Booksmart (2019)

directed by Olivia Wilde

Tina Kakadelis

The first girl I had a crush on sat next to me in Honors World History during sophomore year of high school. I can still picture the classroom and the teacher. He was a floater, so our World History class was held in a Spanish room. Every single day, he would come into the room wearing a polo shirt, jeans, and Converse shoes. Every single day, without fail, the color of his polo shirt would perfectly match the shade of his shoes. Every single week, the same five colors on his shirt and his shoes.

That class was maybe the only time in my life I was thankful for assigned seats, because I always got to sit next to her. I remember the gap between her two front teeth and the way it gave her a small lisp. She had sandy blonde hair and the prettiest eyes. I couldn’t tell you what color her eyes were, but I remember the way she would write notes to me in the margins of my paper. The way she always wrote in a light blue gel pen in this wonderful hybrid of cursive and manuscript. She gave me butterflies in the simplest, dumbest teenage way.

I was always a bit of a goody two-shoes in school. Crippling anxiety mixed with a fear of letting people down made me an overachiever, but something about pretty girls made that fall away. Suddenly, I was a class clown. I became possessed. Obsessed with making her laugh every chance I got. Foolishly, I’m not sure I even knew it was a crush at that time. I just knew that something about the sound of her laugh made me feel funny and I wanted to hear it again and again and again.

The first time I saw Booksmart, I was fresh out of a relationship. There’s a specific kind of loneliness in Los Angeles. All big cities are probably lonely, but LA is specific because you spend so much time driving in a car. You’re not huddled on a crowded bus or subway, brushing past people on sidewalks. You’re just having a rage meltdown by yourself in your car as you circle the block for the fifth time trying to find a parking spot.

That loneliness is compounded when you lose the person who sat in your passenger seat. The person whose hand, mindlessly playing with your hair, staved off those parking spot rage meltdowns. I used to love going to movies alone, but going to the movies was such an integral part of our relationship that seeing Booksmart by myself in the back row felt exceptionally sad.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, Booksmart is about two best friends, Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), who spend their high school years studying instead of partying. Their goal is to get into prestigious colleges. The day before their high school graduation, they learn that all the kids who spent the past four years partying are also going to prestigious schools. Molly is desperate not to miss out on their last chance to have both partied and studied in high school, so she drags Amy on an all-night romp across the San Fernando Valley.

One of their stops on the romp is Nick’s (Mason Gooding) party. There, Amy sees her crush, Ryan (Victoria Ruesga), who pulls her into the room where their classmates are doing karaoke. Amy sits on an ottoman with Ryan in front of her, Ryan’s arm casually resting on Amy’s thigh. All in all, that moment accounts for less than ten seconds of the film’s run time, but I walked out of that theater unable to think of much else.

In such a succinct way, with no dialogue, Booksmart had perfectly distilled the immensity of teenage crushes into a moment that ached with nostalgia. Watching Booksmart, many years out of high school, I could feel my heart clench for Amy in that moment. The way Amy briefly studies how Ryan’s arm looks on her leg and how her face betrays the cool aura she’s trying to project. A wide, bold, glorious grin spreads across her face. It’s from the hope of it all, the potential, and the possibility that finally feels within her reach. Now it’s just a matter of making something out of the moment.

Amy’s character development in the movie is her journey toward learning to vocalize what she wants. For so much of their friendship, Amy has let Molly call the shots and plan their futures. That all finally comes to a head on this last night, and Amy must find it in herself to go after the things she wants. Not what Molly has planned for her, but the future Amy wants. It’s a terrifying precipice to stand on and say “this is what I want,” because then it’s known. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat. Once it’s known, it can’t ever be put back in the box.

I spent most of the movie with tears in my eyes. Partially because I thought about what a movie with positive queer representation and interesting female friendships would have done for little tenth grade me in that World History class. And also because it was overwhelming how much I saw my teenage self reflected in Amy. Our awkward charm, our love for Virginia Woolf, and the paralyzing fears of acting on our desires. We both had a beret phase, drove old baby blue cars, and wore well-loved jean jackets covered in patches.

I think about that simplicity a lot now as someone who’s gone through relationships where everything feels complicated. Relationships that end not because of some big, terrible thing, but because two people, at their current stages in life, do not work together. And when things are ending—because you know it’s the best thing to do for this person whom you love but whose world you simply do not work in—it’s impossible not to think about when things felt very simple. When a brush of their hand, a whispered joke, or a passed note was more than enough.

Even though Booksmart is a lighthearted comedy, it’s hard for me to revisit it now. It makes me think of who I was at two very different points in my life. It reminds me of the version of myself in LA and the me who sat in World History class cracking jokes to make a pretty girl laugh. I wonder what she would think of the older but not-that-much-wiser me who was heartsick and crying in the back row of the Burbank AMC 16. I would hope she’d be happy with how it all turned out. It’s not the ending that I wanted, but that relationship was filled with the special feelings I dreamed of when I was younger. Nothing will ever be as simple as those notes written in the margins by the girl with the gap between her teeth, but I want more than that.

I want action and boldness. For better or worse, my heart is on my sleeve to make up for that kid who sat in World History unable to admit what she was feeling. Yes, it was simpler back then, but I want people to know how I feel about them in the most simple, desperate way. Not for the sake of arrogance, but because these feelings of fondness and warmth deserve to be spoken into existence.

Tina Kakadelis is a pop culture writer whose words have been featured on Film Cred, Film Daze, 25 Years Later, and others. She won a middle school poetry contest and has been coasting ever since. You can find her on social media @captainameripug or at tinakakadelis.com.