The uplift­ing, trans­for­ma­tive com­ing-of-age cin­e­ma of Gre­ta Gerwig

I was 21 years old when I first saw Lit­tle Women. It was six days after I broke up with my then-girl­friend, and four days after I had rebound sex in a park­ing garage with some­one I met at a par­ty. Dur­ing the film, I real­ized I want­ed to become a woman. Busy week, I suppose.

Okay, that’s not exact­ly true. I did break up with my girl­friend, have rebound sex, and see Lit­tle Women all in the same week, but I wouldn’t make sense of the scary and warm feel­ings that Gerwig’s film roused in me until much lat­er. At the time, there was some­thing deep in my soul which yearned for a life I had not been liv­ing, and Lit­tle Women gave me a taste of that.

Gre­ta Gerwig’s films were per­fect for my younger self to latch onto. I had been ques­tion­ing my gen­der for a long time and felt pret­ty con­fi­dent that I was not a man, but being not-a-man was not the same as being a woman, and I was not ready to make that leap yet. I felt deeply uncom­fort­able with mas­culin­i­ty but had no lan­guage yet to express fem­i­nin­i­ty. I had nev­er been a girl, so how was I sup­posed to become a woman?

Enter Gre­ta. The defin­i­tive chron­i­cler of girl­hood in main­stream Hol­ly­wood, Gerwig’s three solo direc­to­r­i­al out­ings – Lady Bird, Lit­tle Women, and now Bar­bie – are all vari­a­tions on com­ing-of-age sto­ries. Each is about the process of becom­ing a woman, chiefly the nego­ti­a­tions and chal­lenges that entails with your fam­i­ly, with patri­archy, and with your­self. In each film, mem­o­ry plays a crit­i­cal part in nav­i­gat­ing the jour­ney from girl­hood into womanhood.

Lady Bird is less about being a girl than it is about remem­ber­ing what it was like to be one. The post‑9/​11 peri­od set­ting and the film’s ten­den­cy to linger on details out­side of Lady Bird’s point-of-view illus­trate this. Ger­wig uses the cam­era to rein­ter­pret her own expe­ri­ences – the film is set in her home­town, dur­ing the peri­od she was a teenag­er – and as such, the sto­ry reflects how her per­spec­tive has changed with time and matu­ri­ty. Teenage resent­ment ages into under­stand­ing for one’s par­ents as the cam­era leaves Lady Bird behind and set­tles on her moth­er in the car, cry­ing, unable to muster the strength to see her daugh­ter off to col­lege. It’s not quite for­give­ness, but rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. Ger­wig stitch­es these mem­o­ries togeth­er to reveal how they inform the woman Lady Bird becomes. Girl­hood in Lady Bird is a sto­ry refract­ed through the insights of wom­an­hood, enriched and con­tex­tu­al­ized by them.

Lit­tle Women also approach­es girl­hood through the lens of mem­o­ry, this time plac­ing it in direct con­ver­sa­tion with wom­an­hood. The twin time­lines of the film are adjoined through asso­ci­a­tion; a match cut or an object in a room trig­ger­ing a flash­back or for­ward, like walk­ing through your child­hood home and hav­ing mem­o­ries stirred up by the whis­pers of the walls. In one such par­al­lel sequence, Jo March dreams of a Christ­mas morn­ing – per­haps the last Christ­mas the fam­i­ly were togeth­er – tum­bling down the stairs, afraid that her ail­ing sis­ter Beth may be hurt, only to dis­cov­er her alive and well.

A meal is shared with fam­i­ly and friends, shot in com­fort­ing warm tones and soft light­ing. When she awak­ens in the present on a cold win­ter morn­ing, youth­ful fright is replaced by solem­ni­ty as she slow­ly descends the same stairs to join her moth­er in mourn­ing the inevitable – Beth is gone. The two women embrace, the house now grey and sparse, the joy of the fam­i­ly entire­ly absent. The warm adven­tures of bois­ter­ous girl­hood with your sis­ters are rem­i­nisced on from the sober­ing real­i­ty of adult­hood, with its bit­ter com­pro­mis­es and fam­i­lies strained by time, dis­tance, or death.

Gerwig’s first two films are bit­ter­sweet mas­ter­pieces for me. They opened my world up to a life I didn’t know I want­ed to live. I did not read ​‘Lit­tle Women’ as a child. A doc­tor said, ​“It’s a boy!” and so my par­ents and teach­ers assumed I would not have been inter­est­ed in ​‘fem­i­nine’ things. From the moment of birth, it was seem­ing­ly decid­ed for me that a whole world of art and cul­ture and expe­ri­ence would not be of inter­est to me, not out of mal­ice, just as a mat­ter of course. I would have loved that world. I nev­er got to be a girl, but in these two films, I got a win­dow into what that might have been like. Peer­ing through that win­dow changed my life, but it also breaks my heart to think of all the time I lost liv­ing a life some­one else des­ig­nat­ed for me.

It’s com­mon in the trans com­mu­ni­ty to feel loss over the child­hood we nev­er got to have. Many of us spent years not liv­ing our lives before we got the chance to fig­ure it out. Tran­si­tion is thought of as a sec­ond puber­ty by many of us, both lit­er­al­ly – the phys­i­o­log­i­cal changes that hor­mones and surg­eries bring – and sym­bol­i­cal­ly. In this way, it is anoth­er com­ing of age, and a chance to fig­ure out how to be the per­son you want to be. Like any­one attempt­ing to make sense of them­selves, this process is messy and weird and deeply uncool. Tran­si­tion is also a time of reflec­tion and rein­ter­pre­ta­tion. Once you real­ize you are not the gen­der you were told you were, the entire sto­ry of your life becomes tint­ed by that. In that way, it feels nat­ur­al that I find myself and my transness in the ret­ro­spec­tive girl­hood of Gerwig’s first two films. Her third makes this con­nec­tion even more overt.

Bar­bie is about some­one becom­ing a woman who was nev­er a girl. Stereo­typ­i­cal Bar­bie takes the name of her inven­tor Ruth Handler’s daugh­ter when she choos­es to become a human woman at the end of the film, chris­ten­ing her­self ​‘Bar­bara’. This fic­ti­tious Bar­bara didn’t have a child­hood. She was just an idea, a set of traits that appeal to and enforce a shared cul­tur­al con­cep­tion of gen­der. She wasn’t alive until she became a woman. The transness of this nar­ra­tive is evi­dent on its face, but it’s espe­cial­ly fun­ny con­sid­er­ing that a com­mon term in the com­mu­ni­ty to refer to trans women is ​‘doll’. Bar­bie is the sto­ry of a doll becom­ing a woman, lit­er­al­ly and figuratively.

Bar­bara feels a deep yearn­ing in her soul which she can’t explain or sup­press. It dis­tress­es her and – left unat­tend­ed – par­a­lyzes her with thoughts of death. She wish­es she could ignore it. She just wish­es, ​“noth­ing at all would change” because change scares her, but the more she tries to push her feel­ings away, the more they affect her. She has to leave the com­fort zone of her pre­de­ter­mined social role, and in doing so, she finds women whose expe­ri­ences speak to that yearn­ing. She sees her­self in them. Fol­low­ing in their foot­steps – at one point liv­ing through their mem­o­ries – she begins to see her­self as a woman. ​“It’s like I’m a woman already,” she says to her new­found friends as she expe­ri­ences sol­i­dar­i­ty with them.

At the end of her jour­ney, Bar­bara real­izes she doesn’t need anyone’s per­mis­sion – she can be a woman if she wants to be. Giv­en the choice, know­ing the con­se­quences could be grave, she choos­es wom­an­hood. She choos­es to be a woman because return­ing to her old life would keep her trapped in the plas­tic abstrac­tions which kept her from being alive. Wom­an­hood allowed her to be more than just a fan­ta­sy but a human being, flesh and bone, ful­ly and vital­ly alive.

A year after I saw Lit­tle Women for the first time, I came out as a trans woman to my best friend. Every day since I have felt alive in a way I nev­er felt before. I start­ed hor­mones just over two years ago. Wom­an­hood is no longer just a fan­ta­sy, some­thing I yearned for but couldn’t reach. Today I am a woman in New York City (where cul­ture is!). I am a doll who nev­er got to be a girl but became a woman. This Bar­bie is trans, hap­py, and so grate­ful to have Gre­ta Gerwig’s cin­e­ma of young women com­ing into their own at a time in my life when I was just com­ing into mine.