wear and you get a minimum wage job to “be real.” Then you discover just how little you make working a week at a restaurant. And you think, in the most entitled way possible, but I went to college, I am a really smart person, everyone says so! I thought this would be easier.

But, it’s not. And until you figure that out you are a terrible person for a little while.

So I watched two movies about terrible people and both were difficult to sit through. They were terrible in slightly different ways. One was prettier than the other. One was more privileged than the other. One was younger. One was pushier. The cinematography of both carefully framed them in their bleak habitats, unable to relate to anyone around them.

But the question remains, readers: what is the point of making a film about a terrible person with no redemption arc? Does Aura grow at all, or learn anything? Does Mavis? Is addiction an excuse for being insufferable? Is privilege? Are either of these portrayals sympathetic? Does it matter? Which movie did you like better?

Answers due by 5pm.