The Diary of a Teenage Girl starts with a triumph. Fifteen-year-old Minnie (Bel Powley), spring in her stride, tells us in a voiceover that she just lost her virginity. Or, as she put it: “I had sex today. Holy shit.”
A few minutes later, we find out that the man with whom she had sex, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard), is much older than she is. And that he is Minnie’s mother’s boyfriend.
Diary is based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 graphic novel of the same name, which in turn is based largely on Gloeckner’s own life. Diary was adapted by Marielle Heller, in 2010, as a play; Heller directs the movie version, in theaters now.
Minnie gets the coming-of-age treatment so rarely offered to girls in movies: She has sex, she likes it, and whatever the fallout is — and, as you can imagine considering the circumstances, there is considerable fallout — it doesn’t leave her wrecked. But Diary allows that Minnie can be on the prowl for a multitude of things at once, that she can want sex as in end unto itself, or that she can really be wanting attention, or love, or to be wanted.
Monroe is a predator, but Minnie doesn’t see herself as a victim — at least, this girl who regularly asserts that she is “a fucking woman” would be insulted to hear anyone categorize her that way. And that might be the best thing about Diary, how it takes a story we think we know — older man seduces innocent girl-child — and holds it up to the light for a closer examination, allowing that someone inside that experience can have a valid interpretation of those facts that doesn’t align with our expectations.
So many movies show teenage girls as men see them, as objects of someone else’s desire instead of agents of their own. Diary invites us to see Minnie the way she sees herself. I spoke with Gloeckner about watching her story depicted in film, complicated mother-daughter relationships, and why it’s so rare to see girls like Minnie in the movies.
How do you feel watching the movie?
It’s really strange. I would say that, seeing the actual movie was not the pinnacle of that strangeness. I think it started a long time ago when M produced a play. The first time I saw that, I just wanted to cry. I was kind of overwhelmed. And since then, I was on the set of the movie and my kids were involved in one way or another in the production, so when I finally saw the movie, I guess I was just stunned. I had to see it twice, because I couldn’t even grasp what it meant to me, or even, I couldn’t judge it. It was just a little too much.
You’ve said that, if you made the movie, it would have been much darker, that it would have hurt to watch. Which was interesting to hear because, tonally, it’s not a super-dark movie. There’s this real exuberance to Minnie, even though what’s happening to her is dark. She kicks off the movie with this voiceover of: “I had sex today. Holy shit.” It’s so triumphant.
I guess what I didn’t add is, Minnie would have been equally joyful, but it would have gone a little more deeply into the darker areas of the story. She is a teenager, and the joy and the pain are, they’re almost like manic-depressives, teens. Every feeling is so intense. So it would have been more like the book, but the book has a happy ending, too. So in that sense, the film is not so different in terms of the story arc. It just goes a few other places that the movie doesn’t really go. But I think that — if I had made the movie, it probably would not have been as popular as this seems to be, in terms of independent films. So it’s good that she did it. More people will see it. And I really like the film, I must say.
The question in that sense is: What if it had been a more age-appropriate relationship or, in terms of the family, a more appropriate person that she was involved with? She probably would have experienced that same elation. She’s a teenager, of course she’s going to feel that. This is new to her. And she doesn’t have the ability to see it from the outside. She’s still confused, she doesn’t even know if it’s right or wrong. She’s kind of putting it in the hands of Monroe, her mom’s boyfriend. The movie paints her more as the aggressor, but I think it’s far more subtle in the book. She goes along with him.
Right. There’s this scene in the movie where Minnie sucks on Monroe’s finger in a bar. And at this point, she’s a virgin and she’s 15 years old, and it’s this kind of knowing thing that she does. For someone who doesn’t know anything about sex… she kind of seems to know something about sex.
That was Marielle’s cinematic choice. But in the book, she doesn’t do that, and he takes her hand and puts it down his pants. She doesn’t volunteer that. And she’s much drunker, too. So although her reaction — you read her thoughts in the book, and she’s actually, she’s kind of overwhelmed, she’s excited, but she — I think there’s a line in the book I wish I could quote, but it’s like, right after that experience she said, “I told him I wanted him to fuck me. But really, I don’t know if I want him or anybody else to fuck me. I just think if I don’t, I’ll never get the chance again.” So she’s kind of making this sort of teenagery irrational justification.
In Diary we see an extreme case of this, but I’m reminded of the way that most teenage girls figure out what is and is not sexy or attractive, and how it is so driven by the feedback they get from men, solicited or not. Minnie feels like she’s sexy because a man told her so.
Men are more protected. Women are constantly on display. There’s really this inequity which makes the male the shopper and the female the produce. And we accept that.
Very much so, yeah. I’m sure you’ve experienced it — I have a teenager myself. The other is in her early 20s. I can see, the questions about what she wears, anything that doesn’t show off any inch of her body, she thinks she’s ugly. But it’s a reflection of everything she sees on Tumblr, because she’s constantly collecting these images. And the girls judge each other as well. But I always think, okay, the way girls dress, you can see what their butt looks like. You can see how big their breasts are. The way a man is dressed, their sexuality is really underplayed. We don’t see the outline of their penis, we don’t know how big it is. Men are more protected. Women are constantly on display, or feel they have to be, especially young women. And there’s really this inequity which makes the male the shopper and the female the produce. And we accept that, entirely. We buy that.
Do you see this experience differently now that you are a mother with daughters?
Oh, definitely. When I was Minnie, or Minnie’s age, I still had fantasies that Monroe would fall in love with me. I had no way to judge exactly what was going on, or what my mother would think. It was from a distant, weird cloud. But that relationship, if you think about it, the destructive thing really isn’t the difference in age but, more directly, it’s the familial relationship where this guy is sleeping with the mother and the daughter. The mother and child didn’t have a great relationship to begin with, but no matter what, it creates a divide. The mother-daughter relationship is never really going to be possible in the way that it would be if that didn’t happen. So that, I think, is the worst thing. And also, I guess Minnie couldn’t see, for a long time, how immature Monroe was, and how incapable he was, really, of having the kind of relationship she was dreaming about. I think of it differently because I can see all these things. I certainly wouldn’t want that for my kids. I don’t think it’s cool or anything else. But I wrote the book without that judgment, because the girl didn’t have it. And I wanted it to be from her point of view as much as possible.
It reminded me, though, of how when you’re a teenager, you think you are an adult — more adult than you actually are — so any adult who treats you as a peer must be seeing something mature and exceptional in you. When really, an adult who can level with a child in that way is being childish. It’s not that the teenager is an adult inside; it’s that the adult is immature.
Right, exactly, something is a little off. He was still seeing it more or less as Minnie saw it back then, some game or conquest or something fun. Which, you can look at it that way — but I don’t think he would ever have been able to, I quoted him in some other article, I guess he was in a bar or something with a friend and he showed the friend the trailer without explaining why, or his relationship to it, and the guy said, “That’s a pretty sick situation.” and Monroe said “What do you mean? This guy’s a real man!”
How old is he now?
He’s 70 or so.
Were you surprised by his reaction?
It surprised me, yeah, because I had assumed that he had matured or changed or reflected on his life or whatever. But that he hadn’t, at least, in terms of me, it didn’t surprise me. After I got over the initial direction of my assumptions.
Some of the most compelling moments, to me, are when Minnie is alone in her room, just figuring herself out: Standing naked and looking in the mirror, recording her diary. It’s pretty rare to see a girl have that time alone in a movie — a time when, like we were saying before, her sexuality isn’t about how guys see her but it’s just about how she sees herself. Why do you think scenes like that are so hard to find in film?
It’s true, we don’t see that very often. Because when girls are treated as the object in a film, to have that object become a real person capable of introspection and their own thoughts, then their objectification gets kind of wobbly, because they become human. And women are just constantly treated as, you know, the pole dancer, it’s the Madonna/whore thing, they’re either virgins to be rescued, virgins to pursue, or whores, or older, nurturing types. And if they’re not nurturing types and they’re older, they’re going to be bitches, or bitter. We see more of a variety of characters, I think, than we have in the past.
Did your mom see the movie? What did she think?
Yeah, she saw it. She hadn’t read the book, but she saw the movie. She was afraid to read the book, I think. And she was pleased by the movie. I think she was afraid to see the movie, but when she saw it, she was relieved. I think it is a bit darker in the book, but then, Minnie is kind of cantankerous. Minnie is oppositional. Minnie is a lot of things which are not so fully expressed in the film. She has a lot of reasons to fight with her mother, to be angry. And that was translated in the film to something a little less, well, it’s not as harsh. But maybe it’s not really as realistic, either. A film can get the idea of a book across, and it can give you the feeling and make you excited and be wonderful. But almost any adaptation I’ve seen, there’s always more in the book. That’s just a fact. It’s just a different thing. So the shorthand and the devices that the film takes do express the spirit of Minnie, but the story is a little different.
How do you feel about the depiction of that mother-daughter relationship?
I think it was shown really well. I think the mother was given a little bit more — Minnie was not told she was pretty so often by her parents or her mother. So there was much more of a feeling of unspoken rivalry. So I guess by making the mom a little more complimentary to the daughter, it makes her seem a little bit more vulnerable, because you realize she’s weighing these other aspects of Minnie’s appearance or behavior. She’s comparing herself to Minnie.
Plus they’re so close in age.
The kid doesn’t understand that. The kid just thinks: Mother. The mother thinks of age. But a mother is a mother to any kid, no matter how old they are, or what the age difference is.
Do you think about how you want people to feel about the movie? Or are you separate from that, because you have the book and the book is all yours but the movie is a collaborative effort?
It’s a tale of someone beginning to discover who they are. Boys have had a zillion opportunities to go through this transition with confusion and lack of judgment, and girls need that, too.
I can’t really. I can’t look at it as, somebody said the movie and the book are two different things and they have to stand on their own, and that’s true. But nevertheless, since the book came out of experiences in my own life, and was translated by me into this character, I could never separate any interpretation of it. So someone once told me, I talk to a lot of authors who had books adapted, they said if you’re not embarrassed by the film, you’re lucky. That is the best you can hope for. It is a low bar! But it would be very easy to be embarrassed by an adaptation of that particular book. But I trusted Marielle. I knew she loved Minnie and would do a bang-up job. The fact that it’s different, I can look at it as a separate work in that sense. But the spirit of this girl is captured and maintained in the film, and that’s what makes me happy.
I think that the fact that the lack of judgment from the point of view, I’m so glad that carried over from the book to the film. That really is the one thing that takes women out of their sense of victimhood, whether they are victims or not. The fact is, the experience is what Minnie has been given, and that makes her more human, and it’s not a morality tale. It’s a tale of someone discovering, or beginning to discover who they are. And boys and men have had a zillion opportunities to go through this transition with confusion and lack of judgment and everything else. And girls need that, too.
In some reviews of Diary, the dynamic between Monroe and Minnie is referred to as rape or sexual abuse. And legally, obviously, it is. Yet that feels like a strange word to use in the context of how Minnie sees her experience — but it also feels just as wrong to call it a “relationship,” because that really lets Monroe off the hook. Do you have a word for this?
I don’t have a word. Because I really do have to speak to it from the point of view of that teenager. That’s not what the book or the film is about. It’s about being a teenager. So, yes, it might be abusive and everything else. But that’s not really part of the experience that’s being expressed, because there’s not full consciousness of it. It’s presented, because any kid, if you want to talk about abuse, any kid who has been abused by an adult is somehow convinced that it’s not wrong. And it’s not rational. There’s a lot of attention given to the kid, there’s emotional things, unless it gets violent and they’re threatened. There’s this production. And Minnie is fully in that space, and Monroe is kind of an idiot, not very self-aware. And that’s what — the story is about that space. It is a relationship, but I don’t know what to call it.
I listened to this Fresh Air interview you did, and you said that you told a therapist about this and she basically told you, “Oh, I can’t help you here.” It sounds like she didn’t really arm you with the language you would need to describe this to yourself or anyone else.
She didn’t. But she also told me that, if she talked to me at all, she would have to tell my mother. She probably should have told my mother immediately! But she didn’t want to talk to me again because of this, and she didn’t know how to deal with it, so she sent me to another therapist who also didn’t tell my mother. But even at that time, they were supposed to tell the parent, but they didn’t. Maybe I begged them not to, I don’t know.
It’s interesting to think about how this would have played out had it happened today and not in the 1970s. Because you like to think that we’ve evolved enough in our thinking that a parent wouldn’t turn to her kid in this situation and blame the kid, like it’s always the girl’s fault when a sexual transgression takes place.
I would hope so. That’s kind of the party line, that you hear more often nowadays. But there still is this idea of the perverted girl child who will try to seduce and do things like that. That still exists very strongly, I think.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.