Movies

Welcome back to Pop Pedestal, the series where we pay homage to our favorite characters in pop culture. This week I'd like to take it back to 1996 with Dawn Wiener, the 7th grade martyr from Todd Solondz' Welcome to the Dollhouse. 

Pedestal Profile: In Welcome to the Dollhouse we follow Dawn Wiener, an endearing loner, as she navigates the minefields of life in junior high. Nicknamed "Wienerdog" by her classmates, Dawn spends much of the movie being made fun of mercilessly by her classmates. Besides suffering the miseries of school, at home Dawn is also the black sheep, stuck between a nerdy, driven older brother and a beautiful, charming, ballerina for a little sister. Over the course of the film Dawn experiences an overwhelming crush on her older brother's hunky friend, the tearing down of her clubhouse for The Special People's Club, the kidnapping and comic recovery of her little sister, and the aggressive and threatening affections of her first boyfriend. 

I originally intended for this to be a companion piece to my previous post about the 2009 film Adam. Mozart and the Whale is a 2006 romantic "dramedy" about a man and a woman with Asperger syndrome and, in many ways, it makes a very neat thematic companion to the other film. In Adam, the protagonists' relationship ultimately fails because the title character's autism prevents him from fulfulling an appropriate "masculine" role. In Mozart and the Whale, the relationship succeeds because both characters are autistic; neither of them can successfully maintain a relationship with a "normal" person but, as the tagline says, "They don't fit in. Except together." The troubling implication is that if autistic people are going to pursue romantic relationships, it's best if we stick with "our own kind."

There are many movies about a young person awkwardly stumbling into adulthood—but they're not usually about young women. Attenberg (screening this week at the Portland International Film Festival) follows Marina, a 23-year-old woman living in a coastal Greek city who's smart, but still doesn't have all the answers. Click through for more on the film, and other flicks to catch this week at PIFF!

Save a few outlying exceptions, I watched most of these films on Netflix and streamed a number of them. This is how I saw Argentinean writer-director Lucía Puenzo’s 2007 feature debut XXY. It’s a touching coming-of-age film about Alex Kraken (an excellent Inés Efron), a 15-year-old intersex girl who decides to stop taking medication to suppress her masculine features. She recently relocated to a seaside village in Uruguay with marine biologist father Néstor (Ricardo Darín) and mother Suli (Valeria Bertuccelli) to avoid social stigma. Her mother invites family friends from Argentina to their new home with the intent to discuss a sex change operation, which Alex doesn’t want.