What ‘Boyhood’ Shows Us About Girlhood

What ‘Boyhood’ Shows Us About Girlhood

In Richard Linklater’s Oscar-nominated movie, a boy grows independent even as his sister loses her self-confidence

By Sharon Marcus and Anne Skomorowsky in the Wall Street Journal

The Oscars are coming, and Richard Linklater ’s “Boyhood,” already a critical favorite, is a contender for many of the big awards. As the title declares, the film is very much a boy’s coming-of-age story, but “Boyhood” is also about girlhood. Mason has a sister, Samantha, who grows up alongside him over the course of the 12 years it took to make the film.

For the first half of the film, as Mason dreams, Samantha competes with him. She dominates, teases and outperforms her younger brother (in reality, the actors playing the brother and sister were born only months apart). When Samantha first appears, she whizzes by Mason on her bike, calling him home for dinner. She taunts him by singing a Britney Spears song, speaking pig Latin and reminding him that he flunked first grade.

Even in early adolescence, Samantha remains outspoken, challenging her controlling stepfather about the pointlessness of dusting, worrying about her stepsiblings when he turns abusive and her mother flees the house.

But in the film’s last hour, Samantha starts to fade. Her speech and voice start to disintegrate audibly: She speaks less, signals uncertainty with the constant use of the filler phrase “I mean” and punctuates many of her statements with a nervous laugh. At Mason’s high school graduation party, she makes a toast only after being prompted to do so.

By contrast, as Mason gets older, he speaks in a loud, deep voice and expresses himself in well-formed sentences, unhampered by nervous tics and distracting phrases. The teenage Mason is full of ideas and grows in confidence with every passing year.

What explains these differences in their development? Pivotal scenes in which adults confront each of them offer a key. In one, Mason’s photography teacher accuses him of laziness and gutlessness. “Who do you want to be, Mason? What do you want to do?” When Mason responds vaguely that he wants to make art, his teacher demands, “What can you bring to it that nobody else can?”

In an earlier scene, the mother confronts Samantha with a similar existential question after she has failed to pick Mason up after school: “Do you want to be a cooperative person, who is compassionate and helps people out? Or do you want to be a self-centered narcissist?”

Mason’s teacher pressures him to think about how he can express his individuality; Samantha’s mother offers a false choice: either help others or be an unlikable person. The boy is asked to take himself way too seriously, while the girl is chastised for a single instance of having put herself first.

“Boyhood” shows us the different challenges that boys and girls face in holding on to the self-regard each of us possesses from infancy. The normal child expects and demands admiration, adoration and service from parents. In adolescence, these feelings usually turn toward romantic partners and personal accomplishments. In “Boyhood,” we see Mason become both independent and playful as he moves through these stages, but Sam seems to lose her way.

Samantha’s mother presents care-taking and personal sacrifice as the deepest, worthiest sources of pleasure, but the film also suggests that they can be deeply unsatisfying. In her final speech in the film, as Mason packs for college, the mother wails, “This is the worst day of my life…I didn’t know you were gonna be so…happy to be leaving.” Being “a cooperative person” has been a disappointment for the mother’s character.

It is small wonder that Samantha, too, is so unsure of herself. If she identifies as a self-effacing future mother, she may never find out what she can do. On the other hand, if she strives for personal expression, as her brother does, she may lose the one source of gratification her mother has offered her.

On the day that Mason graduates, the father gives his son two messages: “Don’t hand over the controls of your self-esteem” [to an ex-girlfriend] and “I believe in you, Mason. I think you’re really special.” Samantha’s story line just trails off, with the same vagueness as her sentences.

Who wouldn’t want the freedom of adulthood without its responsibilities? Mason is no more likely than his father to be able to attain this fantasy, but the adults around him help him to articulate and celebrate that dream.

One of the achievements of “Boyhood” is to show us how girls are discouraged from putting themselves first. A boy can dream, the film suggests, but a girl…not so much.

—Dr. Marcus is professor of English and dean of humanities at Columbia University. Dr. Skomorowsky is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center.

Poster’s comments:

1)      I am from the school of thought that says maximize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses.

2)      Boys and girls are different.

3)      There are many reasons that we humans have the problems we have on our earth do to our vast overpopulation of the earth. Well half of all humans are female, so they are certainly part of the equation.