Lady Bird

And White People Living Within Institutional Racism

The first sign of authenticity in “Lady Bird” is within the arguments between the title character (nee Christine McPhereson, played by Saoirse Ronan) and her mother (Oscar nominee Laurie Metcalf). The first piece of evidence is how the two of them hurl barbs at each other – largely daughter to mother – and, while they believably step over each other’s words, each insult they deliver draws a little bit of blood. But gradually, you recognize the love peeking out through the basic, suburban cruelty. It can be measured in percentages. You can flinch at how that percentage of love keeps shifting at 90%, 65%, 79%, 55%. But it’s always primarily love, and each sparring match ends in a draw, the expectation between this grown woman and her almost-grown daughter that they’ll return to each others’ corners, preparing to tap gloves once again.

“Lady Bird” is a superficially-unremarkable story of a girl straining to find her identity as she crawls towards the end of high school. She fumbles around with boys, first an uncertain one (Lucas Hedges) and then later a supremely overconfident one (Timothee Chalamet). There’s a change of hair color, there are wardrobe shifts, and there are yelling matches galore. There’s also a best friend, the delightful Beanie Feldstein. I read a “Lady Bird”-era profile of Feldstein in prison where she claimed she fought insecurity in casting calls by declaring, “They either want the Bean, or they DON’T want the Bean!” and I knew I would like her. Sure enough, in this world of excessive IP mining, I would like if someone took a chance on a streaming-era spinoff with Feldstein returning as Julie Steffans.

This is a period piece, set in the early 00’s. The reasoning for that is clearly specific to writer-director Greta Gerwig, though it doesn’t seem plot driven. Mostly, it comes across in the pop culture, specifically with Dave Matthews Band, even though that’s probably a little late for someone to be listening to “Under The Table And Dreaming”. I know this because when I was young, I committed this particular sin. We were all young once. Get off my back. No I did not own a hacky sack.

This is going to sound like an insult, but I feel as if it’s a compliment: Ronan’s Lady Bird is perfectly ordinary. She considers herself the center of the universe, when in fact she is one of thousands of similar girls in the movie’s reality. Ronan accurately captures the “this can’t be happening to me!” reaction all young people of that age have. It’s impressive work considering the subtle three degrees of remove she has from the material. Firstly, the era is alien to her, and secondly, she’s not actually an American. But more importantly, here she’s playing a high school senior at the age of 22 — at that age, your high school years are behind you, but not so far as for you to recognize how ridiculous and stupid you really were. In it’s self-serious severity, it’s terribly funny work.

I am of two minds regarding “Lady Bird”. It’s a heartfelt, emotionally-authentic movie, filled with snippets of conversations that trail off believably, and characters that stutter over their own fears and insecurities. But one of the reasons I jumped onto this whole movie project was that going to prison shifted my perspective on a lot of indie movie storylines and themes. And, let’s face it, this is some First World stuff, with minimal true conflict. This is about the shaping of a young woman, and as she decides between colleges (and bumps up against her family’s own financial limitations) you sense there are multiple variations of Lady Bird that could emerge from each scenario, a multiverse of options. But that universality feels too problematic for me. And knowing the independent movie marketplace, if either this or Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” were made about Black and brown kids, they would receive minimal attention, get snapped up by a meager distributor without the money for an Oscar campaign, and they’d disappear onto a streaming service, resurfacing for a one-time-only Saturday night screening on BET or something.

That would be another example of what we’d consider institutional and/or structural racism. To many people this seems like an abstract notion, the kind that believers and non-believers alike struggle to prove or disprove. Except that we existed in a structure that was a testament to actual racism. People have debated this on the outside in several ways, some of them informed.

What struck me as fascinating was speaking to white people in prison, many of whom did not believe in the very idea of institutional racism, despite literally living inside an institution built by racism. This stood out in the second prison where I lived, with a staff that was all-white, and a population that was mostly Black and Hispanic. These white men, many of whom had never spent any extended time with minorities, were now in a place surrounded by them, all of them being punished. But somehow, the connection would not be drawn. Everything is a pattern, until it’s an anomaly, and there is no distinction for many of these men. It would help if these white inmates were shown exactly what the problem was with not understanding what was in front of them, not understanding the system that imprisoning them might be harmful in different ways. It would help if they were taught empathy. But that would require these “correctional institutions” to admit their fault. And the biggest myth among people involved in criminal justice is that the criminal justice system “works”.

Next week will be Christmas Week! Happy Holidays!