by Trina Robbins
On the evening of Monday, August 3, the iconic Castro Theater in San Francisco’s famous Castro District more resembled a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show than a preview of The Diary of Teenage Girl, a movie adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel. Continue reading
The nationwide release of Marielle Heller’s film version of Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl calls for unique EatDrinkFilms coverage, because of its vital candor and because it is deeply set in San Francisco — it’s an instant addition to the SF movie canon. We’ve gathered four writers, some with direct connections to Gloeckner and to Diary‘s genesis, some with strong connections to grrrl culture and the comics world, and all with passionate ties to, and writerly histories within, The City. Continue reading
by Dodie Bellamy
From the margins I have watched many phases in the development of The Diary of a Teenage Girl. In the late ’90s Phoebe Gloeckner, who was a mainstay in the creative circle I hung out in at that time, signed up for the writing workshop I teach in my living room during the summer. She brought in pages from her actual high school diary, using the workshop as a sort of litmus test, asking if the material was interesting, wondering what she could make of it. I remember being impressed with the intelligence and sensitivity of her journals, thinking, rather jealously, I sound like a total ditz in my own high school journals. When the book came out I was even more impressed by how skillfully Phoebe crafted the winding meanderings of her journal into a compelling narrative. I talked the San Francisco Chronicle into allowing me to review it, hiding the fact that I was a friend of the author. “Minnie is one of the most believable teenage protagonists ever written,” I wrote, “a complicated, contradictory child posing as a woman.” I taught the book in a grad writing seminar at San Francisco State, worried the students were going to rebel at reading an illustrated novel about a teen girl, but they loved it, even the guys. One woman in the class was a middle school teacher, and a student found the book on her desk and all of the girls in her class were reading it and loving it. I was again impressed that Phoebe could manage to produce something embraced by both grad writing students and teen girls.
Two women and one girl: Bel Powley, Phoebe Gloeckner and Minnie from Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
When I heard about the movie, I was hesitant. It would be so easy to screw up the uncompromising complexity of Phoebe’s novel. Happily, for the most part, given this is a film made for a mainstream audience, Marielle Heller has done a wonderful job protecting that complexity. Even though she keeps stepping into danger, Minnie is never portrayed as an agentless victim. Bel Powley is brilliant at steering Minnie towards ruin—and at remaining adorably childlike no matter how raunchy her behavior. Kristen Wiig is also wonderful as Minnie’s mother, evoking compassion while leading a fucked up, driven existence. Around the time the book came out, I met Phoebe’s mother. The first thing she said to me was, “I’m not as bad as Phoebe makes me out to be in her stories.” Watching Wiig’s charismatic performance, I thought—I bet Phoebe’s mother likes this portrayal of herself better. Alexander Skarsgård is totally dreamy—there’s no problem believing Minnie would fall in love with him—and his acting too is superb—I like that he’s portrayed as kind of a mess but not a bad guy. But perhaps somebody skeezier would have been better casting, somebody who would make the audience cringe a bit when he fucks Minnie, rather than fulfilling our collective desire for his acres of luscious naked flesh and boyish charm. I hope the movie is a big hit. It’s a much-needed antidote to all the sexual moralizing that’s being flung around these days.
Portrait by Neil LeDoux
Dodie Bellamy’s latest book is When the Sick Rule the World (via Amazon or Indiebound), from Semiotext(e). Her chapbook Barf Manifesto was named best book of 2009 under 30 pages by Time Out New York. Another chapbook, The Beating of Our Hearts, was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. With Kevin Killian she is editing for Nightboat Books Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997.
Also in this issue, read other reviews about The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Janelle Hessig, Kevin Killian, Lynn Rapoport and Trina Robbins.To learn more about The Diary of a Teenage Girl and its author Phoebe Gloeckner:
by Lynn Rapoport
Past landmarks: The cover page of Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
In 1976, the year in which Marielle Heller sets her portrait of the artist as a young girl — adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner’s semi-autobiographical 2002 graphic novel, The Diary of a Teenage Girl — the spirit of the bicentennial was surely alive somewhere in San Francisco. No one, though, seems to be celebrating in this particular version of the city, which has at its center other landmarks in a life.
It’s a version in which 15-year-old girls can wander in and out of Polk Street fern bars, practicing their “prostitute walk” and propositioning men, doing lines at parties with the adults tasked with their supervision, and the young girl and artist in question, Minnie Goetze (played with precise conviction and adorability by Bel Powley), can convert her sketchpad bedroom fantasies into real-life experience by hitting the bar on two-for-one Tuesday with her mother’s 35-year-old boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård). “Oh Monroe,” Minnie dreamily soliloquizes after getting absent-mindedly felt up by him on the couch late one night. “Pitter-pat. You touched my tit. How was that?”
Two-for-one: Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård) and Minnie (Bel Powley) hit the bar in The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
And with that, for better and probably also for worse, something else gets converted: The skin-crawling sensation of watching a quasi-incestuous interlude lit by late-night television recedes somewhat, as Heller steadily diverts our attention to Minnie’s droll post-grope introspections and the thing that Heller is more interested in: a young girl’s rash, sometimes fumbling, occasionally repulsed explorations of her own sexuality, both its power over those around her and its more visceral dividends.
A post-virginity Minnie (Bel Powley) in The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
The film’s opening shot telegraphs this through line: trailing Minnie’s ass during an exuberant walk home through Golden Gate Park as she replays in wonderment the afternoon’s events, announcing to herself in voice-over, still astounded: “I had sex today. Ho-ly shit.” Watching Minnie eye a cluster of boys passing, a braless jogger, an amorous couple on a picnic blanket, we see the world as she does, hazy with pheromones and potential.
Bachelor sad: Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård) beds Minnie (Bel Powley) in his Scottie Ferguson-like apartment in The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
At that moment, anyway. Her take on the world is circumstantial, emotions flashing by in passage, like the images in one of the X-rated flipbooks she constructs. Later she’s raging in the bathtub against Monroe’s inconstancy; sharing heartfelt imaginary confidences with Twisted Sisters comic artist Aline Kominsky (R. Crumb unapologetically sidelined here); silently digesting bad advice doled out by her party-girl mother, Charlotte (Kristen Wiig); or wistfully remarking, “I wish I knew someone who’s happy…” Later still, Heller captures the exact moment an infatuation dies, draining away out of Minnie’s incredibly expressive eyes.
An archive lives: Bel Powley as Minnie in the film version The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and panels from Phoebe Gloeckner’s book.
Lucky for us that she records her impressions first on a series of tape cassettes, her narration to some barely outlined future self and a big-boned cat on the bed standing in for the three-ring binder of Gloeckner’s novel, stuffed with loose-leaf, crawling with proto-comic sketches that in the film creep, animated, into the frame during daydreams and acid trips. In its immediacy, the film fends off any sense of the nostalgia, regret, or decades-old embarrassment that such an archive might churn up someday. Instead, from a remove, watching an artful retelling, we can see that Minnie is right, in her adolescent certainty, that—acute dangers of discovery notwithstanding—all this will still matter when it surfaces in a box under a bed in some future, grown-up version of the city in which she has adventured.
Minnie (Bel Powley) puts pen to paper in The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
Getting better: Minnie (Bel Powley) at the beach in The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
Fittingly, Heller’s film is tidier than Gloeckner’s chaotic, worrying, ambiguous recounting—indicative, maybe, of the narrative challenges of such a sprawling, inconsistent text as a diary, or of market forces, but also, maybe, a reflection of Heller’s own solicitous wishes for Minnie. If you fell for her on the pages that her grown, incarnate counterpart inked and wrote, having somehow made it to adulthood, you might want to give her a story that offered answers to at least a few of her poignant, hilarious, stream-of-consciousness queries about life, love, sex, and Aline Kominsky.
No doubt Minnie’s version of the city still sometimes manifests today, though the fern bars are ironic, the bouncers warier, the rehabbed Victorians full of helicopter parents reading magazine articles about their freaked-out, nature-deprived, micromanaged children. It’s hard to imagine a Minnie set loose upon the city long enough to gather material for a one-sheet comic, let alone a full-length Diary, but the closing words of Heller’s film—“This is for all the girls when they have grown”—imply she’s certain they’re out there still.
Credit: Portrait of Lynn Rapoport by Michael McConnell.
Lynn Rapoport has written about film for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Fandor, SF360, and io9.
Also in this issue, read other reviews about The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Dodie Bellamy, Janelle Hessig, Kevin Killian, and Trina Robbins.
To learn more about The Diary of a Teenage Girl and its author Phoebe Gloeckner:
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