After being an adult I have learned that having sex does no make you an adult. What you do with the consequences of sex. How you handle it. Are you making responsible decisions like condoms which is something Minnie does not use and yet she does not get pregnant. Unrealistic. The amount of unprotected sex she has she is lucky she didn't get pregnant. These are the things that make you an adult.
shareThere's a lot more to being an adult outside of sex as well
share*gasp* No! You don't say?
That's the point the movie is trying to make. But it's doing so in a non-judgmental way.
This film is set in the 70's so many people were not well educated about safe sex back then until the HIV epidemic hit the early 80's... So it seems pretty realistic to me.
sharecaptkirk_459's concerns about how realistic the sex was handled had nothing to do with stds, he/she merely was addressing pregnancy. Your reply made me laugh since it seemed to imply that the '70's were soooo way back in the dark ages or something and for it's implication that a condom's only function is to provide protection from an std.
Wayyy back then sexually active people, even in backwater Podunk places, knew what a condom was and every teenager would have scrambled to get their hands on one. They were in wide usage long before the hiv epidemic came our way. Their intended purpose (and the reasons to use them) was exactly the same back then as it is today.
Monroe didn't seem like a complete idiot to me and as such an unwanted pregnancy by him and his girlfriend's daughter I think would have been paramount on his mind. So, that's where I'm in agreement with how unrealistic the approach about sex is handled in the movie.
This is kind of a straw-man argument since no one--least of all the filmmakers--is claiming sex DOES make you an adult. But it's also kind of stupid to pretend that teens don't experiment with sex.
It actually wasn't nearly as common before the 80's AIDS epidemic for teens OR adults to use condoms. The lesson is you can't judge everything by today's standards. In retrospect, it was very irresponsible of my mother back in the 70's to drink a six-pack of beer to calm herself down while she was driving us over a snowy mountain pass, but she did it many times, and it simply was not regarded the same way back then as it is now. The same thing with unprotected sex.
"Let be be finale of seem/ The only emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream"
It was Minnie's claim.
shareI believe that was the point the film was attempting to make. There are a lot of naive things that Minnie says and believes that of course as an adult watching the film we know they are not true. At that point in her life she believes sex is all and that proves who you are in life. Like her belief that if someone loves you or their life is all about you that is the most important thing. Even in the end of the film she realizes that is not the point. She acknowledges the fact that there is a possibility that no one loves her and maybe no one ever will and is aware of that and fine with it (at least in that phase in her life).
I read some of the criticisms of this movie before I watched it basically saying Minnie's character was annoying and she doesn't know what she is talking about. After watching it I again have to say that was done intentionally. She can get whiny and self-obsessed but at that period in her life she is self-absorbed and has some delusional ideas about what life is about and in my mind that's okay because it's realistic. I can say for myself I laugh back when I think about some of the ridiculous things I believed when I was a teenager and how stubborn I would be about things like love and what I wanted to do in life. My mindset was so naive and that might have been obnoxious to other people but the point being that we just don't know more until we've lived life more and kept learning. I think overall especially in the end it had a good message.
What many viewers fail your realize is that this movie is told through Monnie's eyes and the point of view is that of a 15 year old girl. Of course her perspective is immature,awkward and yes,at times annoying. She has extreme highs and lows and is full of erroneous notions. Unfortunately, we don't get this kind of perspective when it comes to teenage girls. Instead we get preachy messages about the pitfalls that await any girl who ventures too far off the beaten path of the " good little girl" into territory reserved for the" slut" or " fallen " woman. The fact that this movie is not preachy leaves some viewers feeling confused and rudderless. They feel unanchored and uncomfortable with this kind of viewpoint and want to condem Minnie or the movie as a whole for not telling them the moral story they expected.
I find it sad that they can't be compassionate toward Minnie and her quest for self expression. It is,after all, a journey that they are witnessing and one that is hardly complete at the end of the film. It is one that has just begun and instead of condemning Minnie because she has ventured into territory previously reserved for " bad " girls emerging victorious albeit emotionally battered ,they should instead be applauding Minnie for her courage and free spirit. Some even want to accuse her of being bi polar or having some other personality disorder rarther than accept that Minnie is an uninhibited teen who due to the societal freedom of the times finds herself able to experiment with her new found sexuality in a reclkless and heedless fashion. They want to see Minnie punished along with Monroe.and her mother. These people are far too irresponsible, in these viewers eyes, to go free.,particularly Monroe iand if not him then it is Minnie who must be made into a conscienceless slut who, with her Lolita- like ways seduced poor hapless Monroe into an affair.
Others accuse Minnie of being a totally unrealistic portrayal of a teenage girl because she doesn't use condoms( they have no idea of the " times"), she thinks sex is love, she thinks she has finally arrived ,via her sexual exploits, into adult territory and is in fact all grown up,she cries,she shouts and has wild bursts of glee and joy. She is not the tamed down,repressed and suppressed teen they are used to who is in turns sulky,full of frustrated anger and up tight with reined in emotions. In fact Minnie doesn't seem to be holding much in at all. It's all out there on display for the viewer to see. It's too bad that these viewers missed the point and that Minnie's character did not resonate with them.
I totally agree. People want to put to impose MORALS on this, and real life just doesn't always lend itself to easy morals. Even Minnie's harsh attitudes toward Monroe at the end are not meant, in my opinion, to be adult judgments, but exactly how a teenage girl would feel AT THE TIME towards a guy who just broke her heart. This is the DIARY of a teenager in the 70's without any kind of adult perspective or judgment imposed on it. That's refreshing and pretty cool really.
I also get tired of people having to be "sluts" or "predators" when it comes to sex. When I was 20 I got blackout drunk in northern Nevada and woke up in a trailer in bed with a middle-age women who turned out to be completely crazy (as in schizophrenic). But I didn't consider myself "taken advantage of". When I was 23, I was dating a 17-year-old girl and took her to a concert where SHE got falling down drunk, so I took her to a motel to sleep it off where some would say I "took advantage" of her, but that actually that wasn't what happened at all. I'm not proud of either of these things, but they are the kind of sh*t that just happens in life, particularly when you're young and foolish, and it doesn't make me either a "slut" or a "predator". People really are too judgmental sometimes.
This is a very realistic movie with someone just sharing an experience they had in life. It isn't a great movie perhaps, but I really appreciate that about it.
"Let be be finale of seem/ The only emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream"
How do you know she didn't use condoms "captkirk"? The version I saw was pretty explicit. But they never showed a naked penis.
Must mean Monroe didn't have a penis since we dindn't see it. Just like we didn't see a condom ,so te must not have used one, maybe she was on birth control pills but since we didn't see her take one, that couldn't be either.
shareCome to think of it, I don't remember ever seeing Minnie's vagina. Maybe she didn't have one (since we never saw it). The safest form of sex has to be between people who have no genitals? So then, we can't fault them for not having safe sex, right Maggie?
Unfortunately this kind of truth is the kind you only find out about once it's useless to you: when you're an adult.
For every lie I unlearn I learn something new - Ani Difranco
The film wasn't saying that sex makes one an adult.
It was concerned only with the inner workings of the character, who was, like most teenagers, TRYING to be adult, and using sex for that purpose. I remember drinking coffee for the first time, at around that age, and feeling so adult to myself. So, am I saying that "coffee made me an adult". Of course not. But, I can imagine using that experience if I was developing a teenage character for a book or film.
"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."