While watching Lady Bird (2017), I realized that the titular protagonist reminded me a lot of one of my favorite literary characters, Nao Yasutani.
These young women come from vastly different backgrounds and struggle with distinctly disparate situations, but their yearning for something more infiltrates every single interaction they have with other humans.
Lady Bird is an ambitious provocateur, prone to dramatics and sulking. Her world in Sacramento is small and she aches for a new kind of life, one filled with glamour and chaos and wonder. In Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Nao is a depressed young woman, bullied mercilessly by her peers in Tokyo, who plans to eventually “graduate from life.” Yet, despite her insistence that she will eventually depart the mortal coil, Nao is secretly fascinated by the minutiae of life, cataloguing her memories with searing precision. Lady Bird and Nao are so, so different. But gumption and humor sticks to their pores. They chafe, bewildered, against their reality. Yet they can’t help but love, too.
For Lady Bird and Nao, much of their unhappiness stems from the recognition that just beyond their fingertips is a pool of possibility, glimmering in the distance. They try to create new moments, something they can hold onto, but the kind of happiness that they want slips through their fingers like water.
At one point, Nao writes in her journal about the paradox of attempting to really, truly live in the present:
“I used to sit in the backseat of our Volvo station wagon, looking out at the golf courses and shopping malls and housing developments and factories and salt ponds streaming by on the Bayshore Freeway, and in the distance the water of San Francisco Bay was all blue and sparkling, and I kept the window open so the hot, dry, smoggy haze could blow on my face while I whispered Now! …. Now! … Now! … over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the word was what it is: when now became NOW. But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It’s already then.”
She adds, “It was hopeless, like trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it…”
Lady Bird changes her name into something “unique,” throws herself into theater, falls in love, falls out of love, and fights bitterly with her mother. She’s a jar of fireflies, filled with something bright and jittery, ready to crack at the merest threat of impact. She wants to live, even if it hurts, especially if it hurts, but she’s chasing an elusive kind of contentment that she’s not sure actually exists. Even if she can’t articulate it precisely, like Nao, Lady Bird is growing up and absorbing the knowledge that time rushes past all of us at an alarming speed. Even when we’re young and want it to pass, acknowledging its passing is a secret kind of grief. Lady Bird desperately wants to leave Sacramento. She desperately wants newness. But as she realizes in the very end of the film, her past—including who she once was—remains a part of her.
When Lady Bird sits across from Sister Sarah Joan at school, the nun kindly looks at her after reading her college application.
She tells Lady Bird, “You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.”
Lady Bird replies, “Well, I was just describing it.”
“Well, it comes across as love.”
“Sure. I guess I pay attention.”
Sister Sarah Joan explains, “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?”
In the stories of Lady Bird and Nao, both young women insist that they hate everything about their lives. But they also spend all of their time studying and reacting to and writing about the things they supposedly cannot stand, including their own parents.
And for both of them, a significant crux of their pain is their inability to understand their parents, or have their parents understand them. Miscommunication is the familial tragedy that underscores their stories.
Part of the reason Nao wants to leave her own life is because she sees the ways in which the world has destroyed her father. Even so, she doesn’t understand why her father has allowed himself to unravel, so she chooses to hate him. If he’s going to leave, then she’s going to leave, too. They don’t really speak to each other, instead falling back on euphemisms and assumptions, which heightens their rising levels of internal despair. Nao keeps expecting her parents to read her mind—and they keep thinking that they have, indeed, read her mind. But her father misreads her, miserably, and languishes in his own emotional prison. He knows she hates him. Nao wants her father to save her, and when he can’t do that, she tells herself that she hates him.
But it’s love that is pouring from their skins. They can only try to repair when they listen. As the story demonstrates, miscommunications, words left unspoken, leave deep scars that family members struggle to witness or make sense of in each other.
Similarly, Lady Bird and her mother spend the majority of the film eyeing each other warily, yelling cruelties like bullets, and then repeating old patterns of uneasy neutrality. Her mother loves her, but she shows her love by pushing, over and over again, for what she believes Lady Bird should become. In turn, Lady Bird only sees her mother trying to change her, prod her into something “better,” and it makes her think that her mother doesn’t like her, much less love her. They care about each other so much that their emotions rise off like steam, enveloping their interactions, jumbling their brains. It makes it hard for either of them to see each other clearly. It makes it hard for either of them to know each other. Here, unspoken conversations lead to tension and estrangement and heartbreak.
Eventually, both Lady Bird and Nao come to terms with the fact that human life is messy, unpredictable, and meandering. Immediately upon arriving in New York City for college, Lady Bird drinks too much and ends up in the hospital. As she walks to her dorm in the bright light, she studies the sky with the kind of clear-headed thinking that only sits in after a night of crying and regret. She walks and she breathes and she walks.
Lady Bird calls her parents and leaves them a message:
“Hi Mom and Dad, it’s me. Christine. It’s the name you gave me. It’s a good one. Dad, this is more for Mom – Hey Mom: did you feel emotional the first time that you drove in Sacramento? I did and I wanted to tell you, but we weren’t really talking when it happened. All those bends I’ve known my whole life, and stores, and the whole thing. But I wanted to tell you. I love you. Thank you, I’m… thank you.”
And that’s when Lady Bird sees that life does slip from your fingers, so quickly, but sometimes there is a beauty in that, too.
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