Lady Bird: Trauma, Love, Life, the Universe, and Everything

You know, of the movies of 2017, the two that surprised me the most were I, Tonya, on which I will likely write next, and, of course, Lady Bird, the coming of age story directed, written, and loosely based on the life of Greta Gerwig.

Lady Bird, despite what people seem to expect, has nothing to do with Lady Bird Johnson. Instead, it follows Lady Bird McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) as she progresses through her senior year of high school, looking to the future, toward college, and toward some sense of freedom. It’s a story that nearly all of us can relate to, to some extent. A sense of wanderlust, a sense of wanting something bigger and better for ourselves, wanting to at least discover what we want. And all the while trying to figure a bunch of other shit out.

Lady Bird treats its characters and its situations with so much tenderness, showing their flaws and shortcomings just alongside their best aspects. The dialogue is beautifully done, coming across with a genuineness uncommon in film. The way I keep describing this film is as a way better version of Boyhood (come at me, I have Opinions. It’s a boring movie! But please prove me wrong and explain otherwise if you think it’s not, I’m always looking to be convinced otherwise!) But, as always, multiple viewings and me repeatedly listening to the soundtrack – another phenomenal score by the wonderful Jon Brion – have kept this movie bouncing around in my mind.

(I also feel that I should preface this review by saying NO NONE OF THIS RELATES TO MY HOME SITUATION GROWING UP) (my parents were great) (SO DON’T DRAW COMPARISONS BETWEEN ANY OF THE CHARACTERS AND ANY OF MY FAMILY) (just saying!)

This movie made me burst into sobs just as often as it made me laugh out loud. It’s a ride I wasn’t expecting. Several friends of mine have running jokes where any time I mention Brion’s score or it comes up somewhere, they turn to me and ask if I’m okay, largely because of what he is able to say in his scores, and the kind of feelings he’s able to inspire in me. Through his use of repetition in this movie, he links together totally separate parts of the narrative, builds a movie inside the movie using nothing other than his music. I know I sound pretentious as fuck right now, and like, yes, it me, but really. Just give it a listen some time. I spent a long time trying to write a piece on Brion’s music and how it works with the movies it is a part of, which fell victim to writer’s block (despite the fact that these reviews are unedited, stream of consciousness messes of thoughts and feelings and ideas and connections, writers block still happens. Odd.), and I think it’ll still happen some day. But Lady Bird presents some of his greatest work, accentuating every emotional swell with a musical one.

There was something in the music, however, that I couldn’t put my finger on. It communicates a deep sense of longing and almost ennui, sure. It emulates the lightness of first love, and second love, and shitty decisions, and the heaviness of leaving. But it carries this weight throughout its runtime, this sadness, this… dissonance, I guess? Most notably in Summer in Sacramento, when Lady Bird is desperately apologizing to her mother, beating herself up in an attempt to get her mother to talk to her, tearing herself down and doing all of the work her mother has done through the rest of the movie.

Still, back to the beginning. The movie begins with mother and daughter on Lady Bird’s college visits, with the first striking image of the two of them sharing the same bed, facing each other – some of the few moments of peace we see between the two of them, some of the small tendernesses they share. Marion (Laurie Metcalf) brushes away some hair from her daughter’s forehead as they prepare to leave their hotel room. Next, the two of them are wiping away tears after finishing another tape of the audiobook version of The Grapes of Wrath, and the bond that these two share is apparent. As apparent, however, is the strain in their relationship. No sooner is the tape over that the two start disagreeing and fighting again, with Marion digging into Lady Bird, tearing her down, telling her how weak, ineffective, and stupid she is (despite these things not being true, as far as the audience is aware). Not the kind of thing one should be expected to hear from a mother. Behavior that ceases to be discipline or “tough love” and becomes harmful, and even borderline abusive.

If we needed any more evidence that something was wrong with this relationship, we need look no further than Lady Bird literally throwing herself out of the car while it’s in motion and evidently breaking her arm. Lady Bird feels trapped and powerless in her own way, constantly seeking escapism through dreams of the east coast (“where writers live in the woods”) or walking by the expensive houses in town and dreaming about her life there, and so on. Meanwhile, Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith) – in whose office Lady Bird often finds herself after getting herself in trouble one way or another – seems to serve as the movies maternal presence. She guides Lady Bird along, but she doesn’t scream at, berate, and treat Lady Bird with the disdain that her biological mother does. She accepts Lady Bird’s small mistakes, she understands, and she doesn’t judge. She merely tries to listen, work with Lady Bird, and find the best outcome for her.

This movie’s lack of judgement toward its characters is intentional. The image of mother and daughter both crying over Grapes of Wrath is leant just as much weight as the image of Marion yelling “make your own fucking eggs” at her daughter when she expresses her displeasure with them. Each of these characters have their own private lives that we only see tangentially, but that still defines them. Alongside the behavior of Marion at home, we see her giving gifts outside of her job at the psychiatric unit at the hospital, we see her breaking down after trying to present a cold exterior when dropping off Lady Bird at the airport for college, we see Marion and Lady Bird’s father, Larry (Tracy Letts) joking while getting ready in the morning. Underlying all of this though? We see this universally accepted fear of Marion, the “your mother won’t be happy about this” and the “your mother can’t know,” and so on. Marion is consistently discouraging her daughter from shooting higher, while at the same time throwing out platitudes like “I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be” in response to Lady Bird asking if her mother likes her. She can’t even answer that much. She can’t give her daughter the slightest amount of affection.

It’s something Lady Bird winds up doing to the other people in her own life – treating her friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein) with disdain when Julie winds up getting one of the big roles in the musical while Lady Bird got… not much of anything.

Still, this movie captures the feeling of adolescent memories and experiences so clearly. The moment Lady Bird falls in love for the first time, the background begins to fall away, transitioning into the track “LB/Danny,” a lilting and airy track that captures that first spark. I think that Lady Bird actually has a great treatment of like, naïve and young love. The entire awkwardness of it, the uncertainty of it all, etc. I wish I could say that I’m any better at flirting than Lady Bird trying with Danny by describing how one curls hair, but o o p s. When Danny and Lady Bird do share their first kiss, however, I think it captures that moment of taking the plunge – that moment that exists with any new person – so clearly. There is such enormous tension over the entire scene, and then, eventually, that one moment when the tension is broken, when both people, almost naturally, move in for that first kiss. And hell, to this day I still feel like Lady Bird screaming with happiness right afterwards.

But hey, lest we, the viewers, felt that Lady Bird would get to savor one moment of joy or happiness, she is immediately accosted by her mother when arriving home over her room being too dirty, too messy, about Lady Bird arriving too late, etc. She refuses to use Lady Bird’s name, instead deciding to call her Christine, only calling her Lady Bird when it serves her well. She winds up taking out her anger on Lady Bird, yelling at her not only about leaving her room a mess, but also making her father’s loss of a job Lady Bird’s issue, claiming that it’s the fact that Lady Bird “looks like trash” that is making her father unable to get a job. The only insight we get into Marion’s own abusive behaviors are that “her mother was an abusive alcoholic.” It is a key to the cycles of abuse. That Marion, perhaps, has learned to view love a certain way, that only through tearing down will the people that she loves improve themselves. It’s worth noting that Marion does seem to have a great deal of love for Lady Bird. She just seems to think that her behavior is how to express that, or perhaps has just had her view of what love is so severely fucked up by her own experiences that she just thinks that as long as she’s not as abusive as her mother, that what she’s doing is normal.

The movie next cuts to Danny (Lucas Hedges) and Lady Bird in a field, dancing, talking, just generally enjoying being in each other’s space. It feels like a liminal space, a moment where everything just… clicks, where things feel simultaneously so light and yet so present, so connected. Those moments where the world constantly feels like it’s telling us, something is about to happen, and is in the process of happening, but has not happened yet. It’s a hard thing to describe in words – especially for someone like yours truly who lacks a mind’s eye – but these moments are spread around adolescence and young adulthood. The moment when you first fell in love. The moment when your heart was first broken. The first times you travel alone, and the places that you can call home, and the long conversations while just sitting with someone else, listening to the cars driving by with 6am light beginning to creep in through the window.

Once again, though, this theme of Lady Bird’s mother comes up again. She mentions how “my mom is always mad… doesn’t matter if I get home late, she’ll get mad at me anyway.” She explains this away by telling herself, yeah, Marion is hard on her but “she loves me a lot,” as if the abuse that Lady Bird is facing is somehow her own fault. She’s internalized the guilt, the feeling that somehow what is being done to her, the burdens she’s had unfairly placed on her, the hate and anger that she faces, are somehow her own fault, that they are out of love, that this is merely how people show love. I get the impression that if we saw into Marion’s adolescence, we’d see a similar rationale coming from her. Lady Bird even diverts from any talk of her mother as soon as it’s started.

Lady Bird and Danny’s moment in the field, though, made me cry both because of that insight into Lady Bird’s struggles at home, and because of the purity and realism of the love that Danny and Lady Bird share. Your first love is rarely going to be the most intense love, or best love, that you’ll experience, but I think the first time that you wind up sharing such intimate parts of yourself with another human being are so much harder, and so much more… heavy than any time you do so in the future. For the first time, you’re sharing your most personal facets with another person. The things the two of them say sound so, like, young and stupid, but also so sweet and, well, exactly the type of thing you’d expect two 17 year-olds in love to say.

And suddenly, after this, we go back to Lady Bird and her mother shopping in a thrift store, Marion shaming Lady Bird’s decision to go elsewhere for thanksgiving and judging her every movement (“you were dragging your feet, if you’re tired we can sit down”) etc. Every moment is a new type of beratement. She can never do right by her mother. Hell, when she comes down to head out with Danny to thanksgiving, her mother even questions “what’s in that dufflebag?”

And yet – this is immediately followed up by Marion coming into the kitchen, finding Lady Bird, Danny, and several others cooking up some munchies in the microwave (presumably since they were smoking weed together moments before), and just smiling, saying hello, and telling Lady Bird “they missed her at Thanksgiving.” Right after this, Lady Bird is outside smoking and talking with Shelly (Marielle Scott), about how Marion took in Shelly and “has a big heart.” Yet again, we get more evidence that Marion does care right alongside evidence of abusive behavior. Love and abuse, hand in hand.

We move back, right afterwards, to the cast party at a restaurant following the show (an experience that I, as someone who was part of the plays and musicals in high school just like Lady Bird, sympathize with!) and the hijinks that go on there. It’s here, however, that Lady Bird finds Danny making out with another man in the stall, before cutting to Lady Bird and Julie sobbing on top of a car.

But hey! Yet again, more evidence of the insidious abusive behavior of Marion. She constantly enters Lady Bird’s room without knocking – a fact that apparently her father also knows, allowing Lady Bird no expectation of privacy. These facts are subtle – hardly noticeable the first time through but much more prominent the second time around – but absolutely there, quite intentionally.

Regardless, as things continue, we see Lady Bird trying to win the approval of some of the more “popular” kids. Lady Bird first starts flirting with Kyle (Timothée Chalamet) outside her coffee shop – the very definition of a hipster, A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn in one hand (I feel personally attacked, Greta Gerwig!), and also changing her own behavior to win the approval of stereotypical Rich White Popular Cis Girl Jenna (Odeya Rush), going so far as to destroy her relationship with her childhood best friend Julie. It’s pretty obvious that she doesn’t quite feel super comfortable with this crowd – Kyle with such Wise Words as “the government didn’t have to put tracking devices on us, we bought ‘em and put them on ourselves… the cellphones” and Jenna who thinks hanging out in one parking lot is vastly preferable to hanging out in another one.

It’s shortly after this that we hear from Danny, however, who visits Lady Bird’s workplace. Once again, hey! Danny opens with describing Marion as “warm, but scary,” and all Lady Bird has to say in her mother’s defense are the same words that Shelly gave to her earlier – that she “has a big heart,” etc. Not much of a convincing defense, if you ask me. And yet, despite being put down, despite having hatred and anger and the like spewed at her, the “big heart” we wind up seeing is Lady Bird’s. When Danny starts hurting in front of her, worrying about how he’s going to tell his parents etc. about the fact that he is gay, Lady Bird – the person Danny wound up cheating on, for fuck’s sake! – takes him into her arms, trys to reassure him, let him know she’s there. She’s the heart of this movie. The reason so many people see this movie as being tender, light, quirky, etc. is because of the moments it follows its lead. Lady Bird’s life, as we see it, is a relatively relatable senior year for many of us. Which honestly, I think, is why the moments of mistreatment breeze by us so quickly. When Marion brings up that Larry feels hurt by the fact that Lady Bird asks to be dropped off away from her school because he feels she is embarrassed by them, it’s a tactic to make Lady Bird feel bad. She follows it up by once again telling Lady Bird how she’s wasting every opportunity they’ve given her, how she’s worthless and a do-nothing and stupid, etc. Even when Lady Bird asks for “a number” for how much she owes her parents for them raising her, so as to break the shackles she feels around her, her mother follows up by doubting her daughter’s ability to get a job good enough.

Once again, cut to Lady Bird making Decisions! She goes to a house party where she bumps into Kyle, which cuts again to the two of them furiously making out outside a bedroom and Lady Bird saying to him that she hasn’t had sex yet – with him responding, “me neither.” Relevant, because after they do wind up having sex for the first time, he informs Lady Bird that he had had sex… multiple times beforehand. So, misinformed consent, which is uh. Horrible! And wrong! And yet he denies he ever said it, that it ever happened, and that Lady Bird is overreacting. And, for fuck’s sake… even when Marion is trying to calm her daughter down after having an experience that took her sense of agency away regarding her body, she quibbles over the ownership of the sweater worn by Lady Bird.

We go back to a scene of Lady Bird with Sister Joan, being called out on her messing with the Sister’s car (but not being punished for it, with it being recognized by the Sister as a harmless – and funny! – prank. The Sister points out something that comes as a bit of a shock to both the viewer and Lady Bird herself: Lady Bird’s love of Sacramento, the city that Lady Bird has spoken of with such disdain. The thing that makes the Sister think there is love there? The fact Lady Bird describes the town with “such attention,” pointing out that love and attention are, in some ways, the same thing. The amount of attention that we pay to the small nuances and quirks of anything, be it people, or locations, or, hell, movies, are to some extent a sign of how much we love them.

I feel like this review has been a little whip-lashy, switching between descriptions of Marion’s mistreatment of Lady Bird and Lady Bird’s life outside of the home. And hey, the next cut follows this trend, having Marion criticize Lady Bird for eating a second slice of pie, or criticizing the dress Lady Bird loves as being “too pink,” saying that any time that Lady Bird is hurt by what Marion says it’s just her being too sensitive to the “truth.”

I think the scenes that follow immediately are some of the most realistic and relatable in the whole movie, when Lady Bird, finally being fed up by the popular people she spent so long hanging out with, reconciles with Julie, who we find crying on the couch, saying “some people just aren’t built happy, you know?” Another cut to Lady Bird and Julie cutting cheese on the counter and shoving it into their mouths without a care in the world. The two of them go to prom together eventually. They leave, walking to the local bridge, remarking on their imminent separation by the normal progression of things, that things are going to change by necessity, that their friendship that was powerful enough to last through everything and despite everything, is still going to be affected by their college choices. I had these teary goodbyes in my high school, for sure. I’ve had them in undergrad. And frankly? Despite every promise we’ve made, most of these friendships have fizzled out. Most of them are lost to time, and I can’t pretend that I don’t think sometimes about how weird it is to have had such a close, personal, emotionally intimate connection with someone, only for that connection to be lost to time now. It’s the nature of life, sure, but it still exists. And so I think the fact that this moment is able to capture the hope and fear that these moments carry, with the aptly named “Looking Forward” playing in the background.

And hey, again, the same cycle over and over and over. We go from moments of happiness straight back into – you guessed it – Lady Bird’s mother treating her like scum again. Even the way that Lady Bird walked across the stage (“you walked weird across the stage, but you did it!”)

Holy shit, though, this is followed up by a moment that I didn’t really read as horribly as I should have the first time around. When Lady Bird’s mother learns that she applied to Columbia, and was waitlisted there, she completely shuts down. She cuts out Lady Bird, refuses to talk to her for months! Her daughter dared to dream bigger than she wanted her to, and as a result she must be punished, in her mother’s eyes. Lady Bird spends a while continuing to trash herself, telling her mother how much of a bad person she is for dreaming, how she’s stupid and that she probably didn’t deserve to get in anyway, and that she’s a bad person, etc. etc. etc. She’s internalized all the things her mother told her over the years. Abuse takes its toll. It makes you think you’re the bad person. It makes you think you’ve done something to deserve this all. It makes you hate yourself, and it makes you need someone else’s approval to go anywhere. Lady Bird follows up this moment by taking charge of her life, getting her driver’s license, getting a job, etc.

This brings us back to something I discussed before. Marion continues the silent treatment up until Lady Bird’s departure, refusing to even go in the airport with her and see her daughter off. She drives away, claiming that parking is “too expensive.” And then we follow her as we see her stern expression turn to a frown, turning to tears, turning to a desperate search for the departure gates, running through the airport and hoping she’s not too late. Marion does love Lady Bird. That’s not at doubt here. She feels some manner of compassion for her daughter. I think what’s lost is that that’s not incompatible with abuse. Just because Marion loves her daughter and thinks she’s doing what’s best for her, doesn’t mean that what she’s doing isn’t abuse. Especially given what seems to be a cycle of abuse, starting with Marion’s own mother, it’s no surprise that she’s learned that the way to love is through abuse, somehow. That that’s how people normally act. That what she’s doing isn’t abuse, somehow. She’s unaware of what she’s done, but she’s still absolutely responsible for it. I think this movie attempts to build up a story of reconciliation between daughter and mother, but I think that’s not well founded. Lady Bird’s entire journey is trying to escape that abuse, that boot around her neck, make something more of herself, and battle the uncertainty and self-loathing that has been conditioned into her all along, while simultaneously showing that it’s not always clear what the damage is until it’s done or until after the fact.

I didn’t notice this until after the second viewing either, but when Lady Bird’s plane takes off toward New York City, a variation of the song Title Credits plays. It’s a new beginning. A new start to this film. A step forward. Which, hey, ends with Lady Bird getting drunk at a party, making out with some dude before being hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. I wonder if the scene in the hospital, where she looks across the bed and sees what seems to be a mother with an injured child, is meant to mirror her own injuries – not physical, but just as real. She has every right to be in that hospital as much as the child, though her wounds are emotional and mental. She happens upon a church, which she enters, listening to the choir singing, before leaving and calling her parents, leaving them a voicemail meant mainly for her mother, in which she shares something intimate, something personal, before thanking her mother. I think this scene works against much of what the rest of the film has spent establishing – this abusive relationship between mother and daughter, which was not without love but which was with a lot of pain and misunderstanding and outright hurtful behavior. But I have to believe that perhaps what Gerwig was attempting to say here was that we need to accept and move on from our trauma in order to start getting somewhere with it, in order to move forward and live our best lives.

This essay honestly went places I wasn’t exactly expecting it to. It certainly takes the form of a synopsis more than I was expecting it to, but honestly its very structure was interesting to me. This movie hops a lot between showing the hurtful and often abusive behavior of Marion, and juxtaposing it with the love and care and other pieces of Lady Bird’s life. It shows that this kind of abuse isn’t so easily tied down, and that Lady Bird is able to persevere through this all. That she is affected by her experiences but they do not define her, and that ultimately she is able to escape them.

And I think a common misconception is this idea that abuse is about things being horrible all the time, about this overwhelming mistreatment that is ceaseless, that it is perpetrated by monsters, people who are sub-human. But the fact of the matter is – it’s often perpetrated by people who we love! By people who are supposed to – or sometimes do! – love us! This notion – that abuse and love are not mutually exclusive – are so important. As is the fact that much of the behavior in this movie is played off as not that serious by many reviewers, that Marion’s behavior doesn’t throw up red flags, that Lady Bird’s story is simply seen as “growing pains.” This is a coming of age story, sure, but it’s one that grapples with how emotional turmoil and abuse fucks with that process, how it’s escapable but with only great effort, and how the scars and wounds sit with us. There’s a reason that people stick in these situations for so long. It’s because they don’t believe that it is truly abuse, or that they see the good and remember the good moments (callback to my Eternal Sunshine piece!), or that they simply don’t have the strength to extricate themselves.

But hey. If you were looking for carefully crafted Discourse, you’re at the wrong blog. This is a blog for my thoughts, as they happen, in a stream of consciousness format. The fact that my thoughts changed dramatically from my first viewing to my second kind of shocked me, but was at least evidence of how insidious a lot of this is. How it’s hard to spot. How many doubt its existence at all, especially those at the center of it.

Do not get me wrong, however. Lady Bird is a tragic story with a good ending. Lady Bird got out. Will Marion correct her behavior and do better? Maybe. But by the end of the movie, Lady Bird has washed her hands of that. It no longer is relevant to her. She has moved on, created something new, and is pushing forward with new people, new experiences, and a new purpose. It may take her a long time to move past what happened to her, but she is taking the first steps.

This movie is a love letter to her city, sure, and it very clearly captures the nostalgia we have for our hometowns. I can still remember every crevice of my hometown and its nearest cities, no matter how much shit I talk about them sometimes. There’s still my favorite hangout spot, the swingset I used to hang out with at with my best friend in middle school, the first time I fell in love, differing loyalties within friend groups, my experience in high school theater for fuck’s sake! But it also is, or at least it felt like to me, a very objective look at the relationships we have in our lives and whether they are something we should simply accept on the surface or not. Whether we deserve more than we are given, whether this world has bigger things in store for us than we think we’ve earned. We are told that if someone tells us they love us then they probably do. So much of what happens in this movie comes from Lady Bird taking that old adage and believing it, which is not something she should be blamed for. But just because everyone says Marion loves Lady Bird, and just because she does, doesn’t mean she’s not capable of causing great pain, of doing emotionally manipulative and abusive things.

Lady Bird has gone through a lot of shit. She’s been mistreated by a number of people. She’s been emotionally abused by her mother. She’s been gaslit by an ex, with her first sexual experience being the product of a lie and her being taken advantage of. She’s been constantly told she’s not good enough, but constantly looking for something more, striving to achieve something big.

This movie may not be as charming as it seems at first glance, but I think it is by and large a positive movie. It shows someone getting past the lies that have been drilled into their head their entire lives and doing something big in spite of being told they weren’t good enough. It shows someone coming to terms with their own mistreatment, and the things that they did that were wrong, and reconciling with the people in their lives, regardless of whether those people deserved it or not. The fact that this film treats its characters with no judgement leaves that choice to the viewer, to see if they can interpret enough of the signs to make that choice themselves. And yes, Lady Bird is far from perfect. But fuck, that’s not the point! Of course she’s not perfect, but why should she be? She’s just a person. She’s going to fuck up. She’s not going to see stuff that seems so readily apparent to the audience of this film. That’s just how life works. Especially at the center of all of this, at the center of abuse, at the center of adolescence, etc.

Lady Bird is a fantastic film, but not for the reasons I necessarily thought during the first viewing. It’s honest, but it’s far harsher than I gave it credit for, and it addresses personal and insidious issues in a way that is both direct yet also take some digging through. It’s… well, it’s life. It’s a life, with all of the warts that come with that. And it deserves multiple viewings, and honestly many many awards.

Adolescence is tricky. Abuse is tricky. Love, and college, and hate, and friendships, and relationships, and so on and so forth, are tricky. But we push through these and try to be our best selves because, well, what else is there? The best we can do is improve ourselves, not forget the beauty and the chaos of our youth but also not be bound to the pain and the conditioning and the trauma of it either. We must always move forward, always reinvent ourselves, and always demand better of life.