Can meaning be extracted
merely from living out an ordinary life in an ordinary town? Must a person be
among the literary, political, entertainment, or business elite to feel
fulfilled? Are the popular kids in school the happiest? If so, why does a sense
of over all contentment and ongoing enjoyment seem to come easily to some
people while being arduously difficult for people leading ordinary lives to attain?
Are people in the elites necessarily or even just usually happier than people
who live out ordinary lives by earning enough to put bread on the table and simply
enjoy friends and family. Would so many people be content to live such lives
without any publicized accomplishment that will outlast them if ordinary life
itself were not very satisfying? The 2011 film, Young Adult, is notable
for how it deals with these questions in a non-formulaic way. Aside from
contrasting ordinary living in a small town with being an accomplished, albeit
flawed, writer (and person) in a way that puts accomplishment above a life centered
on local events like high-school football games on Friday nights and family
birthday parties, the film can be read as providing a statement on how not to
write a novel. That the screenwriting is so good makes this dimension possible
even though the medium is film.
The main character, Mavis Gary,
is a woman who is aged 37 and has divorced a man whom her parents still like.
She writes short novels in the young-adult category of fiction and, in an
interesting parallel, is a young adult, psychologically. That she is a
heavy drinker of alcohol likely has something to do with her maturation having
been artificially arrested when had passed on from having been a hot, popular
girl in high school who had no time for those students-dubbed-losers. In the
film, seeking in vain to get her long-past high-school boyfriend (with whom she
had a miscarriage back then) Buddy to leave his wife Beth and infant daughter
to rekindle the high-school romance, Mavis finds it difficult to complete the
last novel in the once-popular series for young adults. Mavis’s manipulative ploys
reek of young adulthood. So too, unfortunately, does her writing.
Writing does not come easy for
her even though Mavis is a serial-published author. The film hints of this in
the scene in which she signs one of her ghost-written books tellingly without the
bookstore employee having made the request or given permission, the film’s
sound amplifies, and thus hones in on, the scratchy carving of her pen into the
paper of a page. By the hard sounds of the tip of the pen on the paper, the audience
can get the sense that writing is arduous. In filmmaking generally, the magnification
of particular, ordinary sounds by literally turning up the volume of a mic up in
volume can be useful in storytelling and developing a character. As a byproduct,
an audience is made more aware of ordinary things in daily life—like how the
closing of a door sounds when sitting in a new car, how hard shoes sound on
bricks, and even how silence can punctuate a typical conversation with meaning.
Life has been an up-hill struggle for Mavis in spite of her having been one of
the cool kids in school, and the scraping sound of her pen writing her own name
in a book that she wrote not only suggests how she approaches writing, but
also, metaphorically speaking, how difficult it has been for her to feel fulfilled.
All the manipulation that goes
into Mavis’s attempt to wrest Buddy from his new family and back into her arms shows
just how desperate she is to feel inner fulfillment, and she allows this
angst to spill into her writing. For example, when getting Buddy back proves
difficult and she realizes that she will have to take an active role in breaking
up Buddy’s marriage to do so, she subverts her novel by writing, “Sometimes in order
to heal, a few people have to get hurt.” Her operating assumption is that
manipulation can bring about happiness rather than isolation and loneliness. The
film’s screenwriter could have had Mavis repeat the line to Bill, who was one
of the geek-students and had a locker next to Mavis’s in high school and during
the film applies the superego-conscience to Mavis. He could say, “So it is ok
to tell young-adult readers of your book that it is ok to hurt people in order
to feel whole?” The extent to which Mavis’s mentality and values are warped
would be more transparent to the audience.
Mavis’s written line speaks
volumes about what not to do in writing a novel, which should not serve as a
mere direction-pointer of what happens to be going on in the writer’s life, bad
or good, when the writing is underway. Such a flow of consciousness is called
an autobiography, not a novel. It is no surprise when the employee at the
bookstore reveals to Mavis that her series is on display not because the books
are selling like pancakes, but, rather, because “that series is over.” That she
is writing the last book of that series nonetheless is itself a harsh verdict
on her books.
It is only after Sandra, Bill’s
sister who looked up to the popular Mavis in high school, recalibrates Mavis’s
perception of herself on the morning after Mavis has had unsatisfying sex with
Bill after having been humiliated by Buddy at his daughter’s “non-religious
naming ceremony” that Mavis recognizes that even her own mediocre accomplishment
was at least an accomplishment. Sandra points out that no one else in that small
town of bars and fast-food restaurants—Mercury, Minnesota—has or could do
anything as noteworthy as writing a series of books. Mavis has had no clue on
just how ordinary, banal, and unaccomplished, and therefore meaningless,
the people are in the small town. They don’t really care if they die, Sandra
explains, because they know it won’t matter whether or when they die because
they haven’t accomplished anything noteworthy. The attitude expressed by the
film itself depreciates this kind of mere existence. “This town blows,”
an astonished and awakened Mavis exclaims to Sandra, who is satisfied that her
message has been received. At the naming ceremony, Buddy gives his wife a
drum-set, after all. Oh joy! Any push-back from this critique of people who
live ordinary lives of putting bread on the table and a roof over a family’s
heads is utterly lacking in the film. Instead, Mavis is portrayed as a heroine
when she stands up in Sandra’s (and Bill’s) kitchen and announces that it is
time to go back to the big city in Minnesota. She even puts Sandra in her place
as fitting well in the ordinariness of Mercury by refusing Sandra’s plea, “Take
me with you!” The film does not consider that Sandra and Mavis may be wrong in
viewing the people who have stayed in Mercury as useless losers whose ordinary
lives amount to nothing. The message of the film is that this is making a noteworthy
accomplishment makes living fulfilling, whereas selfish manipulation and living
an ordinary life are recipes for unhappiness. Even though it is good to see
Mavis wake up and be suddenly refreshed about life rather than commit suicide
or die from driving drunk, I contend that meaning from ordinary living is inordinately
dismissed in the film.
A certain sort of fulfilment
can only come from an un-noticed and relatively unassuming life of lifelong
friends and plenty of extended relatives nearby and therefore of get-togethers.
To be sure, the day-in, day-out drudgery of banal work, however, is much more
difficult to justify. If only more people would know and be matched with
their passion, the world would be a happier place. Aside from the drudgery
involved in having to put bread on the table, retain health insurance, and save
for the kids’ college-education, ordinary life can be fulfilling. If brought
out more in the film, such ubiquitous, long-standing and thus subtle comfort
could contend with the alleged happiness (or value of living) that is known
only to an accomplished member of a societal elite. Hypothetically, a person
raised as a spoiled, immature, and discontented child from Rockford, Illinois,
for example, could go on to be a rich partner of a Hollywood talent agency and
live with utter disdain for the people still living in the sordid rust-belt
city of high crime and unemployment that lies to the west of even the outer
suburbs of Chicago (and thus civilization); such a person could easily look down
on her relatives even if they were not all merely ordinary in terms of noteworthy
accomplishment. Even all the wealth and the contact with popular film actors (many
of whom may, it turns out, be utterly unhappy as fakes, even amid all
their earthly possessions) that unnaturally comes with working at a high level in
Hollywood, and all the pleasure that comes from feeling distain and thus
superior generally may not be enough to erase the inner and outer isolation and
reach the level of fulfilment that simply requires a certain maturation and friendly
continence. Such rare finds can arguably
be found amid fame and famine, in big, accomplished cities as well as in small,
uneventful towns. In cheering on Mavis’ return to the mini-apple and blowing
off the ordinary people who reside in Mercury, the film does not proffer enough
balance to support a dialectic of two very different ways of being fulfilled
(instead, the film is ideologically prescriptive). Had the filmmakers constructed a balanced dialectic for the film, the screenplay could have been written in such a way that the narrative could arrive at identifying the underlying substratum that undergirds happiness
itself, with Mavis realizing a sense of comfort in her own skin regardless of the
context.
