"Girls Town" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL April 5, 1997 Well, I didn't go to the movies last night, I went to the video store with the intention of watching Cher's HBO film about abortion,"If These Walls Could Talk," that is now out on video. However, the one copy that the local video emporium owns was already rented by the time I got there so I found myself for the first time in a long while cruising the aisles looking for something to review for "Women and Film." I was just about to give up when a made a second tour of the new releases and found a copy of a film that I missed during its very brief stop in Tampa a few months ago and that students of mine had been talking about, "Girls Town." My personal title for this film is "Third Wave goes to the movies" and I suspect that it has attracted the attention it has because it is the first feature film that has been relatively widely distributed that exemplifies a "third wave" (or possibly even fourth, depending on how you define these movements within feminist) sensibility. What is this, exactly? Well, coming as I do, straight out of the second wave feminism of my generation, I'm probably not the best person to explain it, but for starters I'd say it's the brand of feminism being espoused by young women who are turned off by what they perceive as the overly rigid pronouncements of '70s and '80s feminism and its tendency toward "victimology." Third Wave women want to think for themselves rather than accept received or "politically correct" ideas (and for their generation the received ideas are often those of my generation of feminists). There is a kind of gender solidarity and recognition that women are unjustly treated badly. But when faced with, e.g., violence against women either physical or verbal, the reaction tends not to be to organize a protest movement but to take immediate, local action in retaliation. It's more like guerilla warfare than organizing and fighting a coordinated campaign. And it's right in keeping with the '90s sensibility that I've been calling "The Age of Comeuppance." "Girls Town" is a film, directed by Jim McKay, that deals with the lives of high school girls in some northeastern, suburban city. The girls in question are a tightly knit group of four--two white, two African American--who are close friends who provide support to one another in their "otherness" since they are well outside the circle of "in" people at the high school they attend. That they are friends at all is a testament to their willingness not to conform. Patti (played by Lili Taylor) is a single mother who is not particularly attractive, older than the others because she has had such a hard time getting through school, and takes vocational courses such as auto mechanics. Nikki (Aunjanue Ellis) is an African American with the smarts and study skills to get her admitted to Princeton. Emma (Anna Grace) is an intensely private young Black woman struggling to find her independence from her mother, while Angela (Bruklin Harris) is someone whose scrubbed good looks would make it possible for her to be accepted by the more conventional students at the school, but who chooses not to avail herself of that white privilege and to dump her more conventional boyfriend who gives her grief for hanging around with this bunch of misfits. The dramatic impetus of the film comes when Nikki, whom the others thought they knew intimately, suddenly commits suicide. They sneak into her house and steal her diary in order to try to find out how and why she could have reached such a state without their having had an inkling of it. It turns out that she had been raped by a man at the magazine where she was working as an intern. They are forced to face and begin to address the violence done against them. Why does Patti continue to allow the father of her child to treat her like dirt? Why hasn't Emma done anything about the classmate who raped her in his "love mobile" ? Why is there a conspiracy of silence about the other sexual predators (including teachers) at their school? Well, now they do something. For starters they vandalize the "love mobile" (too bad we don't get to see the reaction of the schoolyard Don Juan when he finds its tires flat, its windows smashed, and the word "rapist" spray painted on the hood in red). And, in a move that has proved very effective at some universities in recent years, they make a sign on the door of one of the stalls in the women's room asking women to write in the names of known rapists on campus. And they do. Finally, they seek out the man who raped Nikki and beat him. In the version of feminist action that we encounter in "Girls Town," it isn't so much that the personal becomes political, but that what feminist have long thought of as political, namely gender politics, now becomes personal. But with a difference. It is no longer private and hidden, it is public and in your face and reflected in the lyrics of the feminist rap that forms the background of this film, and in films like this by and about feminist grrrls. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1997. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.