Coming of Age with Lady Bird
This week, I crawled into a movie theater on a cold Friday night, alone, and purchased a ticket to see Lady Bird. I was expecting a movie about a quirky girl marching to the beat of her own drum and figuring herself out; maybe an awkward sex scene or two. What I got was a painfully relatable coming of age story, that did focus on a weirdo of a girl, but something that made me really think about who I am as a person.
Not to get personal, but recently I’ve lost a job, and have been feeling a little bit like I’ve become a burden to my Mom since I’m pretty much dead weight. Yea it’s the good life that I’m not paying any bills, but I’m also sitting in my room all day really doing nothing (obviously I’m applying to jobs and pitching to websites, but you all know what I mean.) I feel embarrassed that while my friends are getting promotions and getting engaged and shit, I’m home writing fan fiction about video game characters making out and writing this blog up. However, watching Lady Bird made me think that maybe I’m just coming to my coming of age now.
The film spans Lady Bird’s (Saoirse Ronan) senior year of high school and the beginning of her freshman year of college. It’s charming and embarrassing and reminiscent of every other weird girl story, but with something a little more bitter involved. While movies like Juno are equally quirky, Lady Bird makes me ask the “then what?” Juno ends with Bleeker and Juno playing guitar and living as a teenagers because hey, that baby is out of here and now I can continue my whacky teen antics, but for LB, she’s alone on the opposite side of the country, and she’s growing up but she has a lot to clearly figure out still.
Scott Rudin Productions
Specifically, two moments hit me hard in the movie. The first is when she confronts a character about being gay. Immediately, once he admits he is gay, he cries to Lady Bird begging that she doesn’t tell anybody. Though I’ve never begged anybody to not announce my sexuality, there’s a certain desperation in the character’s voice that resonated with me. Something about his way of life not wanting to change, for the sake of his safety made me burst into tears. The fear of what will come if you are not the norm was so real and it stuck with me. It is a second coming of age struggle that so many LGBT people yet it is rarely talked about in movies. We are not sure if the character has to come out to his family, but as viewers we understand that he has come to terms with it to some degree.
The second instance is towards the end, when Lady Bird is shopping for a prom dress with her mother. After a heated debated, LB asks “Do you like me?” He mother responds with, “Of course I love you.” In my mind, I couldn’t help but think “that’s not an answer.” Though I know my mother loves me and likes me very much, I can’t help but feel like that’s not always the case. When you want to act out and be eccentric as a seventeen year old, it is so incredibly hard to be likable to everybody. Parents are the hardest to please and the easiest to piss off, and more often than not, we painfully want them to think that we did good.
Lady Bird got the confusing and scary parts of young adulthood down perfectly. It’s longing and frustration all in one. As viewers, we see the characters go through these feelings but never feel it ourselves unless we’re thinking about our own situation. After seeing the movie, I felt the need to reflect, but also felt a serene calm like everything will work out, similarly like it did for Lady Bird. I’m not a bad person for being in my twenties and connecting to high schoolers in coming of age films, I’m just figuring myself out and I need to remember that.
