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You Play The Girlhits shelves Aug. 8.
Why I’m at a Catholic school, I have no idea.
Credit: Everett Collection
They got me to a nunnery.
I have one friend.
She seems a little bewildered, too.
We are both miserable.
We are so miserable.
We go seeFlashdanceover Christmas break.
Then we see it again.
Our moms drive us to the mall without comment, and I’m grateful.
The movie is ourStar Wars.
If my friend and I ever discuss this, I have no recollection of what we say.
It’s not the sort of thing you talk about.
It’s not even the kind of movie you talk about.
There isn’t anything to discuss.
We just commune with it in silence.
My naked longing to see this movie again makes me feel self-conscious.
I know this is a terrible movie.
I know it’s a lie from start to finish.
But it’s a lie I very badly want to believe in.
Because what other lie is there for me to believe inI mean, that I can get really behind?
Puberty is a disturbance.
You change, like a werewolf.
It transmutes the world.
Your body becomes an alien body, a question rather than a statement.
The girl is always burdened with impossible standards.
She is made to pay for the loss of innocence with more lossof love, respect, protection.
In the story, she is given one way out, a single path to validation.
The story says: Don’t get dirty.
Don’t think you could escape the narrative.
To think you could escape the narrative is the definition of crazy.
In the male coming-of-age story, the boy creates himself.
In the female coming-of-age story, the girl is created by forces around her.
In the feminist coming-of-age story, the girl resists the forces and becomes herself.
Movies about teenage girls in edgy, aestheticized peril are everywhere.
The danger comes from inside.
It’s mutative, transgressive.
It made them uncontrollable.
Then she took to the streets."
Maturity and experience were gateways to the most dangerous substance of all: unsupervised freedom.
Jennifer Beals inFlashdanceis not very many years older than we are.
It’s almost like she could be us.
We could never be her.
Jennifer Beals is ideal feminine beauty circa 1983.
She is the standard.
We can bask in the proximal thrill of it all.
Her character’s name is Alexandra Owens, but she goes by Alex.
The boy’s name implies she’s cool and you’re able to trust her.
To say her dancing is flashy does not come close to describing it.
It’s like strip-club kabuki theater staged, costumed, set-designed, and shot for a 1980s music video.
Actually, it’s notlikethat; that is precisely what itis.
She wants to be a ballerina and dreams of training at a prestigious dance conservatory.
It’s part of the story of how she’s not an average girl.
She’s so exceptional that she can start training as a ballerina at the age of eighteen.
Her warehouse is decorated in a kind of high-bordello stylePretty BabymeetsBlade Runner.
She is the antithesis of a lady, a portrait of a non-lady.
She’s a twelve-year-old boy in a young woman’s body.
She is represented not like a girl in a romance so much as like a romantic hero.
She’s Byronic in her tempestuousness and effrontery.
Her appetites are lusty, and she chews with her mouth openI can’t decide which is more rebellious.
Nick’s ex-wife happens to be there, and she approaches their table.
She looks down her nose at Alex and sneers.
This is how she signals to the ex-wife that she’s won.
We think this is amazing.
We think, You tell that stuck-up bitch.
But what sort of gauntlet-throwing one-upmanship is this, really?
What does it mean to me, a girl whose father spends meal times relentlessly correcting her manners?
It looks like freedom, I guess.
Like self-assertion, or punk rebellion, or some kind of corrective power.
Of course, the blissful, naughty transgression can’t last, and worlds will collide.
She desperately needs to believe in a level playing field.
She wants to do it all on her own.
It’s meaningless otherwise.
She wants to be recognized and validated by the establishment in the most punk-rock, antiestablishment way possible.
If not, she’ll take her ball and go home.
We’re fifteen, and we have big, vague dreams.
We need to believe in a level playing field, too.
She’s a teen-girl ubermensch, an ubermadchen, a maniac.
She’s utterly, implausibly, ahistorically free.
Because there are both, but media tends to misrepresent the perks and rarely talks about the drawbacks.
