Charlotte Orzel – Bitch Flicks

Rethinking ‘Say Anything’ and the Film’s Actual Protagonist Diane Court

The problem isn’t that audiences misremember Lloyd Dobler; it’s that they forget about Diane Court. … Not only is Diane an equal player in the action; she’s the film’s protagonist. … While Diane has a clear narrative of growth, Lloyd is a static character.

This guest post written by Charlotte Orzel appears as part of our theme week on Ladies of the 80s. | Spoilers ahead.

In the fall of 2014, an early example of “peak nostalgia” saw a television adaptation of Cameron Crowe’s 1989 rom-com Say Anything announced and then canceled within twenty-four hours at NBC. According to Deadline, the series would have continued where the film left off:

“Set in present day, the Say Anything series picks up ten years later. Lloyd has long since been dumped by Diane and life hasn’t exactly turned out like he thought. But when Diane surprisingly returns home, Lloyd is inspired to ‘dare to be great’ once again, get Diane back and reboot his life.”

This pitch gets straight to the core of the troublesome way Say Anything has been remembered. People think of the film as synonymous with its iconic image of Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) holding a boombox over his head with his heart on his sleeve. Audiences remember Lloyd as the rare romantic lead who approaches the girl he loves with respect, earnestness, and unshakable optimism. They appreciate the way love let Lloyd “dare to be great.”

The problem isn’t that audiences misremember Lloyd Dobler; it’s that they forget about Diane Court.

Even though the two characters share the screen more or less equally, Diane (Ione Skye) is often treated more as a love interest than a romantic lead. Take this example from Total Film’s 50 Best Romantic Comedies:

“The sweet Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) might be an average student, but he aims high when he asks valedictorian Diane Court (Ione Skye) out on a date. Her affluent lifestyle and his humble upbringing make the two a perfect ‘opposites attract’ pair as he helps her overcome her shyness and the ability to drive a stick shift, and she… well, loves him.”

From this summary, and others like it that have been published since the film’s release, you get the picture of a romance that sees Lloyd Dobler as a sweet, earnest slacker, rise to his potential to win the heart of a beautiful, sheltered girl. He teaches her how to live, and she is eventually won by his charm, wit, and ability to raise a boombox over his head for the entire length of “In Your Eyes” (an admittedly impressive five and a half minutes).

What really happens is quite different. Not only is Diane an equal player in the action; she’s the film’s protagonist. While we spend a great deal of time with Lloyd, the movie’s story is structured around Diane’s life. In the summer after graduation, she has much more on her plate than Lloyd, who when asked about what his summer job is, replies, “I want to see you as much as possible before you leave.” Lloyd’s future is uncertain, but he’s not too worried about it, as long as it includes Diane. Diane, on the other hand, is incredibly anxious about what lies ahead — she has been offered a prestigious fellowship to England and her father is being investigated by the IRS — and her growing feelings for Lloyd complicate things considerably. We watch her navigate her fears for the future and reconcile them with Lloyd’s idealism which, despite her crushing sense of responsibility, she finds incredibly appealing. These issues are not merely set dressing for the romance, like many romantic comedies that give their heroines a wisp of a life to differentiate them from one another, like a set of Career Barbies. Her father’s investigation forms a solid B-plot that is frequently left out of retellings.

In the first few minutes we spend with Diane, she gives a valedictory speech which communicates not only the tremendous expectations on her shoulders, but her own ambivalence about life after high school. It becomes immediately apparent that Diane’s fears run far deeper than a kiss from Lloyd can soothe. In a later scene with her father, when she learns that she’s won a competitive fellowship in England, her initial response is to sink to the ground, worrying: “I’ll have to go on a plane” (we later learn that she has been afraid of flying since she was young). Diane is not only brilliant, shy, and beautiful, but desperately afraid of what the future holds.

Meeting Lloyd opens Diane up to the possibilities of life outside the rigor of constant achievement. Their first date is not a swoony, candlelit affair or a twee romp, but a bustling graduation party where they spend little time together, but keep track of each other over the heads of their classmates. Diane, initially asking if it would be “terrible if [she] wanted to go home early,” enjoys herself and talks eagerly, if awkwardly, with the other students, eventually calling her father to tell him that she’ll be home before dawn.

In the car on the way back from the party, the two finally connect in a conversation about how their classmates perceive them. Unlike her father, who constantly and almost unconsciously affirms her, Lloyd listens with a kind ear to Diane’s insecurities and doubts. Lloyd represents more than the potential for romance, which Diane has in the droves of suitors (and their droves of cars) her father fields on the phone. He offers her a chance to be afraid, imperfect, and vulnerable, to reach out and connect genuinely with other people, and, most importantly, to be known in turn.

Rather than holding Lloyd at a distance, Diane brings him into her world, introducing him to her father and showing him around the nursing home where she works. He teaches her to drive stick shift, gently letting her be bad at something for what might be the first time in her life. They share their first kiss. Inseparable after that, they soon have sex, which Diane awkwardly has to explain to her worried father when she doesn’t come home that night. Tentative but sure, she pushes at the boundaries of her old life, neglecting to call her father and unable to reason her way out of her attraction to Lloyd.

Then, with her fellowship in England looming on the horizon and the IRS investigation growing ugly, Diane breaks it off suddenly when Lloyd tells her he loves her. She shares her feelings, but begs him not to “put things on this level.” The seriousness of their relationship seems to only deepen her worries about the murky future. Both parties despair, Lloyd leaving Diane a string of voicemails that she screens anxiously, clearly longing for him. Though she is touched by his attempts to change her mind, including the iconic boombox scene, these gestures are not what eventually move her to return to him. Far from the popular idea of Lloyd as the persistent, charming guy who wins the girl through earnest passion, he doesn’t win her back at all. Instead, she turns to him when she discovers her father is guilty of tax fraud. This revelation not only shatters any hope of her returning to her sheltered life, but reminds her of the value of her relationship with Lloyd, who is as open and honest with her as she is with him.

Confronting her father, she is devastated that he lied to her and shrinks from the idea that he wants to use his illegal gains to “set [her] up so [she] doesn’t have to depend on anybody.” When she goes back to Lloyd, she tells him that she needs him. Lloyd asks, “Are you here because you need someone, or because you need me?” following it up by telling her, “Forget it. I don’t care.” But Diane does. The girl who kept everyone at arm’s length has finally found someone she truly knows and can rely on.

The final scene of the film seals this realization, as Diane embraces the uncertainty of her future in England with Lloyd by taking on her major fear: flying. Diane confronts the doubts surrounding her relationship with Lloyd and her fear of flying by accepting the potential for failure. Like Diane, the ding of the smoking light that signals the most dangerous part of the flight is over reassures us, but doesn’t eliminate our worries about the couple’s fate. We don’t know what their future holds, only that the scariest part is over. The plane could still crash. It’s just more likely that it won’t, and that’s enough.

While Diane has a clear narrative of growth, Lloyd is a static character. The film opens on him declaring his intention to win Diane’s heart, and closes on him having achieved his goal, but he remains earnest, steadfast, and optimistic throughout. Diane’s choices, not his, push the story forward. The movie flirts with remedying his lack of career ambition, having first his guidance counselor and then Diane’s father scorn his refusal to commit to a plan for the future. However, he ultimately concludes that his relationship with Diane is enough to sustain him. The movie cheekily points out his lack of development in a scene when he visits her father in prison, and tells him that he probably should start working on his own goals, but has decided to go to England with Diane instead.

This lack of ambition is what has led some to argue that Lloyd and Diane never would have made it work in the long run. In what may be the most cynical article of all time, Dustin Rowles speculates about how things turned out for the characters, concluding that Lloyd’s slacker attitude would wear on Diane and sooner rather than later, she would have cut him loose to go after a graduate student. The NBC pitch also suggests that a breakup between the two was inevitable. But assuming that Lloyd and Diane would split reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what brought them together in the first place. Lloyd doesn’t win Diane with his wit and laid-back attitude; his honesty and warmth encourage her to open up and make herself vulnerable enough to forge a real connection. Eventually, she chooses him because his unflagging optimism balances out her stymieing fear of the unknown. If we imagine that Lloyd won Diane over with his persistence, it’s easy to imagine her becoming disillusioned later on. If we remember that she chose him, and in doing so, took a step forward in becoming the kind of person she wanted to be, writing off their relationship as misguided becomes much harder.

In light of Diane’s place at the center of the story, why is Lloyd given so much more prominence when we talk about Say Anything?

In the years before and since the movie’s release, John Cusack’s star has burned brighter than Ione Skye’s. Since the two actors have almost an equal amount of screentime, that may make it slightly easier to imagine Cusack as the lead. While one could conceivably argue that Lloyd is a more unique and fully realized (or better acted) character, a close look at Diane suggests that conclusion is unfair. Not only is Diane’s shy, anxious braniac just as uncommon a sight onscreen as Lloyd’s witty, earnest slacker, but Crowe and Skye fill her in with loving detail. Diane is just as complex and interesting a character as Lloyd. However, for the audience of teen romance, imagined by marketing executives as young, female, and heterosexual, the male character is often made the object of desire and attention in both marketing and the film itself. This is particularly true in a genre that often makes its female characters bland and one-dimensional on the assumption that it will allow female viewers to more easily insert themselves into the story. And naturally, when male protagonists are more common and valued more highly than female ones, many viewers are already in the habit of bending over backwards to sympathize with the male perspective. These ways of watching are so ingrained that we may end up imposing them ourselves, even when films like Say Anything offer us a more nuanced alternative.

The NBC series pitch leans on these viewing habits by setting Lloyd up as the main character of the show. He is the one whose “life hasn’t turned out like he thought,” who must “reboot” to regain his old energy and idealism. But the movie worked in the first place by watching Diane grow out of her fear of the future. By undermining the ambiguity of the original ending, the TV pitch ignores the way that accepting both the hope of success and the possibility of failure was an essential resolution for Diane’s character arc. The pitch assumes that Diane was a catalyst for change in Lloyd once before and will be again, even though the movie works precisely the other way around. Say Anything didn’t dare Lloyd to be great. It dared Diane to embrace her greatness, and let us watch as she rose to the challenge.

Charlotte Orzel spent a few formative years scooping popcorn at an independent movie theatre, and in the process fell in love with film, television, and criticism of all kinds. She is a Master’s student in Media Studies at Concordia University in Montreal where she studies new initiatives in film exhibition. She tweets about her interests and adventures in writing and academia at @charlotteorzel.

‘Mockingjay – Part One’: On YA Dystopias, Trauma, and the Smokescreen of the “Serious Movie”

Though we get a sense of District Thirteen’s manipulations in the novel, Katniss savvily negotiates with them, resists their orders, and remains distrustful of their motivations, in contrast to her comparatively slight unease in the film. While these changes leave most of the major plot elements intact, they undermine our sense of Katniss as an intelligent political actor who is connected to and moved by the revolution itself, rather than just her personal stake in the events.

This guest post by Charlotte Orzel appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Mockingjay: Part One, the latest instalment of the massively popular Hunger Games series, begins with a terrified Katniss Everdeen huddled in a corner, muttering frantically to herself in a tearful fit, before being dragged off and sedated. Even for a series whose subject matter is children killing each other for sport, from its opening moments the film presents itself as noticeably darker than its predecessors. Director Francis Lawrence paints a grim portrait as the film explores the consequences wrought by the earlier events of the series, touching on torture, the large-scale destruction of warfare, violent suppression of insurrection, the mechanics of war propaganda, and the trauma the series’ violence has inflicted on its characters. But Mockingjay’s dark trappings mask the way the film foregrounds Katniss’ desperate romantic plight at the expense of both other aspects of her character and coherent dystopian critique. In doing so, Lawrence spins the illusion of a gritty, realistic criticism of war and propaganda headed by an independent, emotionally complex female character without truly providing the substance of either.

In Mockingjay, Katniss is at the centre of a political maelstrom, being urged by District Thirteen, the military leaders of the rebellion, to help create the propaganda material it needs to incite a revolution against the totalitarian Capitol. Katniss is suffering from PTSD and distraught about the capture of Peeta Mellark, her partner and love interest from two previous rounds in the Hunger Games. But when Peeta is forced to broadcast his demands for a ceasefire by the Capitol, Katniss concedes to take on the role of the revolution’s figurehead to ensure his immunity should the rebels win. Desperate to protect him from harm, Katniss must negotiate both District Thirteen’s subtle machinations and the violent retaliation of President Snow as she becomes entangled in the representational politics of a national war.

This is a significant departure from the way these events play out in the source material. In the first half of the novel, Katniss makes several decisions that within Lawrence’s film, are influenced or made for her by the rebel government and her handlers. For instance, the novel opens on Katniss having chosen to return to return to her firebombed home district against the wishes of President Coin’s strategy team. What she witnesses there causes her to react passionately against Peeta’s coerced call for a ceasefire and willingly adopt the role of Mockingjay. She does this not to ensure Peeta’s immunity, but to do what she can to strike back against the President Snow’s regime after the violent Capitol oppression she has witnessed and experienced. After witnessing a strike on the hospital in District Eight, it is Katniss who actively seeks out the cameras to make a speech to inflame the districts against President Snow’s regime. In the film, these events are reframed as ideas conceived by the rebels and their propaganda machine to maneuver Katniss into furthering their cause. Though we get a sense of District Thirteen’s manipulations in the novel, Katniss savvily negotiates with them, resists their orders, and remains distrustful of their motivations, in contrast to her comparatively slight unease in the film. While these changes leave most of the major plot elements intact, they undermine our sense of Katniss as an intelligent political actor who is connected to and moved by the revolution itself, rather than just her personal stake in the events.

But the most important difference from the novel is the absence of Katniss’ voice from Mockingjay. The novel, told in first-person, gives the reader a clear sense of Katniss’ desires and emotional state. Both verbally and cinematically, the film often fails to articulate her feelings about the proceedings, outside a sense of generalized trauma, vague unease about District Thirteen and her mounting concern for Peeta’s well-being. Part of this problem is the reduced role played by Gale Hawthorne, who is not only a love interest to Katniss, but her best friend since childhood. In earlier films and the novels especially, Gale’s function as a character is not only to create romantic conflict, but to also advocate for the necessity of the revolution and articulate the violence enacted by the Capitol, including how it extends beyond the Games to the oppression of the districts. By cutting down his role and changing the content of his conversations with Katniss into arguments about Peeta, Mockingjay squanders a valuable opportunity to allow Katniss to voice her perspective on the political environment she finds herself caught up in. It also seems to do so to up the romantic stakes at the expense of portraying a more nuanced relationship between these characters that includes but is not limited to romantic love. Without allowing Katniss to express her viewpoints on these broader issues, through her relationship with Gale or another character, the film feels directionless except in moments where Peeta’s safety is at risk.

Mockingjay appears to justify this shift in narrative purpose through Peeta’s capture itself. The choice to continuously orient Katniss’s decision-making around Peeta suggest that it is his capture that is the major source of her trauma, the trauma that pulls her attention continuously away from the political scene. As other reviewers have argued, it’s refreshing that Katniss is permitted to show emotionally vulnerability as the heroine of a major action film. But not only does much of Katniss’ trauma stem from issues unrelated to Peeta—growing up in the Capitol’s oppressive society where she lived on the edge of starvation; being subjected to violence and forced to perpetrate it within the Games; witnessing the violent repression of resistance to the regime; the destruction of her home district—these traumatic events are precisely the reasons she should be (and in the book, is) compelled to fight back against the Capitol. It would be remiss not to mention that these aspects of her history and the film’s political themes would have also have benefitted by portraying Katniss as a woman of colour, as she is strongly implied to be in the novels. In this volume of the series, doing so would have drawn our attention to the powerful social and psychological effects of racism, and the way its violences intertwine with capitalism. This choice would have also given more potent, layered meaning to Katniss’ newfound position as the “face of the revolution.” Ignoring these important elements of Katniss’ experience and the way they affect her decisions diminishes the particularity of her pain and the complexity of her character. And framing the progression of events in this way suggests that even if we do see more political action from Katniss in the next film, it will be incited by Peeta’s victimization by the Capitol and not her own experiences of oppression and violence.

To a certain degree, Katniss is also incapacitated by Peeta’s capture in the novel. The key difference, however, is that Katniss’ mounting fears about Peeta’s torture lead to a direct conflict between her personal and political goals: any action she takes to spur on the revolution will be met with physical harm to the boy she has grown to love. This internal struggle makes Katniss feel like a whole person with a range of concerns, but it also generates the kind of narrative momentum that drives effective stories.

Making Peeta’s capture and rescue Mockingjay‘s central concern also considerably deflates the film’s dystopian themes. Mockingjay purports to have something interesting to say about capital, war, propaganda, and trauma, but without Katniss’ perspective on these issues to anchor us, they lack both nuance and coherence. Lawrence draws parallels between the propaganda produced by District Thirteen and the spectacle of the Hunger Games, but while this gives us a broad sense that we should distrust President Coin and understand that war propaganda is bad, it fails to articulate this connection in a meaningful way. The film treats Katniss’ trauma as a cue that the film is dark and serious, while simultaneously using it as an excuse for avoiding a clear stance on its political issues. Unfortunately, these problems prefigure similar issues in the final half of Collins’ book that will likely make their way onscreen in the next film.

The problem with Katniss’ detachment from the political action becomes most acute in the last portion of the film, when the rebels launch a risky mission to rescue Peeta from the Capitol. In an effort to distract the Capitol forces, Katniss speaks directly to President Snow via video feed, telling him she never asked to be in the Games or become the Mockingjay, and that she only wanted to save her sister and Peeta. She begs him to release Peeta, offering to give up her role as figurehead and disappear. Then, conceding that he’s won, she pleads to let her exchange herself for Peeta. These statements seem like fundamental betrayals of the struggle Katniss has been growing into throughout the series, but film makes Katniss’ sincerity disturbingly unclear, especially in light of the ambiguity of her political stance earlier in the film. Is she just telling Snow what she believes he wants to hear, or is she truly so desperate to save Peeta that she will sacrifice the revolution itself for his safety?

No matter which is the case, Snow’s answer – “It’s the things we love most that destroy us.” – comes across as an interpretation of the outcome of Katniss’ efforts that, strangely, the film seems to validate. Pushed by Capitol torture into a distorted reality where Katniss is a dangerous enemy, the star-crossed lovers’ reunion results in an extended, disturbing sequence where Peeta wrestles Katniss to the ground, violently choking her. She escapes the encounter, and in a final sequence, watches him in a psychiatric ward, her reflection imposed over his thrashing body on the glass that separates them, as President Coin announces the successful outcome of the rescue at a political rally. This final, ghostly image of Katniss’ tortured face is a far cry from the expression of defiance that closed Catching Fire.

This sequence might have played differently had Katniss’ efforts to protect Peeta been only part of her focus in Mockingjay: Part One, or if this plot point had only been the midpoint of an adaptation of the entire novel. But as an ending, even to a film that promises a sequel, it seems bizarrely punitive and, frankly, horrifying. The film has spent two hours leading its audience alongside Katniss as she gives all her energy to Peeta’s rescue, only to tell both her and us that not only have her efforts been useless, but her loving sacrifices have only served to weaken her against her enemies. Of course, part of the rationale for this is to set up challenges for Katniss and Peeta to overcome in the next instalment. But the film should be able to offer a narrative experience that stands on its own and can thematically justify its existence, particularly if we’re meant to pay upwards of twelve dollars to see it. Obviously, we are not supposed to agree completely with President Snow, who is essentially the embodiment of pure evil in the film’s universe. But the story’s mixed messages offer us little alternative to conceding his victory.

The success of The Hunger Games’ franchise and its dystopian imitators such as the Divergent series or the CW’s The 100 seems to suggest that Hollywood is catching on to the idea that young audiences are willing to pay to see complex female leads and meatier social criticism. Mockingjay’s marketing implores us to embrace it as a gritty critique of oppression, propaganda, and war, and a feminist blockbuster led by a powerful teenage girl with more on her mind than romance (think about both propaganda-inspired posters and Jennifer Lawrence’s press tour pullquotes about how Katniss has too much on her plate to worry about who her boyfriend is). The problem with Mockingjay is not that either Katniss’ trauma or her love interest make her an uninteresting or weak female character. It’s that the film hypocritically champions its own success as female-driven, serious social critique, while in reality treating both these aspects with little depth or care.

As Mockingjay: Part Two looms on the horizon, we should remember that Hollywood’s willingness to deliver stories packaged to appeal to certain kinds of social consciousness does not mean filmmakers will engage beyond a surface level with the issues they use to sell their films. Teenage girls, as much as any audience, deserve complicated female characters, coherent and responsible social criticism, and well-crafted narratives in their media. As critical-minded viewers, we need to continue to demand and support substantive stories within and outside mainstream Hollywood and continue to identify those movies that only lay trendy glosses over empty promises.

Charlotte Orzel will take KA Applegate over Suzanne Collins any day of the week. Her interests include YA war stories, film exhibition, marriage dramas, and making fun of True Detective. She is a Master’s student in Media Studies at Concordia University in Montreal and tweets about life and film at @histoirienne.