Lit­tle Women: the tri­als of girl­hood in con­tem­po­rary cinema

There she is: her blonde hair sway­ing in the breeze as she turns – in slow motion nat­u­ral­ly – to glance at you over her shoul­der, hazy sun­light danc­ing across her serene face. And there is her bed­room, filled with those mys­te­ri­ous emblems of girl­hood: a hair­brush, a rib­bon, a tube of lip­stick, a flash of frills, a stack of records, a poster of some pop star. There is noth­ing, it seems, quite so fas­ci­nat­ing as a girl on screen.

You’ve seen these images before – maybe at the cin­e­ma, or per­haps in a care­ful­ly curat­ed selec­tion of aes­thet­ic film stills on Twit­ter or Pin­ter­est. It could have even been a decade ago when images from films such as The Vir­gin Sui­cides, Marie Antoinette, and Loli­ta filled our Tum­blr feeds.

Cul­tur­al­ly, girl­hood ​‘lore’ goes back a long way – yes, even fur­ther back than the days of Tum­blr. As Claire Marie Healy, founder of research stu­dio Girl­hood Stud­ies, notes in her new book on the sub­ject, por­traits of young girls line the halls of every art gallery – Sir John Everett Millais’s por­trait of Ophe­lia is a par­tic­u­lar­ly influ­en­tial exam­ple of how a long tra­di­tion of art his­to­ry shapes our cur­rent cul­tur­al under­stand­ing of what girl­hood looks like. More recent­ly, films by direc­tors includ­ing Sofia Cop­po­la and Gre­ta Ger­wig have added to our shared visu­al lex­i­con of girl­hood imagery.

But this year, it seems our cul­tur­al enquiry into the nature of being a girl has reached a new high. Social media’s insa­tiable obses­sion with the aes­thet­ics of girl­hood rages on in the form of microtrends cre­at­ed large­ly by and for an audi­ence of Gen Z and Mil­len­ni­al young women across Insta­gram and Tik­Tok. Since the emer­gence of the ​‘Hot Girl Sum­mer’ trend in 2019 thanks to Megan Thee Stallion’s song of the same name, we’ve seen fer­al girl sum­mer, hot girl walks, straw­ber­ry girl, toma­to girl, girl math, girl din­ner, snail girls, lazy girl jobs and count­less oth­ers pop­ping up on our feeds.

This coin­cides with Tay­lor Swift’s ongo­ing re-record­ing project that sees her revis­it­ing the albums she record­ed in her teens and ear­ly twen­ties, along­side the rise of young female singers includ­ing Olivia Rodri­go and Maisie Peters whose music serves as an explo­ration of the state of girlhood.

Mean­while, for girls in the real world, the social and polit­i­cal land­scape feels increas­ing­ly omi­nous and vio­lent. From a broad cul­tur­al per­spec­tive, influ­encers like Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines spread a mes­sage of tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty that encour­ages misog­y­ny as well as the hyper­sex­u­al­i­sa­tion of teen girls. Incel cul­ture is on the rise, and the head­lines are filled with hor­ror sto­ries. Ear­li­er this year in Lon­don, a teenage girl was stabbed to death in Croy­don defend­ing a friend who was alleged­ly attacked after refus­ing a bou­quet of flow­ers from a male class­mate. An ex-police offi­cer was recent­ly charged with coerc­ing hun­dreds of young girls into send­ing him explic­it images. In the recent accu­sa­tions of rape and sex­u­al abuse lev­eled at Rus­sell Brand, a woman who was just 16 at the time claimed the come­di­an called her his ​“lit­tle dol­ly”. A 2017 study showed that a fifth of teenage girls in the UK have expe­ri­enced domes­tic abuse in a roman­tic relationship.

This tur­bu­lent cul­tur­al land­scape – one that sees us embrac­ing height­ened girl­hood aes­thet­ics pre­vi­ous­ly dis­missed as friv­o­lous while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­fronting deeply unset­tling cul­tur­al waves of misog­y­ny – is the con­text in which a new batch of girl­hood films reach­es our screens.

The com­ing-of-age sto­ry that fol­lows a girl on her path to adult­hood is noth­ing new – in fact, it has a long tra­di­tion in sto­ry­telling. Kel­ly Fre­mon Craig’s 2023 com­e­dy Are You There God? It’s Me, Mar­garet is a fair­ly straight adap­ta­tion of Judy Blume’s icon­ic 1970s tale of tween­dom in sub­ur­ban Amer­i­ca. Mar­garet, the eleven-year-old hero­ine of the sto­ry, is des­per­ate to reach wom­an­hood and every­thing it entails – or at least every­thing she thinks it entails – boyfriends, nice clothes, make-up, breasts, and, of course, peri­ods. In many ways, the nov­el set the stan­dard for the female com­ing-of-nar­ra­tive sto­ry by cap­tur­ing the awk­ward­ness and yearn­ing that comes with grow­ing up into a woman, with its influ­ence extend­ing to Sam­mi Cohen’s recent pre-teen com­e­dy You Are So Not Invit­ed To My Bat Mitz­vah (also adapt­ed into a film from a YA novel).

Sofia Cop­po­la is no stranger to the sub­ject of girl­hood, with her films fre­quent­ly cit­ed as key texts. Her lat­est, Priscil­la, turns the lens on Elvis and Priscil­la Pres­ley, one of pop culture’s most icon­ic cou­ples, offer­ing up Priscilla’s per­spec­tive on events. It is also a com­ing-of-age tale – Coppola’s film ven­tures into the dark­er side of girl­hood, explor­ing not only how it feels to be a girl yearn­ing for imag­ined wom­an­hood, but how men are prone to project wom­an­hood onto them prematurely.

Priscilla’s grand fan­tasies about life as a glam­orous girl­friend of the biggest pop star in the world are – for any­one who has ever been a teenage girl – intense­ly relat­able. She plays his records, cuts out his pic­tures from mag­a­zines and doo­dles his name in her note­books. This inno­cent fan­ta­sis­ing is a rite of pas­sage for every teen, but when Priscil­la begins a rela­tion­ship with Elvis and moves to Grace­land, she dis­cov­ers that the fairy­tale romance she had imag­ined doesn’t exist. Instead, Elvis proves to be con­trol­ling and emo­tion­al­ly abusive.

A num­ber of oth­er films delve into this dark­ness through a more con­tem­po­rary lens, cap­tur­ing the implic­it dan­ger of being a girl in a world where being objec­ti­fied, dis­missed and hyper­sex­u­alised by men is the norm. Mol­ly Man­ning Walker’s fea­ture debut, How To Have Sex, sets the scene in Malia where three 16-year-old girls are on a hedo­nis­tic teen vaca­tion, while Kit­ty Green’s The Roy­al Hotel sees two Cana­di­an girls take up bar work in a remote, male-dom­i­nat­ed min­ing town on the Aus­tralian out­back. Final­ly, based on the viral New York­er short sto­ry of the same name, Susan­na Fogel’s Cat Per­son plays with genre to depict the con­fu­sion and para­noia of sex and dat­ing as a het­ero­sex­u­al young woman today.

Sim­i­lar­ly to Priscil­la, the teen capac­i­ty for fan­ta­sy is once again explored in How To How Sex. Female lead Tara imag­ines a pic­ture-per­fect hol­i­day romance, only to find her­self in increas­ing­ly dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions which ulti­mate­ly result in tragedy. In The Roy­al Hotel, what begin as omi­nous misog­y­nis­tic under­tones and microag­gres­sions from bar patrons ulti­mate­ly devel­op into out­right expres­sions of sex­u­al vio­lence against the girls.

While Priscilla’s fan­ta­sy life con­sists of wild day­dreams about her pop star boyfriend, in the con­tem­po­rary Cat Per­son, the 20-year-old Margot’s fan­ta­sy life is filled with images inspired by the films she’s seen and the head­lines in the news. At one moment, she sees a flash of her new boyfriend as the per­fect man – a tall, dark and hand­some rom-com lead. The next moment, she imag­ines the graph­ic image of a girl in chains behind a closed door in his flat. Ulti­mate­ly, he is nei­ther a ser­i­al killer nor a roman­tic hero – just a bad kiss­er and a bit of a loser.

Vio­lence is by no means a new trope in movies cen­tred on teenage girls. The likes of Heathers, Mean Girls, Jaw­break­er and, more recent­ly Netflix’s Do Revenge dare to paint teen girls as harsh­er, cru­eller, stranger beings than cul­ture tra­di­tion­al­ly allowed them to be. This year Emma Seligman’s Bot­toms fol­lowed in this tra­di­tion, set in an Amer­i­can high school where two queer girls start a fight club as a ruse to hook up with hot cheerleaders.

Accord­ing to Healy, this new trend of dark­er female-led films is a nat­ur­al response to the past few decades. ​“There is a recent his­to­ry of so much sex­u­al­iza­tion of teenage girls… and there is a wave of film­mak­ing, espe­cial­ly from women film­mak­ers who grew up in the 90s or the naugh­ties [that explores] this hyper-sex­u­al­iza­tion,” says Healy. ​“I do think that it is a reac­tion to grow­ing up with quite shal­low con­tent around girl­hood, where 28-year-olds are play­ing 15-year-olds. And it doesn’t sur­prise me that there is this inter­est in this because we’re always try­ing to fig­ure out about ourselves.”

On the whole, films this year are inter­est­ed not only in pre­sent­ing the image of girl­hood that we already know but in giv­ing a tru­ly fem­i­nine per­spec­tive – one from with­in the state of girl­hood itself. Per­haps this is why there is anoth­er ​‘type’ of girl­hood film emerg­ing this year – the type that offers a more exper­i­men­tal, meta-explo­ration of girl­hood altogether.

In Bar­bie, the biggest film of the year, Gre­ta Ger­wig takes on the doll that became syn­ony­mous with girl­hood for gen­er­a­tions of young women with a unique­ly post­mod­ern self-aware­ness, giv­ing the ​‘ide­al woman’ her own com­ing-of-age jour­ney. In Yor­gos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, based on the 1992 nov­el by Alas­dair Gray, a Franken­stein-like exper­i­ment sees a dead woman, Bel­la, re-awak­ened in her adult body with her own unborn baby’s brain implant­ed in her head. What hap­pens when a girl grows up in an adult body?

Like Bar­bie, Poor Things turns the com­ing-of-age genre on its head, plac­ing girl­ish naivety with­in an adult body to sim­pli­fy the explo­ration not only of how girls view the world, but also of how the world views them in return – after all, when a girl grows up unaware of the hyper­sex­u­al­iza­tion, the expec­ta­tions, and all the oth­er things women are told from a young age they should care about, they are effec­tive­ly a blank slate, and when oth­ers view them, they aren’t trained to per­form girl­ish­ness in the same way that ​‘real’ girls all do with­out thinking.

But while the cur­rent crop of films may have a dark­ness that draws from the real­i­ties of real-world girl­hood, they don’t neglect the aes­thet­ic, emo­tion­al plea­sures of being a girl either, and it’s no sur­prise they are often in direct con­ver­sa­tion with this pre­vi­ous­ly estab­lished his­to­ry of girl­hood imagery. They make use of famil­iar images and objects to place them­selves imme­di­ate­ly with­in a very spe­cif­ic aes­thet­ic con­text – and com­ment on the iter­a­tions of girl­hood that came before.

Accord­ing to Healy, famous images of girl­hood – like Kirsten Dun­st lying in the field from The Vir­gin Sui­cides or Sue Lyon as Loli­ta in her heart-shaped sun­glass­es – have tak­en on a life of their own thanks to our lay­ered asso­ci­a­tions with them. Not only have these images become instant­ly recog­nis­able thanks to their pro­lif­er­a­tion online, they have also been used over and over again in pop cul­ture. Just take Marc Jacobs’ infa­mous Daisy ad or Lana Del Rey’s many ref­er­ences to Loli­ta (and her glass­es) over the years.

“I think there’s a ten­den­cy in cul­tur­al crit­i­cism, not often by young women, to reduce [this genre] – to see an inter­est in such things as some­how reduc­tive or maybe un-fem­i­nist or just pure­ly nos­tal­gic,” says Healy. ​“For me, I think it’s real­ly pro­duc­tive to think about girl­hood more in terms of, yes, per­son­al expe­ri­ences and mem­o­ries, but also this bank of images and film – this visu­al cul­ture that we have.”

Cer­tain objects have also been hand­ed down through­out the years, tak­ing on lay­ers of mean­ing – usu­al­ly the objects found in a girl’s pri­vate space, such as lip­stick, hair­spray, rib­bons or lace. Healy notes a col­umn she recent­ly wrote on bal­let shoes. ​“When you then start to think about objects, it’s anoth­er way of sift­ing through and fig­ur­ing out ideas of girl­hood,” she says. ​“These objects are asso­ci­at­ed with these shared ideas of girl­hood and can be very charged and potent. They have this kind of pow­er­ful charge and I think that’s some­thing that Cop­po­la knows quite inti­mate­ly and utilis­es in all her films in a won­der­ful way.”

Priscil­la opens with a mon­tage of her get­ting ready – hair­spray, fluffy rug, pedi­cure, and so on – Cop­po­la is, as Healy sug­gests, not only ref­er­enc­ing the cul­tur­al his­to­ry, but her own artis­tic his­to­ry, too. But oth­er films draw from this cul­tur­al bank of imagery and expe­ri­ence, too. In How To Have Sex, Tara wears an ​‘angel’ neck­lace and ago­nis­es over her eye­brow pen­cil appli­ca­tion. In Poor Things, Bella’s wardrobe is filled with puffed sleeves, lace trim­mings and, bizarrely, won­der­ful­ly, com­plete­ly anachro­nis­tic mini skirts. Bar­bie is stuffed with cos­tumes and sets inspired by Mattel’s prod­ucts, all of which are in them­selves pieces of girl­hood iconography.

On one hand, these images and objects serve to remind us of the girls’ youth. On the oth­er hand, their instant rec­og­niz­abil­i­ty reminds us of that mag­i­cal feel­ing of being a girl – after all, it’s not com­plete­ly awful. In fact, it’s a time filled with soar­ing emo­tions and bound­less cre­ativ­i­ty. These charged images cre­ate a vis­cer­al emo­tion­al tie to that brief in-between stage of a woman’s life.

Healy recalls that she her­self reached a cre­ative peak in her teen years. ​“I do think there is this kind of cre­ative charge to com­ing of age. [When you get old­er], life’s real­i­ty kind of changes things,” she says. ​“I do think that can be what peo­ple respond to in [my] work. And I do think it is what peo­ple respond to in some of these movies that you’re talk­ing about.”

Like Healy, who is con­sis­tent­ly drawn back to her own girl­hood, the films men­tioned here are all helmed by female direc­tors who, it seems, share the same impulse to look back – to enquire into not only what made the peri­od of girl­hood so spe­cial, but also how the world, with all of its ingrained sex­ism and poten­tial for dan­ger, threat­ens to rip that time away.

Per­haps this is where the rise of the online ​‘girl’ trend comes from too. Per­haps the same impulse that dri­ves female film­mak­ers to return to the peri­od of girl­hood is dri­ving women to explore their com­plex rela­tion­ship to girl­hood through online trends.

“I have seen a lot of stuff out there which sees [these trends] as a regres­sive thing – as some kind of self-infan­tiliza­tion,” Healy says. ​“But I think it’s nev­er a case of pure nos­tal­gia or pure regres­sion – what you’ve got is a gen­er­a­tion that has grown up with the Inter­net. They’ve grown up with ref­er­ences. It’s more a case of ref­er­enc­ing this shared world of images and ideas and tak­ing a cer­tain aes­thet­ic plea­sure in these things.”

In her book, Healy sug­gests that the lat­est move­ment in visu­al art fea­tures the girl evolv­ing from mere­ly the sub­ject of the art into both sub­ject and artist at once. She steps behind the easel or the cam­era to paint or film her own self-por­trait. She reclaims con­trol of the gaze. It is a new way to cap­ture the com­plex­i­ty of girl­hood in all of its ela­tion, fear and confusion.

This year, female film­mak­ers have, in their own way, done just this – they have got­ten behind the cam­era and ven­tured back­wards to exca­vate their own adult rela­tion­ships with girl­hood – girl­hood, which, as adult women know, is both a very real expe­ri­ence and some­thing that is pro­ject­ed onto you.

It is a unique­ly height­ened time for young women. The world feels more vio­lent and dan­ger­ous than ever. The new gen­er­a­tion of film­mak­ers are, it seems, acute­ly aware of the wor­ry­ing­ly regres­sive waves of misog­y­ny with­in soci­ety. As such, they con­front their audi­ences with what often feels like a first-per­son explo­ration of girl­hood as it is today. Girl­hood is, they seem to say, a time of awak­en­ing not only to one­self but also to the often dis­ap­point­ing and some­times out­right hor­ri­fy­ing real­i­ties of the world.

But, in the face of all of this, women in the real world are embrac­ing the aes­thet­ic joys asso­ci­at­ed with girl­hood with a cer­tain sense of defi­ance. On-screen, the same defi­ant self-aware­ness rings out. By get­ting behind the cam­era and look­ing back toward their own expe­ri­ences of girl­hood, female film­mak­ers and cre­atives are embrac­ing the long his­to­ry of girl­hood aes­thet­ics – indeed, they are reclaim­ing these images as their own. Ulti­mate­ly, their hero­ines are not mere­ly vic­tims. And the imagery asso­ci­at­ed with girl­hood – pink acces­sories, paint­ed nails, lace and rib­bons – are not signs of weak­ness or naivety, but of strength and artistry.

On the sur­face, each of these films takes us on the same old com­ing-of-age jour­ney – from inno­cence to knowl­edge; from girl­hood to wom­an­hood. They put the girl’s expe­ri­ence at the fore­front, div­ing into the minute details of their per­cep­tions, they each give their young hero­ines the agency and per­spec­tive that, through­out the his­to­ry of girl­hood in art, has so rarely been afford­ed. The path to wom­an­hood has become more fraught, and more con­fus­ing than ever – but, ulti­mate­ly, there is joy and mag­ic and, most impor­tant­ly, real strength to be found with­in it.