Desperately Seeking Sandra

A frequent observation in many of the mostly positive reviews of Young Adult has been confusion over the ending. And it's understandable why [full spoilers ahead].

Mavis (Charlize Theron's character), after returning to her hometown to break up the relationship between her high school boyfriend Buddy and his wife Beth, and drunkenly cursing them out at their baby-naming ceremony, goes to the house of her former classmate Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), who she's been bonding with over their complementary alcoholic/melancholic personalities. He was severely injured from the waist down in a high school gay-bashing incident (a plot point unmentioned in the trailer that really complicates the movie--Patton Oswalt discusses it here), and he and Mavis sleep together. I'm not really sure how to interpret that. But most of the reviewers are with the film up to this point. It's the following scene that throws them. The film ends with Mavis encountering Sandra, Matt's sister, in the kitchen the next morning. Sandra basically tells Mavis to forget what her family and former friends think--she argues that a.) they only seem happy because they're shallow and b.) the reason they don't experience the anxiety and alienation that trouble Mavis is because their lives are pointless--they "might as well be dead."

Trust her--she's a doctor.

Sandra tells Mavis that she matters, that she's somebody. Sandra confesses that whenever she feels bored or fed up, she daydreams about Mavis, wondering what she's doing. As Mavis gets up to return to Minneapolis, Sandra blurts, "take me with you." Mavis smiles sadly and says gently, "No. You're good here."

So, reviewers seem to feel let down because instead of learning to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life or repenting at all, Mavis is told that actually her feelings are justified and that she shouldn't change in any way.

You're on the right track, baby.

I'd argue that this ending actually makes perfect sense if you're coming at from the context of lesbian history and culture. Reviewers sort of get that the movie has something to do with lesbians--what they say is, "Charlize Theron gets all ugly [sic] in this movie, and also mean, just like when she was a murderous lesbian in Monster!" Well, that's halfway there. Women refusing to conform to patriarchal expectations is often interpreted as threateningly emasculating, "unattractive," and not very nice at all.

Charlize Theron's characters in both Monster and Young Adult are unwilling to become passive, pleasant, made-up dolls in order to fit into heterosexual culture, and so they read as "unheterosexual" (D.A. Miller's term found here in reference to Jane Austen) in various ways.

In addition to Charlize Theron, most of the main characters in this film had already taken part in creating other lesbian media. Elizabeth Reaser played gay in one of my favorite movies, Puccini for Beginners, Jill Eikenberry was on Hill Street Blues, Hettienne Park was in The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, and Patrick Wilson was in Running With Scissors (Annette Bening/Kristin Chenoweth ftw!). And if these admittedly insider-y signals don't trigger the lesbian lens in your head to engage, both the director Jason Reitman (with Vera Farmiga's character in Up in the Air) and writer Diablo Cody (in basically every moment of Jennifer's Body) have demonstrated their interest in seriously exploring women's relationships with each other, especially when the desire expressed doesn't fit into easy labels or familiar narratives.

And if the lesbian lens still hasn't been triggered at this point, all the flannel in the movie should do it.

To rattle off a few more key contexts: Mavis lives in Minneapolis, home of the Dykes to Watch Out For. Diablo Cody says the idea for Mavis emerged from considering the kind of woman who gets labeled "emotionally stunted" or "stuck in adolescence"--precisely the terms sexologists used for hundreds of years to characterize lesbian desire. And with Mavis's alcohol binges, Jack Mann-esque pal Matt, and what reviewers call her "psychotic" behavior she is basically a Beebo Brinker of the 21st century.

And it doesn't take a Freudian to figure out what the small fuzzy burden she's always carrying around and neglecting symbolizes.

Finally, Mavis is a ghost writer for a book series whose covers look suspiciously similar to 1990s era Sweet Valley High. A series that made my naive tween self pray every night for a twin, because I had a vaguely understood but very strong sense that what I wanted most was to meet a girl, like me but different, to share clothes, intimate conversation, and my bed. I realize that not all or even most twins do any of this, especially the last one, but you better believe Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield did. And the amount of femslash they've inspired indicates I'm not the only one who was thinking along these lines. They, like Mavis and Sandra, occupy the blurry area around "passionate friendship" that allows you to be incredibly close to another women, including in an erotic sense, without defining it as an inborn sexual orientation.

You can see why I was confused.

Like the lesbian references detailed above, Sandra also lurks around the margins of this movie, rarely coming fully into focus.

Literally. It's almost impossible to find a non-blurry picture of her online.

But she's frequently there. She listens at the doorway when Matt and Mavis talk. She reminds Mavis about the time she made Rice Krispie treats for Mavis's birthday in high school, getting special permission from their school to get into Mavis's locker to hide them as a surprise for her. Sandra was basically the Janis Ian of the 90s [and, to be clear, I do think Janis Ian ends up a lesbian eventually].

"Making a Georgia O'Keefe-style painting of us together does NOT mean I'm obsessed with you!"

Sandra's plotline serves as a counterpoint to Matt's. Both his experience with gay bashing and his sense of himself as possessing a clear, inborn (hetero) sexual orientation accord with the most prevalent mainstream narratives about sexuality. When we think about what it means to be gay, what comes to mind is usually a white man, clearly either masculine or feminine, who has known all his life that he is definitely gay. Many studies (from Havelock Ellis to Dean Hamer) have been carried out to try and prove that there are biological differences that clearly divide the population into either gay or straight [of course they all suffer from the fact that there is no way of judging how gay or straight their test subjects are].

But these studies get suddenly less sure of themselves when it comes to women. All of the sudden it's like, "Uh... women are difficult. Their sexuality is, like, more fluid." Over the course of their liftetimes, women are more likely to experience desire that does not fall along strict gender lines. It is this kind of undefined attraction between women that the film concludes with. Mavis encounters reproductive heterosexuality, clinically strict popular perceptions of gender-defined sexual orientation, and finally finds inspiration from this third possibility, in which the expression of desire between women leads to creativity, insight, and personal growth.

"Oh! It's not that he doesn't want a baby--I don't!"

Again, this narrative of sexuality can be difficult to accept because it doesn't begin with the assumption that gender and orientation are unquestionable self-truths. Instead it does what Cody and Reitman do so well: explores the lives of people who refuse to settle down and stop changing at age thirty. These characters--Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air, Mark Loring in Juno, Nick Naylor in Thank You For Smoking, and now Mavis--are not unequivocally "good" people. Actually, they're bad people a lot of the time. They're also complex, engaging, and critical and that's exactly what makes these movies "adult."