Re-release: Easy A
One of my favourite films ever, a look back at a 2019 review of a 2010 masterpiece...
YEAR: 2010
DIRECTOR: Will Gluck
KEY ACTORS: Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson
CERTIFICATE: 15
IMDB SCORE: 7.1
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 85%
SEX SCORE: 4.5/5
✔️ Easily passes the Bechdel test, particularly if you consider conversations about sexual reputation as separate from conversations about men and dating
✔️ Definitely rewatchable. In fact, I watch it approximately twice a year!
✔️ I do want to fuck the cast, yes. And by that I mean that I want to fuck Stanley Tucci.
❓ This film didn’t inspire any sexual fantasies...but Emma Stone in those corsets certainly inspired me to get off my arse and do more exercise! Wanting to look more like her was one of my main inspirations for starting running, for buying more fancy underwear, for buying corsets, so I’m giving it a half mark!
✔️ And I am giving it a whole mark for sex positivity. There is a lot of shame directed towards sexual characters but the film goes out of its why to show why they are wrong. It also manages to find humour in varied sexuality choices and sexual situations without mocking or judging. It’s wonderful!
As always, this contains spoilers so watch the film before you read on...
STREAMING: Netflix, YouTube (from £2.99). For a full list of streaming options, check out JustWatch.com
I always intended on reviewing Easy A at some point - it’s a cracking teen movie with great lessons about reputation, sex and rumour - but my original review in 2019 was prompted by a tweet from Marie Le Conte that reminded me that I not only needed to dance around to A Pocket Full of Sunshine immediately, because it is indeed a banger, but I also needed to watch Easy A again. Soon.
Easy A is the story of Olive Pendergast (Stone) - a high school student who accidentally starts a rumour about losing her virginity, helps a bullied queer student to pass as straight by pretending to sleep with him, and ends up with more and more outcasts asking her to pretend they’ve hooked up in one way or another. Such is the power of the rumour mills that Olive’s new reputation soon causes her to become an outcast. Of course she’s had sex with everyone who says that she has! Of course she’s gave another student an STI!! And Olive decides to live up to her new reputation by dressing in corsets or tiny shorts, all emblazoned with a scarlet letter A.
I love this film. I love everything about it. I love the music, I love the costumes, I love Emma Stone, I love Stanley Tucci. I love that it is a teen movie that doesn’t underestimate teenagers. And I love Olive Pendergast. Even now, in my late thirties, I kind of want to be her!
You see, I wasn’t cool at school. Even with hindsight removing all my insecurities, I wasn’t cool. I volunteered to supervise Duke of Edinburgh expeditions; I was one half of a two person yearbook committee; I drove a car that managed to be older than me but not old enough to be vintage or retro - it was just old. I was not cool. But neither is Olive. I mean, she’s awesome, but she’s not cool in the way students usually are in movies about high school. She’s not a jock or cheerleader. No one really knows her until the rumours start. But she is still awesome - smart, witty, gorgeous - and I really valued the remainder that being in the ‘cool’ group isn’t nearly everything!
These more superficial reasons aside, Easy A is a pretty great film! It’s self-aware, mocking John Hughes tropes and acknowledging its place in a long history of teen movies. It’s also intelligent and funny, and it does not patronise its target audience of young people, particularly young women.
I think it helps that it’s an update of a 19th century novel, The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne. It seems all of the best teen movies are versions of older masterpieces - Clueless from Jane Austen’s Emma, 10 Things I Hate About You from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Cruel Intentions from Les Liaisons Dangereuses and now this. I suspect that this is because it’s telling a real story. Too much media made for younger people underestimates their intelligence, and is less good because of it.
(There is, of course, the less generous argument that high school is the last time in modern society where we can spend all our time and energy focussed on romantic plotting and not having a date to the ball is the end of the world so it's easy to transfer the themes of classic literature, but I prefer my reason!)
I’ve never read The Scarlet Letter (although I have now read the cliff notes in case they had anything interesting to add, which they did not) but the themes in the book are familiar ones - reputation, humiliation...misogyny. Whether in the nineteenth century or the present day, women with a visible sexuality are regularly shunned and cast aside. As seen in this film, men have never suffered the same and instead tend to benefit from having a highly charged sexual reputation - it’s why so many of the boys want to cash in on Olive’s reputation after all.
It is interesting that no one ever doubts that these rumours about Olive are true. Actually, it’s not interesting - it’s the patriarchy. In a he-said-she-said world, would anyone believe her? As one of the needy boys taunted, ‘I don’t need your permission, you know!’ Olive went from being a nerdy nobody to reportedly fucking nearly everyone in school in a matter of weeks, and yet no one questions her ‘slutty alter ego.’ All it took was a rumour that she had had sex once to launch her into the spotlight.
‘That's the beauty of being a girl in high-school: people hear you had sex once and BAM - you're a bimbo.’
It reminded me just how hard it is to be a teenage girl! Our youth has been so sexualised that being seen as sexually active and attractive feels disproportionately important. We want to be cool, we want to be hot, we want to seen, we want to be sexual, and yet we risk gaining a reputation for being easy and promiscuous if we do. Olive’s friend Rhiannon exactly demonstrates this difficult and delicate balance - she is thrilled when it is revealed that her big tits are her identifying feature and calls Olive a ‘superslut like me’ on hearing she’s lost her virginity, and yet Rhiannon is the first to turn on Olive when the rumours start to get out of control, declaring her a ‘skank.’ In fact, the rumours essentially start with Rhiannon as she doesn’t believe it when Olive denies having sex, prompting her to just make something up.
And I know why Olive does it; why she lies and then doubles down on her lie by dressing in revealing clothes, dramatically labelling herself with the A from The Scarlet Letter to ensure no one misses her point. There is pleasure in notoriety, in being someone everyone knows and is talking about. Why do you think I joined the yearbook committee? I wanted everyone to know who I was! Admittedly, it may have been more fun and significantly less work if I’d chosen Olive’s way but I didn’t realise that until much later...!
‘How do you know I like to be thought of as a floosy?’
‘At least you’re being thought of.’
I realised watching Easy A again now that I’m looking at it differently since the birth of my daughter, but in ways that only say good things about the film. Because it is a film that I want her to see, unlike the teen movies from the 80s that it mocks. It’s one that can teach her how to be the person I want her to be - confident, sure of herself - and it has certainly given me ideas on how to be a better parent for her.
Olive’s parents, Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, are just fabulous in this film - they’re the icing on an already perfect film. And the real lesson that I’ve learned from them is that they trust Olive without question. Their daughter is going to school wearing underwear as outerwear but they trust her to take care of herself. They repeatedly check in and express their concerns without judging her, making sure she knows they are there for her, but they accept her words when she says she’s OK and wait for her to come to them when she needs their help. Which, of course, she does.
In contrast to that, my mother once told me I looked like I was asking to be raped when I wore a bikini as a bra under a halter top and, even though I know she was trying to protect me, I haven’t forgotten. And actually, 15 years later, I’m not sure if I’ve forgiven either. I love my mother and we get on very well but I don’t like to think about the number of conversations that were cut off before the words left my mouth after that because I was afraid of her judgement, and I don’t want that to be my relationship with my daughter.
I don’t think I have the free and easy style of Tucci and Clarkson to carry off their wit and joviality, but I hope I can be as open and approachable. And understanding! I just adore Rosemary's (Clarkson) response to Olive’s confession about her reputation at school: ‘I had a similar situation when I was your age. I had a horrible reputation...Because I slept with a whole bunch of people. Mostly guys.’ Not just ‘don’t worry, you’ll be fine’ but ‘don’t worry, I understand - I’ve been through it and I believe that you’ll be fine.’ And I think that’s wonderful.
Olive: Can you not see that I'm a mess?
Rosemary: No, you're not, Olive. You're wonderful. And you'll handle this the same way I did. With an incontrovertible sense of humour. But you're much smarter than I am... so you'll come out of this much better than I did.
Olive: Thank you, Mom.
This complete lack of judgement is why Easy A is definitely a sex positive film. Yes, it does depict judgement but it’s from characters who are also shown to be flawed - Marianne and her religious extremists, Lisa Kudrow’s truly awful guidance counsellor. The people that we’re supposed to like and root for are all sex positive. Sex isn’t the enemy or the destructive power; it’s the lies and misunderstandings and judgement that are clearly shown to be the problem.
Roger Ebert does note that, as is often the case in movies when jokes involve virginity, the protagonist's virginity 'miraculously survives at the end' but I don't think this undermines the sex positive message - Olive may not have had sex yet but the film ends with the message that whenever she wants to, whether soon or not, that's OK.
I also couldn’t write about the sex positivity of this film without mentioning Woodchuck Todd (Badgley). He is just the perfect gentleman and provides a great example of how consent is both hot and doesn’t break the mood, or whatever other excuses people come up with. He asks if he can kiss Olive and then accepts her no without question. He also doesn’t seem to believe the rumour mill surrounding Olive, treating her exactly the same as always. He’s a good man and a good role model.
My final point about Easy A is a sort of throwback to my other review of Zack and Miri make a porno. (Coming soon to Substack!) One of my main criticisms of that film was that it mocked vulnerable social groups and found humour in being offensive, which I really didn’t find funny. But I do find Easy A funny. It’s fucking hilarious! And that includes jokes about being gay and about being a stripper or sex worker. The jokes work for me because they don’t feel like they’re punching down, no one is inherently superior or portrayed as better, and within the whole positive non-judgemental tone of the film, jokes on these topics don't even feel edgy. They’re simply funny!
Yup, Easy A is brilliant. I might have to watch this more frequently then twice a year...!
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RECOMMENDATIONS
I really loved ‘My Mother, the Movies, and Me’ by Keith Phipps on The Reveal substack about his mother and how movies shaped their relationships. She wasn’t really a big fan but she still took him to the cinema anyway, and I really liked the reminder that you do things with your kids that they love, just because they love it, and that’s wonderful.
Different tone but I have to recommend Girl on the Net’s recent post, ‘I sucked a dick at Glastonbury.’ A really sexy, really joyful, and really uplifting post that is about so much more than sucking dick but is also about the absolute thrill of doing exactly that!
MOVIE DIARY
Elephant (Van Sant, 2003): This felt more like an art project than a movie. The beginning was boring and the end was disturbing, but they didn’t coherently work for me. It’s also a movie about a school shooting that didn’t seem to have a point - either the shooting or the movie - which I guess could be a message about the futility of it all but just felt…sensational? Unneccesary? I don’t know but it’s not for me!
Godzilla Minus One (Yamazaki, 2023): This, however, is exactly my kind of movie - a monster movie with incredible and Oscar winning special effects that had enough story and heart to make me cry! It has all the key features of a Godzilla movie but is set in the immediate aftermath of WW2 with the Japanese people struggling to survive after the war, weight down with PTSD and survivor guilt. Really excellent monster movie!
Tangerine (Baker. 2015): A movie famous for being shot entirely on a iPhone 5, I really enjoyed this all-in-one-night movie about trans sex workers. An incredible LA movie, an alternative Christmas movie, an inclusive and realistic movie without being sensationalist or exploitative, this really works!
Minions: The Rise of Gru (Balda, 2022): I’m preparing for Despicable Me 4 by watching all the old movies with my daughters - they absolutely love the Minions! And, while I’m not sure that the movies themselves are any better than other standard children’s animation, the Minions do tap into a very basic level of humour (toilet humour, slapstick etc) that will always be funny!