Lady Bird

The whole family watched 2017 Oscar nominee Lady Bird the other night -- Natalie for the second time. Mom and I loved it, Graham not so much. He was focused on a few specific points in which it was "unrealistic" -- specifically the ages of the actors and acrtresses, stuff like that. Frankly, they seemed pretty young to me, I hadn't even thought about it. He also pointed out that if someone threw themselves out of a car going at highway speeds, as Lady Bird did at the beginning, that they would get more than a cast on a forearm. I had to give him that.

Mary and Graham were discussing it as I was trying to go to bed Wednesday night, which was a moment when I had zero interest in hearing about it, so I closed my door. But I brought it back up at dinner, and the discussion got interesting. Natalie dug in her heels and bemoaned the fact that resistance to personal, intimate narratives like Lady Bird was reflected in the fact that only one female director had ever won an Oscar (she failed to mention that it was Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker that won it, as male a picture as you are likely to see).

I was initially a little annoyed at Natalie's slightly knee-jerky adherence to a somewhat simplistic party line she was learning on campus, but it did make me wonder about some of the stupid stuff I said when I was in college, and it took me back specifically many years to one argument I had with mom around then in which we raised our voices and I was saying basically that Capitalism is Evil and she was saying that Socialism is Evil and I remember even as it was coming out of my mouth I knew it was kinda bs but I said it anyway because I was in the mood and getting in an argument would give me a fine excuse to go out and party that night).

But Natalie's argument has a good deal more validity than the one I was espousing all those many years ago. We do prize the big dramatic stories more than the little personal ones, and to our detriment. We are a long way from the days of Norman Lear, Ordinary People, and On Golden Pond.