warning: spoilers abound
Life isn’t fair.
And it’s not unfair in a fair way either.
Which is to say, it’s not just that bad people don’t get the justice they deserve, it’s often the case that awesome things happen to the most terrible of people.
And while art may replicate life in many ways, most movies are guilty of some type of reinforcement of just-world theory.
Just-world theory (or just-world hypothesis, just-world fallacy) states:
That a person’s actions are inherently inclined to bring morally fair and fitting consequences to that person
Hans Gruber falls out of a helicopter.
all noble actions being eventually rewarded and all evil actions eventually punished
How do you like them apples?
the just-world hypothesis is the tendency to attribute consequences to—or expect consequences as the result of—a universal force that restores moral balance.
95% of Disney villains, because of prejudiced, historically Western based values of beauty, have dark skin and pronounced bone structure.
This belief generally implies the existence of cosmic justice, destiny, divine providence, desert, stability, or order
The Force.
The danger of this type of thinking, studies have found, is not just that it sets up an inaccurate view of the world, from which the inaccurate belief holder may then incorrectly assess situations in their lives and do damage to themselves and those around them; it’s also that a believer in just-world theory (consciously or not) assumes that people who get punished, deserve their punishment, simply because they are being punished.
Amy & Molly & Not Hans Gruber
That is probably why so much of Booksmart felt refreshing.
It defies just-world theory at several key plot points, along with your High School Coming of Age/Friendship Building genre expectations.
It’s not that Booksmart doesn’t follow a screenwriting playbook for peaks and valleys, it’s what happens in those peaks to turn them into valleys.
Quick premise check:
Two girls, Amy and Molly, best friends, last day of high school. Their whole lives have been about succeeding at school.
After a brief introduction to the somewhat loosely-defined cliques as our main characters walk into school, Booksmart quickly subverts our first just-world expectation.
THE FIRST SUBVERSION
(sung to the tune of “Final Countdown”)
Within the first 20 minutes we follow Molly into a Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults scene that doesn’t turn out the way most Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults scenes turn out.
As Molly flushes and walks out of the stall, we’re ready for a revenge scene where the misunderstood, less popular girl eviscerates the “bullies” she overheard insulting her.
However, Booksmart is too smart to let Molly, and us, off the hook that easy.
While she gets off a few stinging quips, as soon as Molly starts to insult their work ethic and boast about her own, post-high school successes, the popular shit-talkers all clap back with the ivy league school or tech internship they will be heading to next year.
The popular kids also got into good schools.
The at-first-glance-antagonists “have it all” while, it turns out, our pro-tags have been doing their entire life wrong up until this point.
“The irresponsible people who partied also got into those colleges…We didn’t have to chose. They did both. We’re the only assholes who did one” – Molly
This news, satisfyingly, sets 1) Molly over the cliff and 2) the main premise of the film into action: one night of epic partying to make up for an entire high school career spent studying and missing out.
While The Breakfast Club started this conversation by taking an entire film to peel back each (white) high school stereotype, revealing the multi-layered, complex white onion underneath, Booksmart stands on its shoulders and does it in 20 minutes, allowing the film to go in even further on our just-world and genre expectations.
SUBVERSIONS 2-5
2. The Jock Douche Turns Out to Be Pretty Cool
During that aforementioned entrance into high school, in which we see the cliques over the shoulders and through the eyes of our main characters, we are introduced to Nick.
At first presentation Nick is a popular, good looking, charismatic guy. In other words, a total piece of shit.
By the time we are told that Molly, blasphemously, has a crush on him, we are prepped from years of teen melodramas to suspect that Nick will do something terrible to Molly because Nick is terrible.
That turns out not to be the case. Nick is a super cool hang and just an all around guy you wanna be around.
3. No Protagonist Ends Up With Their Crush, Instead…
This is a coming of age comedy that veers away from the comedy during the rise of its 2nd act and the fall of its 3rd, but still focuses – like many coming of age comedies – on unrequited love.
In Booksmart however, the unrequited love becomes un-unrequited because it becomes love redirected (to, for Amy, a character previously in the background), not because the main characters get to end up with their crushes, and not because the crushes turned out to be total pieces of shit like we all thought Nick was going to be.
Instead of Molly or Amy getting to be with their crushes because Molly and Amy went through an experience that made them learn about themselves and therefore DESERVE THE THINGS THEY DESIRE AND THOSE THINGS ARE PEOPLE…their crushes actually end up with each other which is simultaneously our next subversion.
4. The Jock Douche Ends Up With The Masculine Presenting Female
At first impression, I thought Ryan was The McLovin of Booksmart.
My second thought was that Ryan might be The Gender Non-Binary McLovin of Booksmart, but it turns out, where my first thought may have been too regressive, my second assumption was too progressive.
In the end, Ryan is just The Female McLovin of Booksmart: a girl who dresses kind of like a sloppy skater guy and makes out with the apple of Molly’s eye, and all around charismatic, nice, handsome guy Nick.
In most High School movies Ryan doesn’t exist, or Ryan is simply an object of Amy’s crush, or Ryan is a token transgender character and Nick is a tool who dates the popular cheerleader but, as we find out later, is cheating on her because, again, total piece of shit.
In no just-world do these two characters get rewarded for their complexity.
In no High School movies except Booksmart do these two end up together.
5. AAA is not About Roadside Assistance, and Honestly, Fuck Off Any Way
The female equivalent to Nick is AAA, played by Molly Gordon.
She’s attractive and popular and got accepted to a good college. What a total pile of shit.
AAA got her name via a rumor that she was hooking up with older guys in their cars.
By late in the movie we the audience are more than ready for AAA to “redeem” herself and, in a bit of a pump fake, we feel that redemption for a moment when she tells Molly she got the nickname “AAA” because she actually gave guys rides home in her car.
But after a quick beat Annabelle (aka AAA) reveals she was indeed hooking up with these guys in cars.
But like, fucking, who cares?
AAA: I’m incredible at hand-jobs but I also got a fifteen-sixty on the SATs.
The film not only understands we will immediately fall for AAA’s initial explanation on how she got her nickname, yearning for our misunderstood Madonna to reveal herself, it then takes time to give AAA voice,
AAA: You know what the worst part is? All the fucking girls call me that too.
The Final Section (also, to the tune of…)
It’s not that Booksmart is perfect, as Richard Brody of The New Yorker points out:
There’s no shortage of sexualized talk…but it’s all portrayed as untroubled, cheerful, and innocent...The school is predominantly white but unquestioningly tolerant of the diversity in its population—not that its diversity ever asserts itself in any conspicuous way.
And yes, it floats along on a cloud of, “isn’t it amazing how much of ourselves we are being?” personified by the dancing scenes between the two main characters:
I hadn’t noticed until The New Yorker review, that yes, the serial killer is the only blue collar representation in the film (Brody, again, “it’s exemplary of the movie’s class politics that the only true villain is a workingman in a service job”).
This is an irritating trait for a movie to have, and one I find upsetting that I missed given my Milwaukee Public School upbringing. To my credit, the delivery driver isn’t really the villain of the movie. His pathology is more or less a comic prop – which might not be better. (And even he subverts his role by warning the girls not to get into stranger’s cars, as they have just gotten into his).
But not every film has to be “the way things are”.
Brody seems to miss this point, even when he took the time to bring it up: “Despite the emotional authenticity of the protagonists’ dilemma, their journey comes off as a fantasy.”
Yea.
Fantasy is more fun when it has emotional authenticity.
And while Booksmart is part fantasy, it still succeeds at setting us up to expect the very real “just-world plot points” (to the tune of…), only to slyly defy them, and us, all the way to its final, not-quite-goodbye but still tearful, airport scene.