Previously in this series.
1. You’re at an emotional crossroads. You get in the bath and hold your breath underwater for around 9 seconds. When you break the water’s surface, that’s a turning point, right there.
2. Something humiliating and/or traumatic happens. You decide your best option is to take no action, and instead respond in a numb-faced, non-verbal way.
3. The diner you work in part time requires you to wear timelessly dorky yet hip retro uniforms. If you’re intellectual, yellow is involved. Romantics = pastel pink.
4. Your best friend works at the diner too. She’s fatter than you, and more truthful.
5. There’s ten-pin bowling.
6. The guy you like is kind of passive, with a slightly weak voice. If it’s winter he’s wearing lumberjack plaid. Likelihood of excellent musicianship or sensitive facility with carpentry is very high.
7. Your parental figures are depressed. It would be crass to allude more than obliquely to the fact that this behaviour is all down to something tragic in the back-story.
8. You have pale skin.
9. All cars are second-hand.
10. If sexual things are going to happen, they’ll happen with wallpaper in the background.
11. You know things are getting really sad if the camera goes so wide you become a lone, distant figure in a comically melancholy knitted hat.
12. Your regional hometown is cultureless and poor, but a burnt-out mentor/spiritual antagonist figure living there has a depth of knowledge related to something literary. This will help you, but not much.
13. Conflict will take place near an ironically optimistic neon sign. That’ll be a turning point, right there.
14. This story is about you because you’re inherently interesting. This is apparent from the way you veil your responses to things in a numb-faced, non-verbal way.
15. There’s no way this is just a movie about you getting together with the weak-voiced guy. This story is about a lot more than that, and the soundtrack underscores this.
16. At the end, you forgive your depressed parental figures their flaws, deal (obliquely) with the tragic back-story, throw off your diner uniform (optional), jump in the weak-voiced guy’s second-hand car and speed past the ten-pin bowling place. Sunlight licks your pale skin as you non-verbally, numb-facedly acknowledge the fact that the neon sign you’re driving by is no longer as ironic as it seemed before you came of age. There’s some truth in it, now. The soundtrack underscores this.
17. Somewhere your best friend also smiles. Perhaps her limbically resonant joy broadens to a grin. She looks thinner than before. Her career will eclipse yours in less time than this film will last in theaters.
Number 6, that is spot on my partner (although he has more of a tenor voice than a weak voice. He can be quite deafening when provoked), including the carpentry. Since we were both well past any coming-of-ages when we met, I suppose he was a left over.
I’m attempting to shoehorn Twilight into these and while it doesn’t work all the time, it’s good enough.
I’m doing the same with Stoker, even though Mia Wasikowski’s character doesn’t have a job or any friends in that movie.
#17 is why I love Agnes best of all the witches.
Does this make Perdita our super special coming-of-age heroine or Best Friend Type 2: the marketably edgy one who exists to give snarky pep talks?
18. Your second-hand car is quirky and yellow.
This article really made me realize how much I hate movies.
Clearly the goal is to be the fatter best friend who sees through the numb-faced nonsense and has some common sense.
That’s my modus operandi anyway
I always thought I was the fatter best friend, but according to my bestie, I was always the lead.
1. Bonus points if the camera captures your face underwater while you open your eyes in mute, blinking apathy. Triple word score if you scream underwater too!
California variation: This scene can also take place in a pool.
bonus points for being in a body of water fully clothed, especially if walked into in a “numb-faced, non-verbal” way with no seeming regard for clothed state.
Also, everything about this post essentially applies 100% to Ghost World, right down to your best friend’s career eclipsing yours (oh, Thora Birch), but it remains the only indie coming of age movie I actually like.
Are you delicately wearing cotton underwear with cartoon characters on it, to underscore your innocence and sense of loss/nostalgia?
You’re at a party and you’re: the only sober one/standing alone on the balcony/dressed weirdly/talking to a mysterious stranger
18. Somewhere, somehow, there is a ukulele.
(Promotional still from Look At Them Tams! Now playing in select theatres.)
Tangentially, how does one keep a hat perched on one’s head so precariously? Am I the only one that has tried wearing a hat like that, only to have it fall off and into a puddle??
Hatpins.
I feel like I would stab myself somehow. But that is a very practical answer.
I need hatpins. I didn’t know I needed them until right now.
You always need hatpins, especially if you can’t decide which hat (or boyfriend) you’re going to wear that day. Just close your eyes and jab.
If you watch God Help The Girl, it isn’t quite like that. (There is a “submerge self in tub” scene, though.) The titular Girl looks at all the people who expect her to be their Manic Pixie and says “eff that noise, my life is not about helping you.”
I watched it this weekend with friends and afterwards we were all “wow, that is SO REFRESHING.”
Glad to hear it! My apologies to Stuart Murdoch and Co. for the intemperate snark.
directed by zach braff
*features the Shins on the soundtrack*
I was the Fatter Best Friend for years, until I met a bunch of other Fatter Best Friends and we banded together to wreak havoc. We are unstoppable. If we can bring one more into the fold we can physically join together to make some sort of Mecha version.
I kind of want to be a part of this group. Actually, scratch the “kind of.”
Please make a movie about your life.
I hate myself for liking these movies but goddamnit, I ALWAYS do.
You have an innocent, lovable male friend who is doomed to die in order to further your coming of age.
women in refrigerators! Misandry 🙂
I never could come of age, because while I love baths, I hate submerging my head in the bath. And I certainly would never submerge my head then stare vacantly up through the water at the stained and/or cracked and/or unupdated lighting fixture bedecked ceiling.
Therefore, I’ve never had a turning point.
Perhaps I just need to spend more time around neon signs, instead?
I do that, but only when very dehydrated. Dehydration: it puts you into an indie coming-of-age movie.
Also there’s ennui. There are a lot of parallels. These people should drink some Gatorade.
I refuse to believe anyone opens their eyes underwater. Any water. Doesn’t matter what kind of water. The water is dirty and gross! Why would you want that in your eyes?!? WHAT ABOUT CONTACTS, MOVIES? WHAT. ABOUT. CONTACTS?? signed, Person Who Never Puts Her Face in Any Body of Water Without Some Type of Goggles (except showers but that doesn’t really count and also now that I think about it, not even then, really)
Me too. I have a thing about getting my ears wet, and also baths are for reading and what if my book falls into the water while I’m swanning about down there?
Okay so I watched Damsels in Distress on Netflix the other day and does that count as an Indie Coming of Age movie? It was so bewildering and I feel like if we could talk about it that would be marvellous.
It is how Whit Stillman works. You are never quite sure what just happened or how you feel about it. I don’t think it is coming of age exactly. It is more like come to reality. Maybe. I don’t know. I am still working it out.
This is all before your life becomes directionless in your mid-20s and you move back in with your parents after living in The City for a few years. That guy who was Such A Dork in high school is suddenly looking more appealing. You start hanging out with someone in an inappropriate age range.
“This story is about you because you’re inherently interesting. This is apparent from the way you veil your responses to things in a numb-faced, non-verbal way.”
On the DVD of your life is a deleted scene where you smile after taking a BuzzFeed quiz that determines that you are, indeed, an Introvert.
New Waterford Girl, except the best friend is just as skinny as Moonie and there’s no love interest. Plus, Cathy Moriarty!
“‘You are white, and any people of color you interact with are either wordless extras, tertiary characters. At best, one of them is a friend.”
If there are Indie Coming Of Age movies where this isn’t the case, please let me know since I tend to avoid them for all of these reasons.
Ohhh I’m glad you said it because I thought that immediately and then was like, I feel weird as a WOC saying that :/
But. Yes. UGHHH 🙁 Someone needs to write an indie coming-of-age about a white girl who is full of ennui who meets a WOC and says, “Wow, I’ve never had any friends [of this or that color, but probably of any color]” and then the camera pans to the WOC and it turns out the movie is actually about HER.
ALSO SOMETIMES the woman has one black guy friend who she doesn’t have any tension with, nope, he’s not a part of any of the love geometries because he’s hot and sweet and charming but you know…no.
I would love it if a movie pivoted that way!
I would watch the fuck out of that movie, oh my god <3
Can we pan AWAY from the willowy numb-faced white actresses please my gosh.
I actually just read a review for the movie Girlhood that played at TIFF and it’s a coming of age story about a black girl that is supposed to be really good! Here’s the review: http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/tiff-2014…
The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love comes to mind.
Bend It Like Beckham, maybe?
That is my suggestion too! Ohh, there really should be more than one, yep, there it is….
Oh but don’t you realise that it’s meant to be representative of all people and only white middle-class people can be representative of all people? We don’t want to make it about race you know, this is a movie about being human!
</sarcasm>
You are plain-looking, but in a beautiful way. By which I mean you are obviously conventionally stunning and probably have a modeling contract outside the movie but inside the movie world, everyone seems to have a blind spot. This may be because you wear beanie hats and converse which create a thick fog of plainness.
Also the blue-filter lighting, which supposedly makes you look washed out but actually makes you look charming and fragile.
…And your quirkiness is obvious by the way you stand with your feet apart and wear socks, not tights.
Or by the way in which you turn your feet in when you stand which somehow comes across as charming and feminine and not as needing corrective inserts in your shoes.
Stand like a pigeon (feet= / ) in your cute taobao shoes listening to upbeat-but-somehow-sad 60s pop
“Likelihood of excellent musicianship or sensitive facility with carpentry is very high.”
This is a perfect capsule weather report for certain areas of Philadelphia, especially about 8 years ago.
I’m in this movie! Only I am the burnt out mentor character from no. 12. I’m not sure whether to cry or find some pale, young waitress in a knitted beanie to talk literature with.
YESSS TO ALL OF THIS, especially number one, why are all films so rubbish
Your hometown friend, or a friend of your hometown friend, has a debilitating leg injury because something something can’t escape your past et cetera. While visiting, you ride around on an ancient bicycle found in your family’s garage because something potential freedom yada yada. When the two of you sleep together you leave on the bike afterwards.
You, or someone very near to you, engages in a graphic throw-up scene. Also, crucial things that need to be said by you or to you go unsaid, despite boundless opportunities for saying them. This lack of communication leads to terrible and/or comical misunderstandings which would never happen in real life because in real life, people say “Um, that homeless man we just saw is my dad” or Will you go out with me?” in order to avoid confusion.
Excepting #1, Frances Ha lacks all of these. Plus Greta Gerwig. I loathe most indie movies like this, but Frances shouldn’t be lumped in with them.
“Undateable.”
Agree. I loved Frances Ha. Even more so Noah Baumbach’s work on Madagascar 3. But it’s a good movie.
Pick you up at 7pm.
AGREED.
Agree. Don't make too much of the lumberjacking in this one, though… He's a wee little thing, despite the plaid and the occasional forestry.
Agreed. Loved Frances Ha.
Can we date now?
Juliette Lewis is your nemesis but it turns out she was just joshing you all along and now she’s like the cool aunt you never had.
There is a supporting character from Australia or New Zealand.
Your dad thinks your mom is being too hard on you but he has to go along with her to maintain parenthood, but he secretly gives you beer/the car keys.
(But I did like how in the end Ellen Page dumps the weak-voiced guy because he’s a dirtbag/Nice Guy.)
I love Greta Gerwig and was pleasantly reminded that Adam Brody is the most engaging actor on Earth (maybe hyperbole, possibly) but I didn't understand whether I was supposed to like the characters or loathe them- and I know that's Whit Stilman's schtick but it seemed to *work* in his other films in a way it just didn't in Damsels in Distress. How am I supposed to dislike a character played by Greta Gerwig who starts her own dance craze? But then, how am I supposed to like a character, even one played by Greta Gerwig, who is as heartily punchable as Greta Gerwig's character? I DON'T KNOW HOW TO FEEL TELL ME WHAT I SHOULD FEEL.
Oh, and maybe one point in the film's favour is that it features Dookie from The Wire, playing a character who is not Dookie from The Wire (which can only be in said character's favour, all told), but who, at one point, *line- dances*. 'It's Dookie! Line- dancing!' I thrilled to myself. How can I not like a film that features Dookie line- dancing? And yet… SO bewildering.
You are obsessed with acting out death scenes, and your parental figures are too distant to recognise this as a problem.
Harold & Maude! Nice! That is the best coming of age movie ever.
I would watch the fuck out of that movie, oh my god <3
Can we pan AWAY from the willowy numb-faced white actresses please my gosh.