Luckiest Girl Alive; the Emotional Evolution of Men Should not be Bought at the Cost of Women’s Trauma

I've been traveling a lot for work and one of my favorite things to see is people watching planes on movies. No, I do not watch planes on movies, I prefer to watch other people watching movies. You can tell a lot about the person in 12C by the films they choose to watch on an 8-hour red eye from New York to London. Why would you watch the entire Need for Speed trilogy? Or what would compel the parent in 24F to put on the movie Chucky for their nine year old daughter. Sometimes the movie is auxilary to the real show; how people react to films on planes. Flying tends to bring out the best and the worst in people, and it's hard to look away when you see someone sobbing while watching Sharknado. A movie that I've recently seen a lot of people watching on planes is Luckiest Girl Alive, a recent film starring Mila Kunis, Finn Wittrock, Scoot McNairy, Thomas Barbusca, Jennifer Beals, and Connie Britton and is based on a novel by the same name.

The people who watch this film on planes are almost all women, and almost all of them have cried. As a result, it's been really hard to get myself to watch the movie because I, like most people, do not necessarily enjoy crying. While it can be soothing, cathartic crying can easily snowball into crippling sobs and bawling in the shower for twenty minutes. As a result, I've avoided most dramas in recent years and refuse to watch My Octopus Teacher. A movie that makes people swear off of eating Octopus might make me depressed enough to swear off eating anything, in general.

I've been traveling a lot for work and one of my favorite things to see is people watching planes on movies. No, I do not watch planes on movies, I prefer to watch other people watching movies. You can tell a lot about the person in 12C by the films they choose to watch on an 8-hour red eye from New York to London. Why would you watch the entire Need for Speed trilogy? Or what would compel the parent in 24F to put on the movie Chucky for their nine year old daughter. Sometimes the movie is auxilary to the real show; how people react to films on planes. Flying tends to bring out the best and the worst in people, and it's hard to look away when you see someone sobbing while watching Sharknado. A movie that I've recently seen a lot of people watching on planes is Luckiest Girl Alive, a recent film starring Mila Kunis, Finn Wittrock, Scoot McNairy, Thomas Barbusca, Jennifer Beals, and Connie Britton and is based on a novel by the same name.

The people who watch this film on planes are almost all women, and almost all of them have cried. As a result, it's been really hard to get myself to watch the movie because I, like most people, do not necessarily enjoy crying. While it can be soothing, cathartic crying can easily snowball into crippling sobs and bawling in the shower for twenty minutes. As a result, I've avoided most dramas in recent years and refuse to watch My Octopus Teacher. A movie that makes people swear off of eating Octopus might make me depressed enough to swear off eating anything, in general.

Luckiest Girl Alive is a movie about a highly ambitious, socially elegant young woman by the name of Ani, who has gone to the right schools, has the perfect job, and is set to be married to a gorgeous man in a perfectly gorgeous wedding. She doesn't eat carbs because she is disciplined, and her narration is the only clue we have to the fact that her entire outward persona is a sham. The narration we get reveals that she is spiteful, sarcastic, biting, and deceitful, while her outward appearance remains poised, controlled, and perfect. As the movie goes on, little by little we discover the complicated layers that make up Ani and her need for control and power. A documentarian has been trying to convince her to sit down to talk about her role surviving a school shooting; but, as flashbacks and her deteriorating mental health and stability show, there is much more to the story than that.

This movie is a gorgeous criticism of victim blaming, of purity culture, of women being told to protect and hide men from the consequences of their actions, because it would be a shame to ruin the life of 'a promising young man,' a phrase now made infamous because of its use in the trial of Brock Turner, a Stanford student who was caught raping an unconscious girl and was giving a mockingly light sentence for his crime. It peels back the layers of hypocrisy in our society that say that a man should be allowed to have sex with whomever he pleases, and that a woman should be flattered if he picks her, even if she doesn't want it. It forces us to confront that we would much rather women deal with the trauma of being a victim in silence and isolation, while men are allowed to use their victimhood to elevate themselves to hero status. It shows that if we are shown a man who is doing good and the shattered woman he broke on his way, we think it is a fair price to pay.

In a post #metoo era of reckoning, this film confronts how often we are more concerned that it will hurt men's feelings to be painted as the bad guys, than we are concerned with the wellbeing of the women they hurt. The film can be wrapped up in the final moments, when a fellow reporter who has followed Dean's career in campaigning for increased gun restrictions basically tells Ani that she has ruined things for everyone. Complicity is expected. Women are the stones that men sharpen themselves against, so they can do battle with anything other than themselves.

I was shattered when I watched this movie, which, as expected, I watched on a plane. Statistically, there were probably several women on my plane who have been victims of sexual violence. Statistically, there were probably several men on my plane who had been perpetrators of violence, But it comforts me to see Kunis's face on screen. Not in a romcom, but in a role with gravitas and meaning; a film that confronts what we don't want to talk about and is willing to splash it across the screens of hundreds of planes filling the sky. Perhaps if enough people watch it, if enough people are forced to confront the reality of what women are expected to suffer silently, maybe we will get somewhere and move the needle just a little bit forward.

Luckiest Girl Alive is a movie about a highly ambitious, socially elegant young woman by the name of Ani, who has gone to the right schools, has the perfect job, and is set to be married to a gorgeous man in a perfectly gorgeous wedding. She doesn't eat carbs because she is disciplined, and her narration is the only clue we have to the fact that her entire outward persona is a sham. The narration we get reveals that she is spiteful, sarcastic, biting, and deceitful, while her outward appearance remains poised, controlled, and perfect. As the movie goes on, little by little we discover the complicated layers that make up Ani and her need for control and power. A documentarian has been trying to convince her to sit down to talk about her role surviving a school shooting; but, as flashbacks and her deteriorating mental health and stability show, there is much more to the story than that.

This movie is a gorgeous criticism of victim blaming, of purity culture, of women being told to protect and hide men from the consequences of their actions, because it would be a shame to ruin the life of 'a promising young man,' a phrase now made infamous because of its use in the trial of Brock Turner, a Stanford student who was caught raping an unconscious girl and was giving a mockingly light sentence for his crime. It peels back the layers of hypocrisy in our society that say that a man should be allowed to have sex with whomever he pleases, and that a woman should be flattered if he picks her, even if she doesn't want it. It forces us to confront that we would much rather women deal with the trauma of being a victim in silence and isolation, while men are allowed to use their victimhood to elevate themselves to hero status. It shows that if we are shown a man who is doing good and the shattered woman he broke on his way, we think it is a fair price to pay.

In a post #metoo era of reckoning, this film confronts how often we are more concerned that it will hurt men's feelings to be painted as the bad guys, than we are concerned with the wellbeing of the women they hurt. The film can be wrapped up in the final moments, when a fellow reporter who has followed Dean's career in campaigning for increased gun restrictions basically tells Ani that she has ruined things for everyone. Complicity is expected. Women are the stones that men sharpen themselves against, so they can do battle with anything other than themselves.

I was shattered when I watched this movie, which, as expected, I watched on a plane. Statistically, there were probably several women on my plane who have been victims of sexual violence. Statistically, there were probably several men on my plane who had been perpetrators of violence, But it comforts me to see Kunis's face on screen. Not in a romcom, but in a role with gravitas and meaning; a film that confronts what we don't want to talk about and is willing to splash it across the screens of hundreds of planes filling the sky. Perhaps if enough people watch it, if enough people are forced to confront the reality of what women are expected to suffer silently, maybe we will get somewhere and move the needle just a little bit forward.