coastaldefeat

Girls Like Girls is a lovingly made scrapbook about girls loving girls in the pre-Trump era. Like the main character in the music video, Coley sports a tattoo choker and a yellow retro bike. Both are out of place in a movie set in 2006 small-town Oregon, and the movie leans into this. The dialogue is bad, and it barely matters. It’s a feel-good collage about liking a girl and learning to be less alone.

The Guardian hated that! They claim that it embodies “the neoliberal optimism of the Obama years”—this is an odd read of this movie. This movie isn’t optimistic about the future; it simply refuses to engage with the future. The words “gay” or “lesbian” are never mentioned in the movie, and there aren’t even any expressions of (externalized) homophobia. Those things, as well as the political reality of gay people, hang heavy in the silence.

The Guardian is correct that the original music video was emblematic of Obama-era optimism—brash, simple, and triumphant. At the height of the music video, the two girls are sitting on the edge of the pool, lips closing in, when the evil boyfriend starts screaming and hitting his cheating lesbian girlfriend. Then the other lesbian absolutely pummels the homophobic abusive boyfriend, and the lesbian girlbosses win the day. 

The movie, by contrast, views that optimism with heavy nostalgia and refuses to emulate it. Kiyoko toys with the audience by having Coley and Sonya get into pools and lakes over and over again, leaving the audience waiting for the big moment. (Side note: Coley’s swimsuits are all super cute, the costume designer outdid themselves.) In one moment in the middle of the movie, Coley and Sonya have a staring contest in the pool and are getting closer. I wondered, Is it happening? But instead of punching Sonya in the face, the evil boyfriend just throws a beach ball at them. Homophobia wins the moment.

In another moment, Coley and Sonya are finally sitting on the edge of a pool. The boyfriend is just a few yards away. The two get closer. I think, Oh it’s definitely happening. 

The movie ends. My friends yell, “What!?” I desperately try to explain to them that this is actually super cool and that the movie ends where the climax of the music video starts, and that the implication is that Coley is about to beat up the boyfriend, and that nobody understands this movie like I do.

Then the post-credits scene plays and confirms that Coley did not beat him up. Coley and Sonya say some sweet nothings to each other and go home, unscathed. Haley Kiyoko made me look like a fool.

Kiyoko tells a story about love and grief and memory, not about triumph. While I agree that this is a feel-good movie, I think some reviewers who wish this movie were more expressly political are missing some of the other emotions this movie evokes. The movie doesn’t really let you sit closely with joy, or any other emotion. It’s pretty dissociative. Coley tries to find escape from her thoughts about Sonya by having desperate, risky sex with a store clerk. This short sequence is shown out of order with almost no detail. It’s hard to tell what’s happening and impossible to tell what Coley is thinking. The audience doesn’t know if Sonya likes her boyfriend by the end of the movie. The audience doesn’t even know if either of them know they’re gay. When you make a scrapbook about lesbian love and try to cut out all the homophobia from it, there are a lot of visible gaps and holes. Girls Like Girls lays bare the futility of the feel-good optimism from the music video, and it appears to do that purposefully. The whole experience is just as unsettling as it is comforting.

If you watched the music video around the time that it came out, I would recommend seeing this movie. It’s an interesting follow-up.