Lady Bird: Five Years On

A love letter and retrospective on my relationship with Lady Bird (2017).

If I was ever asked what traditions I hold sacred in my life, my response would be: none.

I don’t go to a particular place every year, and I don’t have a gift, custom, or belief handed down by my family. Traditions seem very purposeful, and I can’t say my routines hold much purpose, especially around my birthdays. 

I think the first time I experienced birthday anxiety must've been around my 18th. It was as if all of a sudden, I came face to face with mortality. Of course, this is a common reaction to ageing, but I sometimes forget about the dramaticism of anxiety. It’s life or death, and neither feels safe. 

Two months before my 19th birthday, I stumbled upon a film on Film Twitter™, which created discourse about whether or not the praise thrown towards the film was valid.

That film was 2017’s Lady Bird. Before Twitter, I hadn’t heard of or seen any of Greta Gerwig’s films— in my defense, I grew up quite far from any notable indie scenes, but in 2017, I had found myself amid a personal change in my taste in music, movies, and tv. 

Gerwig has written and directed several films, including Frances Ha (2012) and Mistress America (2015)—co-written with her partner and fellow writer/director Noah Baumbach. Both films focus on the feeling of being lost and finding yourself in your early to late twenties, and they take place in New York. Frances Ha is a film that centres around a struggling dancer who finds the love of her life (her best friend) slowly pulling away as she enters a new phase of her relationship. Mistress America is about two almost stepsisters who become intertwined as the younger of the two begins writing about her sister's failing life as a woman of many skill sets. 

I adore those films equally— they are charming, incredibly heartfelt, and poignantly written. However, Lady Bird is the only one I watch every year on the day before my birthday.  

Produced by IAC and distributed by A24, Lady Bird is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film that depicts Gerwig’s teenage years in Sacramento, California, during the early 2000s. The film explores typical themes of coming-of-age movies, such as failed relationships, college applications, and rejection. At the epicenter of Lady Bird lies the fragile relationship between Christine' Lady Bird’ McPherson (the stand-in for Gerwig) and her mother, Marion McPherson.

Lady Bird as a character is both miles away from me and yet so familiar. We both went to private religious schools and struggled with maintaining friendships and a deep-seated need to be liked, but she was a white girl who lived in California, and I was someone who wasn’t that and lived in England.

Still, when I watched the film on a less-than-reliable pirated link months before the UK premiere, I finally knew what it was like to fall in love with a movie for the first time. 

As previously mentioned, Lady Bird is about many things, but the age-old tale of mothers and daughters lies at its core. There is so much love in the way Gerwig writes Marion and Lady Bird. Their arguments are sometimes futile, but also we witness them become infused with bitterness. Lady Bird and Marion do not understand each other, and the effort to try often hurts them both. Upon my first watch, I felt seen in a way I hadn’t for a long time— this was during a year where my relationship with my mother was in many ways hurtful to me, and to see this depicted on screen with someone so different to me almost made it easier. It’s not just a cultural or religious issue that pries us apart but, instead, a lack of understanding and patience. 

One of my favorite elements of the film is ‘This Eve of Parting’ by John Hartford, which Gerwig uses to cement the theme of change. It appears when Marion is driving home from her late work shift and peers around at Sacramento—a city she loves and her daughter desperately wants to escape. When Marion arrives home, there’s a cut in the music, and we move to the next scene, where we witness the clash between Marion’s work life and her home life, filled with tension between her and Lady Bird.

Further in the film, Lady Bird chooses to move to New York without telling her mother, leading to Marion completely ignoring her. During a montage, ‘This Eve of Parting’ plays again as Lady Bird becomes more mature than she has during the film's first two acts—she gets multiple jobs, acquires her license, and applies for student loans.

On the other hand, Marion is almost ghostlike, not wanting to be seen or heard. She tries to write letters, which are later revealed to be her attempt at an apology to Lady Bird but throws them away. The song plays until Lady Bird catches her flight, and it is at this moment Lady Bird finally speaks to Marion and is once again ignored—a breaking point between them. Through this song, Gerwig seamlessly connects the themes of how the women feel about Sacramento and how they feel about each other.

Being a few months away from university applications at the time of my first watch, I deeply related to this aspect. I wanted to move away from home but felt scared to do so and felt resentful of my town. While I couldn’t do this at the time, Lady Bird did and inspired me to switch from a Communications and Sociology major to a Communications and Film Studies major. 

I rewatched the film several times towards the end of 2017, and when my birthday rolled around, I found myself in the same anxious haze of 2016. To cheer myself up I put it on but this time, I felt different. The anxiety hadn’t disappeared— I would be giving too much credit, but the feeling of displacement was no longer around. I can’t say if the routine started accidentally or on purpose, but I did the same for my 20th birthday and my 21st, 22nd, and 23rd after that. 

Five years later, it’s not only the 5th anniversary of Lady Bird, but it’s also my 24th birthday tomorrow (November 8th). I am five years older than I was when I watched Lady Bird, and my relationship with my mother is far better, but I wondered what the rewatch of Lady Bird would do for me this year as there was no catharsis I needed to get through. But is catharsis the only reason I should be watching a film, or can my love for it exist beyond that? 

I’ve also become much more aware of the issues within the film, such as how Lady Bird depicts a racially diverse city as a primarily white environment. In addition, Lady Bird makes an unruly racist comment towards her adopted brother when she doesn’t get into college, and there have been comparisons of how the film has similarities to Real Women Have Curves (2002), a coming-of-age movie starring America Ferrera. 

Being able to reconcile one’s love for art while acknowledging its issues is always tricky because the question becomes, “is my love for it enough to look past the harm?” In my eyes, I see that I have to hold both my care and my criticism to certain aspects in a similar light—they can co-exist.

That being said, I am so grateful to this film because even if my routine ceases to be, I will always hold it dear for the path it set me on. As much as someone may scoff at this, I believe that my filmmaking and writing wouldn’t exist if not for Gerwig.