Lynn Shelton – Bitch Flicks

‘Laggies’: Mentors, Tortoises, Dads, and Growing Up

A Peter Pan syndrome, or in Jungian terms, the “puer aeternus” complex (forever young), is active here for Megan’s character as she fears personal and professional commitment; the term is “puella aeterna” for women. The appeal of this complex is to stay “forever young,” a girl-woman without adult-level commitments. Her complex is strongly activated by her friend Allison’s (Ellie Kemper) bridal shower and large wedding.

This is a guest post by Laura Shamas.

Laggies, a new comedy written by Andrea Seigel and directed by Lynn Shelton, explores how indecision and passivity wreak havoc in the personal life of Megan (played by Keira Knightly), a Seattle woman in her late 20s. Various themes and motifs explored in the film include: the desire to be “adolescent forever” or the appeal of the “puella aeterna” complex; the meaning of animal spirit guides; and complications of father-daughter relationships in terms of female identity. In the growing body of work from talented filmmaker Shelton, this movie’s theme could be categorized under a general umbrella of healing troubled family ties, as seen in her previous films Touchy Feely (2013) and Your Sister’s Sister (2011).

Megan (hilariously portrayed by Keira Knightly) is still part of a circle of friends formed in high school. As 30-ish young adults, they are collectively moving on to marriage, parenthood, and ascending careers. Floundering Megan, who quit grad school therapist training, lives with her serious boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber), and works for her accountant father (Jeff Garlin) by waving signs on the street to advertise his business. Her friends and her mother express impatience with Megan’s inability to “grow up” and commit to a solid direction in life, be it by marrying, getting career counseling, or finding a new interest of any kind.

A Peter Pan syndrome, or in Jungian terms, the “puer aeternus” complex (forever young), is active here for Megan’s character as she fears personal and professional commitment; the term is “puella aeterna” for women. The appeal of this complex is to stay “forever young,” a girl-woman without adult-level commitments. Her complex is strongly activated by her friend Allison’s (Ellie Kemper) bridal shower and large wedding. When boyfriend Anthony proposes to her at the wedding reception, Megan takes a moment to consider things and goes outside, where she catches her father passionately kissing another woman.

Upset Megan, in true “puella” style, flees the wedding without explanation, and drives away alone. In front of a store, teenaged Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz), asks Megan to buy alcohol for her lively group of high school friends. Megan agrees, saying it’s a “rite of passage” since someone once did it for her; Megan ends up spending the rest of the evening drinking with the teenagers outside, and even TPing a house. When she returns home, Megan finds that Anthony, her friends and parents were understandably alarmed by her abrupt disappearance from the wedding reception. However, Megan and Anthony seal their elopement plans and look forward to getting married in the next week or so in Las Vegas.

This first “regression” sequence for Megan, of hanging out with high school kids, leads to more, as Megan eventually fakes attending a business conference for a week, while in reality, hanging out with Annika’s crowd, staying at her house and getting to know Craig (Sam Rockwell), Annika’s charismatic father. Megan poses as Annika’s mom for a conference with a school counselor, trying on the role of “mother.” Megan’s ongoing vocational interest in “healing” is foreshadowed here as she inquires about the credentials needed to work as a school counselor.

The leitmotif of animal spirit guides is present in the film, used to metaphorically probe the undercurrents of character. Anthony learns, while attending a conference, that his animal guide is “Shark,” a motivating image for him in terms of personal/professional growth. But what is Megan’s spiritual animal avatar? During her weeklong “secret residency” at Annika’s house, Megan takes care of a pet tortoise left behind by Annika’s mother, who moved away. Although the pet has feeding issues, Megan gets on the ground with it in the back yard and cures its eating disorder – another sign of her continued interest in the act of healing. Megan declares to Craig that “Tortoise” is her animal spirit guide. At the teenager’s request, Annika and Megan visit estranged mom Bethany (Gretchen Mol), by tracking her down from a return address on checks sent to Craig. Inside Bethany’s apartment, there are tortoise images on the walls, heading downward towards the floor – a symbolic tie to the family Bethany left behind. Megan, in the encounter in Bethany’s apartment, tries to help both mother and daughter connect, a third instance in the film of Megan promoting a healing process.

In the end of the film, Megan falls in love with Craig while engaged to Anthony, without either of the men knowing about each other. She declares herself to be “a Snake,” but one in the act of transformation, shedding skin. Although some have interpreted the film’s ending to be in the “romantic comedy” vein, the animal imagery here signals that it’s more about Megan’s understanding of herself. More than a simple “happily ever after” ending, she comes to terms with who she really is. Her admission of her own “slow pace” (Tortoise) and duplicity in romance (Snake), along with an articulation of a desire to change (her connection to the “snake’s skin”) leads her to break free from the passivity of her “in-between” life and the stereotypical social pressures of her friends, to go for what she really wants. Siegel and Shelton remind us that our “animal” instincts connect to personal identity and self-acceptance.

Father-daughter relationships get a lot of screen time in Laggies. Two daughters, with loving dads, struggle with identity issues and passivity. Ed has always loved Megan unconditionally, cutting her slack when others judged her “laggie” ways harshly. He never “pushed” her towards easy answers as others in the film seem to do. But Megan cuts off all contact from her dad after seeing him kissing another woman. In the film’s third act, Megan admits that she is like her father with her own recent bout of cheating; she confronts Ed about his “cheating” incident, and also listens to his advice about the changing nature of relationships, and the ongoing need to work at maintaining them. She’s also happy that he told her mother the truth about what happened, and her parents are going to work through their relationship issues.

Craig and Annika also have a paired focus in the film. Craig’s initial alarm upon finding the adult Megan hanging out in his daughter’s bedroom highlights his role of “protector.” But Annika is protective of her father, too; she cuts off her friendship with wayward Megan upon learning that she’s engaged to another man while becoming involved with her dad. Annika misses her mother; Megan functions as a surrogate mother-mentor figure to her in a large portion of the film, but facilitates a reconciliation visit between Annika and Bethany.

Laggies investigates how a Peter Pan syndrome might lose its appeal, and what happens, at the quarter-life mark, when one outgrows a circle of former high school friends. The film begins with old footage of Megan and her friends jumping into a fenced off pool on their high school prom night. In Act Three, Megan ends up at Annika’s prom night, and mentors her by urging Annika to “take action” at the dance and disclose her romantic interest in high schooler Junior (Daniel Zovatto) to him. Megan realizes that she must take her own advice. The clear emphasis on the need for women to claim agency in the final moments of Laggies elevates its message beyond a “romantic” ending. Megan regrets her own passivity; she learns, by the end when she finally knocks on Craig’s door, that she’s the one who’s responsible for what happens in her life, and doing something about it.

Laura Shamas is a writer, film consultant, and mythologist. Her newest book is Pop Mythology: Collected Essays. Read more at her website: LauraShamas.com.

‘Laggies’ and the Perils of Success

Lynn Shelton’s best known films, the great ‘Humpday’ and the equally delightful ‘Your Sister’s Sister’ stood out in a similar way. Shelton devised and wrote scripts that became the basis for the actors’ improvisation (with the ‘”‘final draft’ put together in the editing room”)–and made films that seemed fresh and distinct from the usual Hollywood product. Each film had a surprisingly tight structure and was funny in ways that never occured to mainstream filmmakers. As I sat through Shelton’s latest movie, ‘Laggies,’ (which opens this Friday, Oct. 24) I couldn’t help feeling deflated. Shelton’s transformation into a mainstream director is a little like if Bergman had had second thoughts and ended up going on a diet and let Hollywood makeup artists make her unrecognizable.

Years ago, when Ingrid Bergman first went to work in Hollywood (after a successful career in Sweden), she was wary of how American movie studios had changed the appearance of other European actresses once they were under contract. The Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo who appeared in films stateside looked very different from the actresses of the same name who were in European films a few years before. Bergman opted to keep her own eyebrows and resisted pressure to lose weight. She also wore more natural makeup than was the rule for other actresses working in Hollywood at the time. Her toned-down but still radiant look, along with her talent, may be why Bergman’s presence in films connected with audiences: she stood out among the crowd of Max-Factored, Hollywood actresses with deep hollows under sharp cheekbones.

Lynn Shelton’s best known films, the great Humpday and the equally delightful Your Sister’s Sister stood out in a similar way. Shelton devised and wrote scripts that became the basis for the actors’ improvisation (with the ‘“‘final draft’ put together in the editing room”)–and made films that seemed fresh and distinct from the usual Hollywood product. Each film had a surprisingly tight structure and was funny in ways that never occurred to mainstream filmmakers. As I sat through Shelton’s latest movie, Laggies, I couldn’t help feeling deflated. Shelton’s transformation into a mainstream director is a little like if Bergman had had second thoughts and ended up going on a diet and letting Hollywood makeup artists make her unrecognizable.

Laggies has a traditional script (in every respect) by Andrea Seigel and names familiar from the multiplex in the lead roles: Keira Knightley as Megan, an underachieving 20-something, Chloë Grace Moretz as Annika, the high school student she befriends and Sam Rockwell as Annika’s single Dad, Craig, who works as a divorce lawyer.

At the very beginning of the film we see Megan after her own prom hanging out with her best high school girlfriends in terribly framed and shot “home video.” We can barely see their faces: a clever and effective solution to the movie quandary of showing characters over a decade younger than they appear in the rest of the film. Unlike most people, who move on from their high school friends during college or in other parts of young adulthood, Megan is still hanging out with the same clique and we see from the beginning that they have grown apart. During the small, private, bachelorette party for her friend Allison (Ellie Kemper, playing a snide variation of the same character she played in Bridesmaids) we see her friends snip at her for everything from her working for her father, holding a sign pointing to his business, to touching the chest of a huge, tacky, gold-painted statue at the Chinese restaurant where the party takes place. Perpetually irritated Allison asks, “Why would you tweak the nipples? That’s Buddha.” (actually it’s Budai the so-called “laughing Buddha,” but I don’t expect the characters to know the difference).

Megan has a nice-guy, live-in boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber), also a relic from high school, who proposes to her at Allison’s wedding reception. Megan’s reaction when she sees him start to get down on one knee is to gasp and say, “No, no, whoa! Get up!”

Megan first meets Annika outside a liquor store when the teen approaches her with a flimsy story about her and her obviously underage friends that culminates in the question: could Megan buy liquor for them? Megan says, “Someone did this for me when I was your age. It’s like a rite of passage.”

Annika says, “I had a good feeling about you.”

Megan cracks, “That makes one of us.”

That night, Megan hangs out with and gets very drunk with the teens and through a series of contrivances ends up staying at Annika’s home for a week–accompanying her to teen parties, the mall and taking part in a sleepover with Annika’s best friend Misty (Caitlyn Dever from last year’s Short Term 12). Shelton still has a great touch with actors and Knightley here reminds us that the movie in which she first received acclaim, Bend It Like Beckham, was a comedy. In Laggies, she’s at her best the times she gets to use her long skinny body for comic effect, as when she dons headphones to undulate along a busy road while she holds the sign pointing to her father’s business or folds herself against the ground into a turtle-like posture to feed Annika’s pet tortoise.

The film also has a refreshing lack of hysteria about the activities of contemporary, suburban teens. Moretz’s character is a teenager who seems more like the peers I had in high school than the stereotypes that populate most movies. Husky-voiced Annika is an unapologetic “partier” who regularly lies to her father about where she’s going and what she’s doing–and unlike similar girl characters in mainstream films we’re not cued to see her as a sociopath or an alcoholic.

The film also shows empathy for Sam Rockwell’s put-upon Dad. Rockwell has good chemistry with Knightley and a great touch with lines like the one he gets when he first sees Megan in Annika’s room, “Wow, high school students are looking rougher and rougher these days.” His Craig is a mixture of equal parts of love and exasperation he feels toward his daughter with some “embarrassing” Dad behavior thrown in. The film also refrains from completely vilifying Annika’s absentee mother, played briefly and poignantly by Gretchen Mol.

But the film’s central premise of Megan regressing to her high school days falls flat. Knightley’s Megan seems too sensible and grounded to be the kind of screwed-up (but sometimes fun) adult who hangs out with teenagers. And although Rockwell’s character briefly questions Megan’s intentions, no one else does, or comes to the conclusion that many of us would if we saw an adult spending lots of time with a high school student (including sleeping over): that the two are having sex or headed in that direction.

In this film queer people seem not to exist, a disappointment because Shelton is an out bisexual woman who created a complex and memorable title queer woman character (beautifully played by Rosemarie DeWitt) in Your Sister’s Sister and played a small, but memorable role as a queer woman herself in Humpday. Laggies, like the other mainstream American movies that assume everyone is heterosexual, is in danger of seeming outdated, especially compared to recent television shows like Please Like Me and How To Get Away With Murder, which nonchalantly depict every aspect of their queer characters’ lives–and feature them as leads.

The movie intermittently focuses on Megan’s lack of direction (she has dropped out of graduate school, where she was studying to be a therapist), but the ending, like that of a screwball comedy from the 1930s, seems to suggest her whole life is resolved by choosing the right man. This mainstream rom-com directed by Lynn Shelton is better and more nuanced than any other choice at the multiplex, but I still miss the wilder, funnier, earlier Shelton films shown at art houses–and the more complicated lives of the women–and men–at their centers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xep7s36qZL0″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘Touchy Feely’ Explores the Link Between Physical and Emotional Contact

Written by Lady T.

Josh Pais and Rosemarie DeWitt in Touchy Feely

A free-spirited massage therapist develops a powerful aversion to touch, alienating herself from her clients, her boyfriend, and even her own body. Meanwhile, her straitlaced, reserved brother develops an almost miraculous ability to heal jaw pain in the patients of his dental practice.

This is the premise of Touchy Feely, a new film by writer-director Lynn Shelton (Humpday, Your Sister’s Sister). Rosemarie DeWitt plays Abby and Josh Pais plays Scott in a story where sister and brother find themselves abruptly switching roles. Abby becomes isolated from the people around her, and Scott connects with his patients for the first time and finds a new source of energy and inspiration in his life.


Abby examines her hands after developing her aversion to physical contact

Shelton uses extreme close-ups of the human body to show the source of Abby’s fear of contact, focusing on thin, fine hairs and cracks in the skin. Her approach to depicting Scott’s sudden gift for healing is a little different, giving us a montage of grateful patients hugging the awkward dentist after he cures their problems.

As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Abby and Scott, though sharing relatively little screentime together, are two sides of the same coin. Their emotional health and sense of well-being are directly linked to their comfort with physical contact. Abby is emotionally connected to others and at peace with herself when she can make physical connections with people, and cut off and withdrawn when physical contact sends her running into the bathroom.

Sometimes, actual touch isn’t necessary to feel a connection. Inspired by his recent successes at work, Scott meets with Abby’s friend Bronwyn (Allison Janney) to learn about the Japanese art of reiki, where little hand-on-skin contact takes place. Abby, meanwhile, experiments with ecstasy, and while it doesn’t immediately cure her aversion to touch, she experiences the world in a different way, with her senses of sight and smell heightened. Jenny (Ellen Page), Scott’s daughter, is one of the only characters who can put her desire for human contact into words, saying, “Do you ever want to kiss someone so badly that it hurts your skin?”


Scott learns about the practice of reiki from Bronwyn (Allison Janney)

Shelton’s direction is careful, patient, and intimate, lingering on her actors’ faces and bodies, letting their physicality do the talking rather than overwhelming the viewer with dialogue. It’s a wise choice in a film that’s so focused on the relationships the characters have with their bodies and their comfort with physical contact.

What’s missing from Touchy Feely is the motivation. We know

Lady T is a writer with two novels, a screenplay, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at www.theresabasile.com.

2013 Oscar Week: 5 Female-Directed Films That Deserved Oscar Nominations

This article originally appeared on Thought Catalog. You can follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.

In what’s become something of an unfortunate tradition, James Worsdale applauds the work of five female-directed films who the Academy failed to recognize in its allotment of Best Director nominations, opting to, yet again, bestow the honor to five dudes.

Bigelow and her Oscar

This post is the Groundhog Day of blog posts. This post is a post that I didn’t expect to have to write while watching Seth MacFarlane and Emma Stone announce this year’s crop of directors to receive Oscar nominations. This post is a post that I was nearly CERTAIN I wouldn’t have to write for a third year in a row. But, alas, the nominations for the 85th Academy Awards were announced and not a lady to be found in the director’s category.

This is not due to a dearth of films released in 2012 with female directors, there were plenty of those, though obviously still not as many as male-directed films, but an uptick from 2011. It’s also not due to a lack of quality of the films directed by women, as several female directors received multiple accolades by venerable bodies. What is it due to, then?

Sasha Stone, of Awards Daily, in her “Female Trouble: Why Powerful Women Threaten Hollywood” piece from last month says:

Let’s face it, powerful women just freak everybody the fuck out. Everywhere in general, but especially in Hollywood… Sure, no one ever wants to kick up a fuss about anything. Everyone would prefer we stay in our corners and continue to talk about Anne Hathaway’s cooch and Kate and Will’s baby… the last thing we want to talk about is a systemic breakdown in our glitzy annual pageant, as pathways for female filmmakers are blocked at every turn.

To which I have little more to add other than, “HERE HERE!” And with that, here are five female-directed films released in 2012 that deserved Oscar nominations:

Zero Dark Thirty, Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Perhaps the most egregious of omissions, or at least the one that’s garnering the strongest reactions, Bigelow’s absence from the big list, in spite of having been nominated for a Golden Globe, a DGA Award, a BAFTA award, among others, not to mention being the only woman to ever win an Oscar for Best Director, was a shocker. The question of whether the politics of her film were her demise remains, or maybe the Academy opted out of her as a choice because of this year’s presence of the reassuring and uplifting over the darkly complex. But with a nomination in Best Picture, Best Editing, Best Screenplay and a Best Actress nod to boot, you have to wonder why.

Middle of Nowhere, Directed by Ava DuVernay

The complicated characters in DuVernay’s film reflect the confusion and compromise that comes from teetering between two planes, two worlds. These characters are real and DuVernay’s writing gives these gifted actors room to breathe within their roles without the constrictions of stereotype and instead with the liberty of nuance. DuVernay was the first black woman to take home the Best Director honor at Sundance with this film and many thought that the film had legs to make it to the greater award circuit. Though with the positions DuVernay has articulated in the past, she understands and takes pride in this film being a truly independent project and the structural limitations in narratives about people of color being received in those circles.

The Queen of Versailles, Directed by Lauren Greenfield

A documentary that centers around billionaire couple David and Jaqueline Siegel and their family as the crashing of the financial markets leaves them broke and living in an excessively opulent mansion inspired by Versailles sounds sympathetic and relatable right? Well Greenfield’s documentary takes a reprehensible family and actualizes them as real people while still being able to represent them as symbols of the thoughtless decadence of American life. By the film’s end, you don’t like these people, you hate them, in fact, but you recognize them, worry for them, and worry for us.

Take This Waltz, Directed by Sarah Polley

A love triangle with an apprehensive and restless heroine who destroys herself by defining herself through her relationships with men, Polley’s premise may seem hackneyed but it plays out poetically and ends up elating you in blissful confusion. Similarly to Middle of Nowhere, it deals with issues of liminality through a relatable yet distinctive tale. It also really pays homage to the legacy of Leonard Cohen and gives a picturesque view of Montreal. Polley has an Oscar nom already for her writing of Away From Her and her innovative documentary, Stories We Tell, recently shown at Venice, has been getting a lot of great buzz as well.

Your Sister’s Sister, Directed by Lynn Shelton

Shelton is one of the pioneers of the Mumblecore genre, a label many of the directors associated with it, including Judd Apatow, Mark & Jay Duplass, don’t necessarily embrace or, more accurately, don’t necessarily pay attention to. The style is very naturalistic and low-budget. Shelton takes this aesthetic and tells outlandish tales through it in a way that is both hilarious and credible. In this film, Jack, who has fallen into a depression following the death of his brother, takes his friend Iris’s offer to stay in her family’s cabin in the country. Upon his arrival, Iris’s sister Hannah, a lesbian, is also unexpectedly present and nursing a depression herself. A drunken hookup between Jack and Hannah sparks a catharsis of sorts for the three of them, forcing them to confront latent and suppressed emotions. Shelton’s funny and original script in conjunction with her unique style of working with actors makes for a film grounded in verisimilitude but not lacking in entertainment value.

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James Worsdale is a local government employee who lives in Durham, NC. He is a regular contributor on women and film to Canonball.