I don’t care much for movies. In fact, I never have. I don’t have the attention span to sit and stare at a moving picture for more than thirty minutes, nor do I have the desire to cultivate said attention span for that purpose. In the rare event that I do park my ass on a surface long enough to bear the runtime of a film, I’ve probably become so bored or distracted by asinine details that whatever moral or message the movie attempts to push flies right over my head. This is likely because I often enjoy the constituent parts of a movie— writing, cinematography, music, acting— on their own, and thus their combination dulls any effects they would have otherwise expressed more soundly as individuals. Thankfully, this means that good films are made all the more impressive (to me) and thusly achieve the privilege of my permanent devotion. Point in case: 20th Century Women (2016), written and directed by Mike Mills1.
“In 1979 Santa Barbara, Calif., Dorothea Fields is a determined single mother in her mid-50s who is raising her adolescent son, Jamie, at a moment brimming with cultural change and rebellion. Dorothea enlists the help of two younger women— Abbie, a free-spirited punk artist living as a boarder in the Fields' home and Julie, a savvy and provocative teenage neighbor— to help with Jamie's upbringing.” — Google.
I’m biased. So biased. I watched it for the first time during the early summer after my freshman year of high school— the first movie among many, because I had time to waste— and was immediately hooked. It’s the perfect movie for summer, maybe because it’s a California movie. There’s something earthy and organic about the twin togetherness and isolation that each character experiences, and I think it really took a hold of fifteen-year-old Jenna. I might have been lonely, then, even after a semester that finally granted me the friends I probably needed after the autumn being a Real Pariah. At the close of the school year, it hadn’t been enough. This movie (almost) made it so.
In Dorothea I could appreciate my unwillingness to acknowledge my own desperation. In Abbie, I saw a knack for art (I was almost famous on Instagram, at the time). Julie, I’ll admit, was more aspirational, because she was blonde and pretty and also had sex with boys, and these were things I could not relate to. But in Jamie, the boy, I saw a magical kind of resistance to change, because things had been and still were moving fast for me, and, so badly, I wanted them to— for just a minute!— slow down.
Also, the soundtrack was perfect. It combined Great Depression band music with New Wave and punk artists within five seconds of each other. Wow! All of my favorite genres shoved into a single film? Surely, God had delivered it to me via my mother’s Amazon Prime subscription. This must be my movie. I was fresh off a Summer of Love kick— my freshman year obsession— and the disillusionment of the seventies was nothing short of appropriate in matching my admittedly angsty psyche. I was depressed and cooking in the summer heat. Talk about an energy crisis. Talk about malaise.
If you think you haven’t seen 20th Century Women, you’ve still probably seen a clip of an old Chevrolet tailing a skateboarding boy on a Californian road. Suck it up; that’s Dorothea and Jamie.
Wikipedia will do a better job of summarizing production minutia than I can, and I trust that any responsible reader of Lucid & Lurid has both the courage and tenacity to personally click that link and read UP 💜 on the juicy details. The only thing that really matters is that these women are, technically speaking, written by a man. That fact should set off an entire array of red flags, bells, and alarms; we all know what happens when a man writes a woman. But fear not! The 20th century women in question wrote themselves before Mike Mills did; Dorothea is based on Mills’ mother, and Abbie, on his older sister. Julie, too, was based more collectively on the experiences of Mills’ friends.
Thank God for real toads! This levee against reductive writing holds up against the considerable flood of risks (acting like a parable or a manifesto of what a woman should be, I think, is the greatest surge). Being rooted in real women allows Mills to ground his characters to form earth while forgoing over-explanation. The narrative is balanced between brief and meaningful backstories, narrated by Jamie or Dorothea, and scenes of action and inaction in equal measure. They’re dancing or thinking and you’re with them at every moment. You get to watch these people live.
Because the movie is so character driven, most complaints about exclusivity are moot. You know that this movies offers a limited scope of view; in fact, any attempt to make itself larger would only take away from its narrative efficacy, because 20th Century Women doesn’t attempt to be a voice for its years or its culture. All inclusion of era-specific media is, at most, a framing device, or a toy for someone to reference or engage with and then move on from; the energy crisis is not a character. 20th Century Women is a only megaphone for as many mouths as it contains. It does not overstate itself. It does not talk over its limitations, and— personally, I consider this the film’s most important trait— it holds no opinion of its characters. The film extends all responsibility of judgement to the viewer, and this is possible because each person and their flaws are crafted with such empathy that it’s difficult to hold anyone at gunpoint and spit at their feet. I love not being told what to think.
What else can I say? Watch it. It’s late-seventies California and it doesn’t let you forget it. It’s a depression-era daughter grappling with how to rear her malaise-raised son. It’s Annette Bening. It’s birds and birth control and skateboards and artful mentions of Talking Heads. I can’t get over it. Watch it.
I like this guy’s face, by the way. He has those crazy Vincent Gallo eyes.