This is a guest post written by Melanie Taylor.
The Fits is a trip into the internal world of an eleven year old girl named Toni who is curiously but tentatively tip-toeing into the mysterious and unfamiliar realm of adolescence. Toni, played by Royalty Hightower, trains in boxing with her brother at the local rec center, but when she spies on a dance team of teenage girls called the Lionesses, who practice next door, she steps out of the familiar confines of boxing to join them. This leads her on a mysterious path to question what’s happening around her.
It’s when the older girls on the dance team begin to have “fits” or what’s referred to as hysteria, that Toni begins to question just how much she wants to fit in. It’s fear mixed with curiosity that drives her. It’s an exploration of a part of the human psyche, told less with words and more with images, a coming-of-age story about friendship, belonging and identity, but with an eerie, occasionally unnerving tone.
Based on the trailer, the film — directed by Anna Rose Holmer, and co-written by Holmer in collaboration with co-writers Saela Davis and Lisa Kjerulff — appears to be about a young girl trying to make it on a dance team, but it’s a much more internal exploration of self-discovery without vocalizing those changes. As a matter of fact, the main character barely speaks throughout the entire film and when she does, other than soft counting or a quiet “yeah” here and there, she doesn’t say much until around the midpoint of the film. Even with the sparse dialog, everything that Toni thinks and feels is conveyed through the use of sounds, images, and long takes.
The older girls on the dance team were seen from the perspective of Toni, catching glimpses of conversations by eavesdropping, peering through cracked doors and around corners, piecing together her own narrative about them. But it’s when the teenage girls begin experiencing unexplainable “fits” that she begins to question her place in this new group and the more she senses the inevitable changes of growing up, scary as it may be. The sound design made use of environmental factors to create tension and release over and over. Sounds frequently shifted from loud jarring eruptions of shouting girls bursting through hallway doors, to sudden silence and the quiet rustling of a shirt. These effects gave the film a Kubrick-esque quality of eeriness and a sense that something isn’t quite right. The jarring noises or slow wiry discordant notes gave the score a spooky horror film vibe at times, but without violence or gore and a more positive mood. But really, the sounds are meant to reflect the internal conflict of growing up and transitioning into a new phase of life.
These changes can be scary and having a group of like-minded peers around can help ease that process, like the Lionesses dance team that Toni joins. Holmer says the film was inspired by watching videos on YouTube of girls who recorded other girls having “fits,” like hysteria, but that went unexplained. The film is not about what happens with the dance team; it’s about the desire to belong without losing your own sense of self. The Fits is about being fit, having “fits,” and wanting to fit in without compromising one’s sense of self and individuality.
Melanie Taylor graduated from CSUN with a degree in screenwriting. She writes for her blog The Feminist Guide to Hollywood and is also a musician who shares her music on soundcloud.com/phantomcreatures. Follow her on Twitter @mellowknee.
I read the linked article, and it didn’t say she saw youtube clips of girls having fits. She says she was inspired by real life incidents, and from what I read elsewhere (which may not be accurate) the more specific inspiration was a spate of fits which took place in the West Bank before youtube even existed.