Posted on 09/08/2015 2:29:53 PM PDT by Faith Presses On
This summer a movie called “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” was released, to the wide acclaim of liberals (I've only read a few reviews, but searching on the title produces pages of results for liberal newspapers and websites praising it). According to the reviews I've read, it is a so-called “coming of age” movie about a 15 year-old girl with a hippie librarian mother growing up in 1970's San Francisco. The central storyline is this 15 year-old girl's apparently consensual relationship (as the movie ultimately judges it to be) with her mother's boyfriend 25 years older than she. The reviews indicate that the relationship is treated as a “youthful experience,” perhaps mistaken but not anything to be upset about, since such “mistakes,” after all, are just about “growing up” (leaving out that the adult man is no longer “growing up.”) Liberals reviewers also applaud that the girl seems to be “in charge of her own life,” basically in that she has a preoccupation with sex.
This is from a Salon review of the film (1):
“I refuse to be a sniveling crybaby. I’m a ------- woman and this is my life.” So goes the battle cry of Minnie Goetze, the irrepressible heroine of “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” a film widely lauded as a game-changing coming-of-age narrative. And the film should be praised for its unapologetic treatment of female desire as something to contend with... (snip)But in “Diary,” director Marielle Heller’s debut feature film, Minnie Goetze gets what she wants, when she wants it, a refreshingly frequent amount of time. For most of the film what she wants to get is sex — something the film approaches with a rare respect for the exigency of female desire, perhaps specifically the desire to be desired. Played by British actor Bel Powley, Minnie “gets to get” in a pool shed, hotel room, the belly of a sailboat, the back of a car. (snip)
Flash forward and today seems prudish, even downright hostile to sexually adventurous young women. As pointed out last week by Amanda Hess in Slate, “the underlying sexual and technological panic” streaming from recent anti-Tinder-heads “looks remarkably similar to the Victorian version” over a hundred years ago. But staged against the enviably libertine seventies, the central controversy of “Diary” — Minnie’s affair with Monroe, her mother’s boyfriend, 25 years her senior — somehow seems a lot less reprehensible, less like statutory rape and more like just another break from taboo. “My life has gotten really crazy of late,” she gleefully boasts into her audio-diary early in the film after their first encounter. It becomes easier to accept, and even enjoy, the ensuing sexcapades between Minnie and Monroe amidst an Instagrammish scenescape of bellbottoms and tighty whities. It’s as though one has to displace her mind to a time she hasn’t lived through to entertain the illusion that the sex depicted is consensual, that the teenage girl is really the one calling the shots...
The New York Times likes this movie, too (2):
Minnie Goetze, the 15-year-old heroine of “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” is a would-be cartoonist who, despite her first name, is closer in lusty spirit and scratchy pen to Robert Crumb than to Walt Disney. When, partway through this gutsy, exhilarating movie, she draws her first cartoon, it’s of a bodacious female colossus striding across San Francisco. (snip)The terrific actress Bel Powley was in her early 20s when “Diary” was shot, but looks more like a teenager than most of the generically buffed and prettified adolescents who populate American screens. She has the wide-open look children have before life gets in the way...Ms. Powley looks almost doll-like, Lilliputian, when staring up at Alexander Skarsgard (a perfect worm), who plays Monroe, a mustachioed loafer with pitiful self-improvement plans. He’s Charlotte’s boyfriend when the movie opens, and he’s also sleeping with the very willing, all-too-eager Minnie, although calling him her lover doesn’t seem quite right — but neither does predator.
What you call Monroe, other than an expletive, depends on what you call a man having sex with a 15-year-old girl. “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” takes place in 1976, when the age of consent in California was 18 (it still is), but it unfolds in an anything-goes milieu in which Monroe might be branded more of an opportunist than a creep...
It would be easy to call Minnie a victim, and Monroe the villain, even if that’s not at all how it plays out in the movie. Monroe may not be exactly the light of Minnie’s life, but for much of the story, he is the fire of her loins, to borrow and bend some opening words from Nabokov’s “Lolita”... The novel is life-specific, but what makes Minnie — on the page and now on the screen — greater than any one girl is how she tells her own story in her own soaringly alive voice.
And from another New York Times article on the movie (3), in which the filmmakers are sympathetically cast as being victimized by questions about the glorification of child-rape in the movie:
The question that the women behind “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” had been dreading came during a Q. and A. session at a screening in a Park City, Utah, mall two days after the film’s triumphant premiere at Sundance.“What was your ulterior motive?” a man in the audience asked the director, Marielle Heller. “Were you trying to condemn pedophilia or glorify it?”
Ms. Heller barely let a second flicker by.
“Neither,” she replied. “I had one intention, which was to tell an honest story about a teenage girl and what it feels like to be a teenage girl.”
“Diary” is the tale of Minnie Goetze, a 15-year-old girl living in the druggy, sexually freewheeling San Francisco of the ’70s who has an affair with her mother’s 30-something boyfriend. Far from cleaving to a tired Lolita narrative or making its heroine a victim, the film, which stars Kristen Wiig, Alexander Skarsgard and, as Minnie, the British newcomer Bel Powley, presents a cleareyed picture of Minnie’s spirited discovery of sex, her often raging teenage lust and her fraught journey toward self-discovery. Adapted from an illustrated novel by the writer and artist Phoebe Gloeckner, who based it on her own life, the film left Sundance audiences delighted: “wildly provocative,” “wonderfully amoral,” “honest and magnificent,” critics enthused.
And from Time (4):
...And what makes this movie stand out from the admittedly underdeveloped subgenre of films dealing with young female sexuality is its refreshing candor in relaying that tension. It is presented without judgment, with full agency in the hands of its protagonist and with a nuance rarely achieved among its predecessors.When coverage of the Patty Hearst trial comes on the local news in the Goetz home, it is more than a subtle nod to the time (1976) and place (San Francisco). The family’s debate about whether Hearst was a victim or a willing participant in her own ordeal could just as easily have been about Minnie’s budding sexuality: Is she a victim of what she may someday perceive as trauma? Is she being controlled or is she in control?
The answer, as with many of the trials of adolescence, may rest somewhere in between. Since its warm reception at Sundance, The Diary of a Teenage Girl has been mostly described as an empowering tale of teenage female sexuality. It’s not hard to count the ways in which the film normalizes and even celebrates teenage female sexuality: Minnie makes declarations like “I like sex” and thinks about it incessantly, embodying traits which cinema has historically associated with the teenaged male...
The Salon article quoted from above seems as changeable as the winds in its view of the film. On the one hand, it calls a comment from the author of the original book “a dose of reality,” but on the other, it calls the film “sumptuously escapist”:
Speaking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air on August 13, Phoebe Gloeckner, the author of the autobiographical book upon which the film was based, inserted a dose of reality to the aftermath of such freedom. Of Minnie, she says, “People used to tell me, God, you know, your family is so cool. You can do whatever you want. You can smoke pot at home, you can do this. And I would say, you know, I wish I lived in your house. I would’ve welcomed the chance to not have been allowed to do anything … I wanted to be just held tightly and controlled because it was — everything was so anarchical.” To younger Gen-Xers and Millennials, this anarchy holds its own onscreen appeal.
And the other quote:
But 2015 isn’t 1972 all over again. If it was, films like “Diary” wouldn’t feel so openly, so sumptuously, escapist.
Two points to note:
The first is that, as one of the New York Times reviews mentions, the actress playing the 15 year-old actually looks like she could be that age, unlike the actresses in so many other movies with teen characters. What the Times doesn't say, though, is that it appears the filmmakers deliberately made a movie that would visually appear to be a man in his thirties in a sexual relationship with a fifteen year-old girl - in other words, both resembling pornography and actual pornography, visually-speaking.
And a second, larger point, is about the Church in America. Apparently this movie was released a little while back in the middle of summer, and even the filmmakers and many on the left expected controversy, as a glance through articles on the film's release shows, yet I haven't so far found any response by Christians, despite some different searches I've made. So, where is the outrage, and the speaking out against this film?
Article sources:
1. “The sexy ’70s, re-imagined now: The empowering seduction of “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” a coming-of-age fantasy that couldn’t be set today,” Eileen G'sell. Salon. Link.
2. “Review: In ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl,’ a Hormone Bomb Waiting to Explode,” Manohla Dargis. The N.Y. Times. Link.
3. “The Birds and the Bees as Seen at 15, in ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl,’” Cara Buckley. The N.Y. Times. Link.
4. “'The Diary of a Teenage Girl' Should Be Required Viewing,” Eliza Berman. Time. Link.
Well when you’re a movie-going Christian who wasn’t aware of such a film’s existence :)
Mainstreaming paedophilia. Just flippin’ great. I think that I shall vomit.
Ping.
Wasn’t there a movie many years ago about a Teeny in a New Orleans brothel? It starred Brooke Shields as I recall. She was only about 13 or 14 at the time. Its not a new theme. Its just that the left is obsessed with unnatural sex and perversion. It gets them off. Don’t waste your money.
This article substantiates that sympathy for pedophilia is strong in leftist circles, and that homosexual marriage isn’t the end of their movement.
Agreed. Having felt the momentum of the “marriage equality” movement, they’re back pushing this, as they have in the past. If they can get women to watch this and relate, then women will favor such relationships between men and teen boys.
Sorry, but if Christians gave a half second's notice to every piece of trash Hollyweird vomits out, then we would never have time to actually live as lights shining on a hill.
Giving any time to this pictorial trash is non productive. Besides, it's what the sicko's on the left wanted.
another recruiting movie for the perverts of the casting couch.
Give the Left an inch, and they will make you their personal “B!tch”
And dry toast.
It only becomes wrong if the minor is a girl.
Actually it offers an argument for prosecution of both partys in cases of concentual sex with pubescent minors. Which would certainly discourage such activity as unneeded abortions and single mothers.
Are you thinking of Taxi Driver? It starred Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster. Foster played a young prostitute. I thought the setting was Boston, but it could have been New Orleans.
Yeah, the anything-goes 1970s.
When we had a name for flirtatious 15 year old girls.
“Jailbait.”
Even 18 year old guys avoided them like the plague.
Expect to see more of this kind of filth as the left continues its push to remove all taboos, all vestiges of moral decency.
Bingo!
Guard your children — and your pets.
Why should we call attention to a horrible movie and give it more publicity? I’m sure it’ll be on DVD soon enough.
Opening Weekend
$52,334 (USA) (9 August 2015) (4 Screens)
Gross
$415,492 (USA) (23 August 2015)
$52,334 (USA) (9 August 2015)
Weekend Gross
$170,821 (USA) (23 August 2015) (69 Screens)
$52,334 (USA) (9 August 2015) (4 Screens)
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