Growing Up and Greta Gerwig

A Greta Gerwig Monologue™ could fix me.

“I'm so embarrassed. I'm not a real person yet.” - Frances Ha (2012)

Greta Gerwig gets a lot of flack for participating in and heavily leaning into the “mumblecore” subgenre of independent filmmaking. I don’t see what’s so bad about it – the films tend to revolve around young adults and use naturalistic dialogue, hence the name – but many people tend to look down on it. Personally, I find the genre fascinating, but that could also be due to my own existence as a very introspective 20-something. Those films are exactly how I found Gerwig in the first place, and her career has clearly taken off since then even though she has left the genre behind for now. What always fascinated me about her work, though, was her consistent themes surrounding growing up. I’m going to explore three of those films here, though there are many others that she’s been part of. If you find any of this interesting to explore further, I recommend watching Mistress America (2015). I would have included it here, but I wanted to keep my focus a little more narrow for this.

The films I’m going to look at here are Little Women (2019), Frances Ha (2012), and Lady Bird (2017). All three of them revolve around different stages and layers of growing up. And despite the similar theming, they all have different things to say about it.

Little Women (2019)

I often hear people say, when discussing Little Women, “I always thought I was a Jo, but I turned out to be an Amy when I grew up”. I've heard variations of this, too, where many say they later realized they were Meg, or even Beth (minus the tragic death part, I hope). It is, oddly enough, less often that I hear women admit that they are still a Jo, despite everything. I mean, who wouldn't want to be Jo? A scrappy tomboy who has ambition and craves independence, who loves to learn and tell stories, someone who went against the grain of her society's expectations? She sounds pretty great to me. She's an inspiration to tomboys and queerfolk everywhere. Why not stay like her? The same reason not everyone is an Amy or a Meg or a Beth. We're all different. There's no one way to be a girl, or a woman, or even just a person. If there's anything I've learned from my years-long fascination with that book and the people who inspired it, it's that none of the March sisters were “correct”. They all had different dreams, but they grew up (mostly – sorry, Beth) to be great women in their own right. Not everyone can be a Jo. And not everyone needs to be a Jo. But I am. I always have been. It wasn't until the last couple of years that I started to wonder why. I was a tomboy growing up. I certainly stayed that way, especially as I grew into my queerness. My life's ambition is to be a writer. I mean, that's… that's Jo, right? Well, yes. But that's not all there is to her. She also hates change. It's actually the crux of her character, if you look close enough. And boy, do I relate to that. It’s a struggle sometimes, being someone with great ambitions that’s also afraid to leave their comfort zone.

A while ago, I came across a post that said that Greta Gerwig made a good movie when she adapted Little Women for the screen, but she grossly misunderstood the story. The author of that post didn't elaborate on what they meant, so I'm not entirely sure what exactly I'm disagreeing with, but I do disagree with that initial statement. I’ve read the book myself a large number of times, and I’ve seen most – if not all – major English language adaptations (with the exception of that one from 2018 that was a modern adaptation made by PureFlix. I don’t have time here to get into why Little Women is not as deeply Christian as people think, but safe to say I don’t want it touched by evangelicals). There are many storylines and themes present in the book that could be chosen to focus on. Many adaptations tend to focus on the romance and family aspects. All of that is certainly present in Gerwig’s version, but the thread she chooses to pay more attention to is that of change and growing up. It is something we must all endure, no matter who we are and what time period we come from.

This message is its most clear during Meg's wedding. Jo begs and begs for her sister to not marry John, to run away with her instead so they can continue their adventures forever. Jo has no qualms with John as a person. He seems like a nice fellow, and he's a good husband for Meg. But Jo realizes that this is the first stage of truly growing up: Her eldest sister is getting married. There's also an implication here that Jo, being the second-oldest, will be expected to marry soon as well. And if Jo cannot fathom her sister marrying, it is doubtful she'd easily come to terms with that herself. She does marry Friedrich at the end of the book, but Gerwig takes care to honor Alcott’s original intentions for Jo by making it ambiguous as to whether or not Jo does actually marry him. As Jo leans into her sister's embrace, she whispers “I can’t believe childhood is over”. Meg, ever the comforting one, replies, “It was going to end one way or another. And what a happy end”. Once Meg marries, there is no going back, and more change will come quickly. Jo's childhood is, effectively, over.

This is exemplified as well in Jo's friendship with Laurie, especially in the way Gerwig frames it. She has often described Jo and Laurie as each other's “androgynous other half”. They are two halves of a whole, they are each other's best friend. And they do love each other, even though Jo doesn't reciprocate Laurie's romantic feelings. But after he goes off and marries Amy, nothing can ever be the same. Yes, they are all together again and they can still hang out and live their lives in close proximity, adulthood is nothing like the carefree days of their childhood.

Frances Ha (2012)

Frances Ha was the first Gerwig film I ever saw (thanks, Mom!). My mom had seen it on Netflix sometime while I was in high school and basically said, “Let's watch this, I think you'll like it”. Boy, was she ever right. I've watched it a total of three times, to date. Once in high school, once in college, and once when I was 23. I'll probably watch it again soon. I don't think I quite understood it fully when I was in high school, but I knew I liked it. Something about a story about the difficulties of being a twenty-something with no defined future was appealing. When I rewatched it in college, a little more of it made sense because I was starting to feel that waywardness that is impossible to describe but somehow easy to identify when you see it on a screen. Now that I'm in my mid-20s, even more of it just makes sense. Heaven knows I've never experienced half of what Frances did, but so much of it felt real and relatable.

The Greta Gerwig Monologue™ here is one that sticks with me constantly. I think about it a lot. A lot of the film revolves around how people change and grow at different speeds, and sometimes the people you love the most have to leave you behind. Frances finds herself reeling when her best friend, Sophie, decides to move out of their apartment. After that, they see each other less and less. And before that, the two were attached at the hip. It's pretty clear that Frances doesn't have much otherwise in the way of friends or social relationships. She doesn’t seem to fit in with anyone she interacts with. In fact, it seems like Sophie was the only one who actually understood her quirks and liked her all the more for them. Frances tries to branch out and goes through a lot of ups and downs, making mistakes and growing up all the while. While having dinner with the family of another dancer in her company, Frances once again finds herself a little out of place. She does, however, share this entirely earnest piece of herself with them:

“It’s that thing, when you love someone, and they know it. And they love you, and you know it. But it’s a party. And you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining. And you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes, but not because you’re possessive or it’s precisely sexual. But because that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end and it’s this secret world that exists right there – in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that, um, other dimensions exist all around us but we don’t have the ability to perceive them. That’s what I want, out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess… Love.”

What I love about this moment is that she’s talking about a relationship and what she wants out of it. But she’s also talking about Sophie. And at the end of the movie, she does get that moment with her. Despite the fact that the two of them are in such different places in their lives, they still have each other. They will still be friends, they will still love each other and be each other’s person. But when it comes right down to it, things have changed. They always do.

Lady Bird (2017)

I think if you put Little Women, Frances Ha, and Lady Bird in order of what stage of growing up they represent, Lady Bird would go first. There's a little overlap with Little Women as far as theming goes. While they aren’t totally comparable given the drastic difference in time period that they take place in, it is clear that the transition between childhood and adulthood is a key theme in both.

Unlike Little Women and Frances Ha, which capture more general time periods in a person’s life, Lady Bird occupies a more specific scenario – the moment you start to realize that your parents are people, too. I love the complexities of this film. Lady Bird herself is insufferable and selfish at times, especially as she puts herself before anyone else in her life, but you want to see her succeed and mature. Her father coddles her and her mother is too harsh on her, but somehow Lady Bird manages to learn something from both of them. They all make mistakes, but that’s how growing up works, isn’t it? In the end, there’s no right or wrong, no villain or hero. And those lines at the end of the film are the perfect way to capture the realities of Lady Bird growing up.

“Hey Mom: did you feel emotional the first time that you drove in Sacramento? I did and I wanted to tell you, but we weren’t really talking when it happened. All those bends I’ve known my whole life, and stores, and the whole thing. But I wanted to tell you. I love you. Thank you, I’m... thank you.”

It’s a short scene, really. It’s less than two minutes long. But that whole scene is beautiful. The words, tied together with the intercut shots of Lady Bird and Marion each driving alone down the roads of Sacramento, show the audience how similar and intrinsically tied together the two of them truly are. There is no one without the other. They have grown together, whether they knew it or not. And, Lady Bird making the effort to call her mother despite their fight indicates that she is growing up. She recognizes the sacrifices her mother made to make sure she could be where she was, and she is – finally – able to accept those things gratefully.

Growing up is so multi-faceted that I suppose Gerwig could write films about it forever. Selfishly, perhaps, I hope she does. We never stop growing, even as adults, so there’s plenty more for her to write about. I wonder if she’s got anything in particular up her sleeve about the looming reality of moving across the country to pursue a career that is notoriously difficult to get into… That might be helpful to me. Regardless, she is one of the reasons I love writing monologues, and one of the reasons I feel comfortable writing what I do. Yes, between all the horror content, I do write my own work that is actually quite like mumblecore. In fact, that’s really where I started. And considering mumblecore has its own subgenre for horror films (mumblegore), clearly there’s a place for me somewhere.