Review of Young Adult (2011) by Shiira — 27 Jan 2012

Mavis Gary could easily pass for a much younger woman, but she gives herself away, soon after receiving a baby announcement from an old beau via e-mail, in the opening sequence of Young Adult. A person in their twenties, disdainful of old media, would be satisfied with keeping the image on the screen.

Today's generation aren't as hands-on as prior ones, who were raised on Polaroids and Kodak. Mavis downloads the infant. She prints it out, because people of a certain age are tactilely-oriented; they like to hold things.

Mavis goes outside on the patio with the papery child and reads the documented photograph like a text. She deconstructs. The fanciful woman reads between the lines, and against the grain, thereby deluding herself into believing an alternate narrative in which Buddy needs to be rescued from the domestic trappings of a small-town she surmises as being hell.

Mavis is a searcher. Not for nothing does Young Adult evoke Native Americans through her old school's nickname. Mavis loathes the Mercury townsfolk, or in other words, Indians(formerly the "Injuns"), whom she abandoned so long ago.

The filmmaker sees her as a John Ford cowboy; she's Ethan Edwards(John Wayne) and Buddy is her "Little Debbie"(Natalie Wood), the "hostage" that she's going to take home with her. 2011 is the new 1956.

The MINI Cooper is her horse. Quite pointedly, the first line of "The Concept" makes reference to her outlaw image: "She wears denim wherever she goes." Later in the song, the lyric "says she likes my hair 'cause it's down my back," suggests the Indian in Mavis, since long hair for Indians is representative of a strong spirit.

Her old flame's short hair, in a sense, empowers Mavis with the idea that Buddy will put up no resistance against such practiced feminine wiles. "The Concept" was the signature track off one of Buddy's old mix-tapes that Mavis plays repeatedly on her long drive back to the "reservation".

He must have owned the album Bandwagonesque. Incidental or not, the root word "bandwagon", defined as "a wagon which carries a band of musicians in a parade," has connotations to the old west, through the traveling show "Buffalo Bill's Wild West", put on by William Frederick Cody, who also starred in The Scouts of the Prairie, an 1876 stage play that gave birth to the western myth.

Mavis' bout of obsessive nostalgia over the Teenage Fanclub song not only has a harmful effect on her emotional development, but it also calls into question our affection for the past, a troubled history filled with unrepentant racism.

As late as the early-nineties, this fictional high school used a racial slur to identify themselves. In The Searchers, Debbie, a full-fledged member of the Comanche tribe, is married to Scar, as are several other women.

Beth, Buddy's wife, perchance, plays the drums(an instrument that is heavily prevalent in Native American culture), and wears a Breeders t-shirt(a "half-breed" reference), in an all-woman band that indirectly references the Comanche chief's wives.

By covering "The Concept", Nipple Confusion steals the song back from the cowgirl, who appropriated it as the song of the "white woman" when she left Mercury. Now the song belongs once again to its rightful owners.

Suddenly songless, the hopeless, albeit psychotic, romantic, perhaps, with some distance, now realizes that "The Concept" smacked more of being a break-up song. "I didn't want to hurt you," goes the refrain, which raises the question: Exactly why did Mavis leave her old stomping grounds? In The Searchers title song, the singer asks, "What makes a man to wander? What makes a man to roam?" At a baby-naming ceremony, we find out, when Beth spills red wine on Mavis' blouse(read: the Indian slays the cowboy), propelling the big-shot city girl to reveal that she had lost Buddy's baby, which casts this flinty woman in a whole different light.

At 20, while still a young adult, Mavis was apparently ready to bear children, unlike Juno, or Mark Loring, the adoptive parent who flakes out on the titular teen. Uncannily, Mark just happens to be a perfect match for this thirty-something adolescent, with his comic book collection and rock star aspirations.

To escape the pain of her personal loss, she fled. It's no accident that Mavis befriends Matt, "the hate-crime guy", upon her return from Minneapolis. She dovetails with the disabled survivor, because it should've been him, not the queen bee, who needed reinventing.

Mavis could have gone on to rule Mercury beyond high school, in perpetuity, and be perfectly happy. The queen bee invented her ambition. Still grieving, Mavis doesn't realize that, by some standards, she's led a very successful life.

But despite being a published writer, motherhood still haunts her. Playing a monster without the makeup, Mavis would have never given Aileen Wuornos the time of the day, but like the serial killer, all she ever wanted was to be loved.