There is a lot of sex in The Diary of a Teenage Girl. In fact, it's the most frankly sexual teen film I've ever seen, though unlike a standard teen sex comedy or indie erotic drama. For one, the sex never views as exploitive and the main character, Minnie, is never dangled in front of us to dominate, possess, or objectify. The gaze here is clearly female, perhaps even grown-up Minnie looking back on her 15th year with empathy, enthusiasm, and love. Director Marielle Heller cares about Minnie and wants her to love herself and own her sexuality; for the most part, Heller accomplishes this without moralizing or judgement, allowing a sexually curious and bold teenage girl to be a just-so reality and one worthy of its own narrative and of our attention.
Sex for Minnie begins to take on so many meanings and intentions that I found myself wanting to take issue, initially. Minnie sees herself as too fat to be beautiful, too ugly for a boyfriend, too awkward to ever find someone who would love her, who would stay; sex becomes a quest for self-esteem and validation. The need for validation from men becomes so extreme that she goes great lengths to objectify and demean herself to catch the attention of other men, including pretending to be a prostitute and later engaging in a threesome she has no desire to be a part of; both acts leave her feeling nervous and ill. Minnie is also a 15-year-old girl on a mission to find and know herself, who is caught in the middle of her pre-teen Disney wardrobe (an on-the-nose Minnie Mouse shirt) and whatever stable label adulthood holds. So, sex briefly becomes her identity and being a sexual person serves as an avenue for her to at least be a someone, a grownup someone. Her mother, played wounded, reckless and cagey by an understated Kristen Wiig, even encourages her to discover sex as power, but primarily as a commodifiable weapon or bargaining tool with men rather than an empowering practice for pleasure and agency. Wiig's character models a life for her daughter where relationships with men are necessary for meaning and where sex-- or being sexually desirable to men-- is necessary for self-love and personal fulfillment. I found these interpretations of sex heartbreaking. I really wanted sex for Minnie to be about pleasure; or I wanted it to be about love. But I had to come to terms with the honesty and humanness of it, that sex is or can be all of these things for all of us. That we all have sex for the "wrong" reasons (insecurity, boredom, momentary connection) that aren't necessarily wrong at all. It's variations can be but are not necessarily problematic; often, they just are, and there's no sense in moralizing them. That realization helped me really appreciate the film's portrayal of Minnie as a woman with sexuality, just as complicated as anyone else's.
And Minnie does have moments where sex seems to be about pleasure and she's able to articulate her own needs in sex. In one unexpectedly endearing scene, Minnie goes home with a classmate and they proceed to have sex in a backyard playhouse after skinny-dipping together. His thrusts are short, frantic, and desperate, and Minnie looks like someone has attached cooked pasta to a high-speed fan and just kept whipping the outskirts of her vagina with it. Fed up and disappointed she tells him she wants to be on top, and she straddles him with slow, sensual, deliberate movements, bringing her to orgasm. It's a visual representation of her owning her sexuality and serving her needs; it is--and I'm not being facetious--the kind of sex we want our friends, our loved ones, our daughters to be having.
But otherwise, Heller seemingly operates between a neutral-but-compassionate stance on Minnie's articulations of sexuality and a quiet-but-paternalizing concern, perhaps in hopes of siding with her audience. Not only are we led to see Minnie's growing sexual pursuits as destructive compulsions, but the audience has to decide how to process statutory rape through the eyes of a 15-year-old girl who (like me, like you) desperately wants to be beautiful, important, and loved. The bulk of the story is Minnie's secret sexual (and romantic?) relationship with Monroe, her mother's boyfriend. Heller shows some affirmation, respect, and compassion for Minnie by largely showing the affair through Minnie's eyes. From her chaotic, youthful, exploratory, love-craving vantage point, we see real chemistry between Monroe and Minnie. Their flirtatious games shape dynamics that are all at once fatherly, brotherly, and movie-love romantic with noogies and tickle fights and relentless teasing. Early on, as an audience member, I had to remind myself that she was 15 and he was 30 and this was not a romance and this was not okay. But you simultaneously empathized with Minnie and wanted her to find a way to make love and sex work for her, and honestly, in time, when I did find myself wanting their affair to end, it was less because of issues of age-difference, manipulation, legality, and true consent, and mostly because Monroe reveals himself to be a sad, lonely asshole without much of a future. Just as I may have determined were she dating some boy in her class, I felt like Minnie could do better.
(Monroe, played brilliantly by a loses-himself-in-the-role Alexander Skarsgard, leads me to believe this is our intended journey with the character. Skarsgard is relaxed and charming, and he enters the relationship seemingly more curious and confused than predatory... again, we keep having to remind ourselves that their relationship is not legally or ethically okay. But Monroe's mid-film drunken ramblings and his pitiful, childish, drug-induced declarations effectively reveal his character and disarm his charms. Skargard makes us want to, conflictedly, breathe Monroe in and then enthusiastically spit him out)
But if the director's point-of-view and the film's tone don't seem to directly condemn Minnie's eventually compulsive sexuality or illegal and unethical sexual relationship with Monroe, she certainly finds ways to work in a moral commentary. Firstly, there are the absurd and negative consequences of Minnie's sexuality. In one of the film's few ingenuine, far-reaching moments, Minnie's wounded and jealous mother learns of Minnie's relationship with her boyfriend and she tries to compel them to marry one another. This prompts Minnie to escape on a weeks-long drug binge with her short-lived lesbian lover who tries to SELL MINNIE AS A SEX SLAVE FOR DRUGS WITHOUT HER KNOWLEDGE OR PERMISSION. I'm not saying these things never happen, but when you take on one of the few moderately-visible films where a teenage girl gets to own and explore her sexuality through a largely affirming and earnest lens, it seems like an antiquated and thoughtless-to-cruel cautionary tale twist to suggest the extreme consequences of sex trafficking or forced marriage.Why can't her consequences be the same as they are for the rest of us when we're engaging with others sexually while not loving and respecting ourselves?
So that's Heller's more extreme tool for judgement/control of Minnie's sexuality. The more subtle motif is the recurring specter of Patty Hearst. Hearst comes up much too frequently to just be a device for placing the film in time, and besides, there would be more timely references to make to situate the film in San Fran 1976 (the Bicentennial, or more visually appealing and narratively compelling, the rare 1976 SF Blizzard). Our three main characters all provide telling perspectives on Hearst. Minnie is incredulous that anyone could let such a thing-- kidnapping, manipulation, sexual exploitation, and possible Stockholm syndrome-- happen to themselves. Minnie's mother is outraged and sympathetic of Patty, convinced she's a victim. Monroe remains unconvinced that Patty Hearst was victimized at all, arguing she's complicit and responsible for all of her actions. It's an effective, though perhaps too esoteric of a device for showcasing each character's perspective of Minnie and Monroe's sexual relationship, but it also permits Heller to articulate a moral stance on the issue: that Patty Heart's abduction and Minnie's sexual awakening and statutory rape are comparable, that it was, indeed, an act of manipulation, that it may have compelled Minnie to permit crimes-- engage in escapist sexual pursuits-- that were not in her nature or best interest.
Minnie shows tremendous growth at the end of the film. She has ended her relationship with Monroe, rejected her mother's views of sex and romance that led her to seek touch or male approval for identity and self-esteem, and discovered and embraced her identity as an artist. Through brilliant cinematography and charming, surreal moments of animation, the audience has already come to know Minnie as a talented and fresh-eyed illustrator, so it's very fulfilling to see her make that discovery for herself. However, it would have been a more powerful and enjoyable message to know that Minnie was able to healthfully intergrate sex into her life, that she found ways to experience sex and articulate herself sexually beyond her art. Instead, I felt led to believe that Minnie momentarily abandoned sex in pursuit of her future and her artistic identity. While it's great to see her respecting, discovering, and knowing herself, I would have preferred knowing that those were also realities for her sexually and romantically as well.
I'll end with a random postscript on the strange and unfavorable use of black male sexuality in the film. Black men are absent from the film-- sadly not all that uncommon even in progressive indies-- except for in the form of stories meant to scandalize white girls and incite jealousy and anger in white men. Minnie's best friend, perhaps not wanting to be outshone by Minnie's juicy affair with her mom's boyfriend, tells Minnie that she has been sucking the "big black cock" of the guy she's babysitting for. The taboo of interracial sex seems to be put in the same arena as the taboo of statutory rape and infidelity, and in a film that was not otherwise that concerned with contextualizing sexual values within the film's setting, it felt like a distracting-to-shocking-to-offensive inclusion. The only other time a black man, or rather a "big black cock" is mentioned, is when Minnie is trying to make Monroe jealous enough to fuck her again. She fabricates a story about hooking up with a black guy with a painfully large dick in the back of his car, and the fact alone is enough to make Monroe feel like he has something to prove or regain ownership of. Because the film never addresses black sexuality or interacial sex elsewhere, one gets the impression that Heller is contributing to, or at least employing, centuries old narratives of protecting white women (and white masculinity) from black bodies rather than commenting on them, and certainly rather than challenging them. I found the inclusion of these narratives puzzling in a movie that otherwise seemed genuinely invested in validating people as sexual subjects with their own agency and right to pleasure.
PPS: Since I've established a precedent of ending the blog with the picture of a beautiful man:
You're welcome.
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