A year of girls spilling their guts
When she was just 14, Priscilla Beaulieu, an Air Force brat stationed with her family in Germany, met one of the planet’s biggest pop stars. The pair formed a connection, and when it was time to temporarily part ways, he left her with a keepsake.
That gift, an Army jacket from Elvis Presley, is an important symbol in “Priscilla,” hanging from her bedroom wall like a poster ripped from a magazine. The film’s director, Sofia Coppola, seems to be making a point about the gaping age gap between teenager and heartthrob (24 and a year-plus into military service), but also about the universality of a girl’s crush — relatable, all-consuming.
In class soon after, in a scene that reminded me of Britney Spears anxiously counting down the seconds until the bell in the “… Baby One More Time” video, a daydreaming Priscilla fidgets at her desk. You can almost see the cartoon hearts floating above her head as Coppola offers this unsettling portrait of an adolescent drawn into an age-inappropriate relationship. But her knowing depiction of girlhood longing stayed with me, too. Because whether you were a teenage girl in 1959 or in 2023, that specific ache — in love, or what you think is love — will probably feel familiar.
I noticed that pang — the kind that comes from badly wanting something seemingly just out of reach — surfacing in our entertainments this year: fullthroated and kicking down doors on “Guts,” Olivia Rodrigo’s hilarious, if wrenching, relationship album; simmering to a boil in “Swarm,” the series about an obsessed fan with a gnawing hunger; and yearning for validation in “Don’t Think, Dear,” a dancer’s devastating memoir of a ballet career that stalled at the barre. Girls giving voice to their pain even when they couldn’t fully make sense of it. Girls spilling their guts.
The cruel tutelage of Alice Robb
“Ballet had given me a way to be a girl,” a “specific template,” Alice Robb writes in “Don’t Think, Dear.”
To middle school, she wears her hair scraped into a bun, a leotard instead of a bra. She trains at the New York City Ballet’s prestigious school. At 12, though, struggling to keep up, she’s expelled after three years of study. The rejection is unshakable, and the sting goes on for decades. Desperate for a do- over that never comes, she enrolls in less-prominent dance academies, where she’s heartbroken to encounter girls with flat feet and messy buns. She stalks old classmates on social media, and for 15 years, keeps up a dutiful stretching routine that she hopes will maintain the outlines of a ballet body, one that telegraphs her as “special.”
With each page, I rooted for Robb, now a journalist in her 30s, to find the position that would let her plant her feet back on the ground.
And I thought of an Olivia Rodrigo lyric: “I bought all the clothes that they told me to buy/i chased some dumb ideal my whole [expletive] life.” That’s how this 20-year- old pop supernova deals with the anguish of rejection on her sophomore album, “Guts”: She thrashes. Rodrigo realizes that, in its first throes, “Love Is Embarrassing.” (It is.) On that throbbing track, she admits the hold “some weird second-string loser” has on her. On “Get Him Back,” she jokingly lays out a conflicted revenge plot as the bridge drops to a whisper: “I wanna kiss his face, with an uppercut,” she confesses. “I wanna meet his mom — just to tell her her son sucks.” She’s cataloging her humiliations, but she’s laughing at them, too.
Headfirst into heartbreak
Girlhood, strictly marked in years, comes to a close in the waning years of adolescence. But for some, I think this period calls for a lesstidy metric, one that makes room for a soft transition into late girlhood, or adolescence — with all of its intensifying feeling — and then post-girlhood, with its own round of heartbreaks. Lauryn Hill was 23 in 1998 when she released a relationship album for the ages. “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” multiplatinum and Grammy- winning, tracked her recovery from a series of rumored breaks: with her hip-hop trio, the Fugees, and one of her bandmates, Wyclef Jean, with whom she was said to have shared a stormy romance. For a generation of us, it was as if she’d found our own love letters and read each one out loud.
This fall, reunited with her bandmates, the girl from South Orange, New Jersey, returned to the stage to breathe new life into that indelible collection. On opening night of a short-lived tour, I watched from the Prudential Center in Newark as Hill wailed the exasperated plea from “ExFactor”: “No matter how I think we grow, you always seem to let me know it ain’t
working.” It had been 25 years since “Miseducation”; a quarter- century for perspective, love and motherhood to right- size outsize feelings. She sang the words she’d written all those years ago, but this time her voice was tinged with unmistakable joy.
There is longing in the fictional world of “Swarm,” but little joy. Dre (Dominique Fishback), a socially awkward 20-something, spends her days posting online tributes dedicated to her favorite artist, a Beyoncé stand-in named Ni’jah. “I think the second she sees me, she’d know how we’re connected,” Dre tells her roommate.
Dre is a “Killer Bee,” one of a hive of obsessive fans, and she will live up to the name: She soon sets off on a violent cross-country spree, picking off Ni’jah’s unsuspecting online critics. After each kill, famished, Dre devours anything she can get her hands on — a leftover apple pie, a sandwich. It becomes clear that she’s not hungry at all; what she’s starved for is connection. In that sense, she’s not so different from the scores of women and girls who packed concert stadiums this summer, adorned in sparkling silver or baring arms stacked with friendship bracelets.