20th Century Women – Mike Mills. -

Mike Mills creates a detailed portrait of a group of people living at a very specific moment in time (here, an idyllic summer in 1979 in Santa Barbara, California), conveying things they cared about, the kinds of conversations they had, the music they listened to and so on. Not very plot focused, the film gives its characters the essential breathing room they need to be who they are, without placing many plot constraints on them.

This may seem like a coming-of-age story for Jamie from the outside, however, Mills essentially turns the focus towards the environment he grew up in, specifically the women he grew up with, rather than Jamie himself. The main focus of the film are the women, and above all his mother, as seen through Jamie’s eyes, where Jamie is essentially being a vehicle to see the people and the changing culture surrounding him.

It seems to be framed as Jamie reliving his past memories from the future, looking back fondly on the people that affected and influenced him deeply during this time in his life. With this approach of looking back on your memories, no instance feels irrelevant. All of it feels rather significant, whether it be making a big decision or just having a simple conversation with a friend, who you have now lost touch with, or the moment of being introduced to a book or music that had a lasting impression on you.

This film, like his previous Beginners, feels much more like a series of carefully curated moments of personal history of its characters and shows how these experiences helped shape who they will become eventually. Mills creates a portrait of each of his characters, conveying highly specific details about their lives, including where they came from, why they currently feel the way that they do based on their previous experiences, the kinds of clothes they wear, the music they listen to, the cigarette brand they use, etc. For example, William (a tenant living in Dorothea’s house) says at one point that he makes his own shampoo, which tells us so much more about him with just that small detail.

These portraits are soaked in historical and cultural context, conveying how certain ideas, thoughts, moments, and feelings about oneself differ based on the time one lives in, and at the same time can be widely relatable and timeless. The film is a contextual piece, where the context is embedded in the film itself. Mills does this by merging his live-action with stills, historical footage, multiple narrators, book passages, and personal belongings. He says that he is interested in the way we construct our identity or the story of ourselves through the culture that we are living in and this method of combining mediums is an attempt at conveying just that. His background in Graphic design and Art school and specifically Hans Haacke’s work inspired him not to identify with any particular medium and to therefore decentralize live action. This method contextualizes the characters at the same time making the audience aware of the construction of its fiction.

Mills states that including personal specificities, concrete details from one’s experiences, or other people’s experiences is a way to avoid the feeling of convention or tropes, which is exactly what he does with his films. Beginners is inspired by the story of his own father coming out as gay and being diagnosed with cancer after his mother passed away and about how his coming out made him a completely different person, becoming very high on life and wanting to enjoy his time, having deeper personal conversations with his son, something that they didn’t have before. And 20th Century Women is based on his mother, the way she was, the ways she influenced him, and his attempts at connecting with her. These stories are highly specific, yet according to Mills, it’s this specificity of the emotions combined with its historical context that reaches people a lot more deeply.

When it’s not his own experiences, he likes the idea of interviewing people to get their details, specific moments, with their consent to include in his films. Such details can exceed the way we usually categorize people and they have this untidy quality to them that makes them feel so real, according to him.

“I like sewing together things I found, rather than inventing stuff” says Mills in an interview.

The film acknowledges its own limited perspective about the inner lives of its women, as Mills stated that he was concerned about misrepresenting their experiences. He interviewed a lot of women for the parts, as part of his writing process. There is also a line in the film where Julie says, “that’s not me, that’s just your version of me” which is him acknowledging this limited perspective.

Speaking of the characters, Dorothea is based on his mother and Abbie is based on his sisters, while Ellie is based on a bunch of women he interviewed, who would have been her age in 1979, with different experiences the characters have in the film coming from the experiences of different friends of his.

Despite this, he states that memory is incredibly untrustworthy and that his sisters have a completely different version of mom and dad in their minds. His films are his own subjective interpretation of his mom and dad, although he enjoys the impure and corrupt nature of memories as a writer and filmmaker.

He also further explains that despite his films being largely based on his own experiences, he isn’t making a memoir and that this process isn’t therapy for him. He is using his and other’s experiences in order to make a film about things that he loves, is confused by, is fascinated by, his observations, all in service of making a good film. One of the things he does is to depreciousize his memories and convey to his actors that “Just use what’s interesting. We can’t get precious about this. Use what helps. We’re making a movie. We’re not doing therapy.”

There are some scenes however that, Mills says surprise him still, in the fact that he said those things out loud, revealing something very personal to him, something he was embarrassed by. An example of this would be the last line in the film about how he will never be able to explain his mom to his son or towards the end when he says “I thought that was the beginning of a new relationship with her, but maybe that was it. That was as close as we ever were.” which, he says, comes from the shame of not having a better relationship with his mom.

Dorothea is filled with these beautiful contradictions where she is really interested in figuring out everything about her son, Jamie but when asked about how she felt, that was like an invasion of her privacy. Her inner life, her real struggles, she never really shows Jamie. This, Mills explains could be due to his mom being born in the 20s when there was a lot of shame about your emotions. There wasn’t a lot of support and anything related to failure or darker feelings was just not allowed. There was so much self-denial and a total lack of self-pity. Mills says in an interview that his mom married his dad despite knowing he was gay in order to have a man (also depicted in a scene in the film Beginners). She turned in the Jew badge and he turned in the Gay badge and got married. There was love and respect there, but also self-sacrifice. “Self-denial was just such a part of their lives and then the total lack of self pity, to the point that I found it kind of impossible to relate to the person. So much is blocked off”, remarks Mills in an interview.

By the end of the film, Dorothea finally tells Jamie a bit more about her inner life and complexities, but then, comes a line, which is referenced above as well, being “I thought that was the beginning of a new relationship with her, but actually, that was the most it ever was.” which Mills states is so much like life, as life is not full of such epiphanies or singular moments which change everything. Life is messy. People are messy.

Jamie really wants to know his mom or Julie or Abbie, and he is trying to understand them but can’t completely. Similarly, Dorothea is trying to understand her son as well. There is a scene in the film where Dorothea says to Abby, speaking of Jamie “You get to see him out in the world, as a person. I never will,” and Abby shows her a picture of Jamie she took when they were out together. This, admittedly is not a perfect representation but it’s the best thing available to convey this idea and for Dorothea to understand him; which is exactly what Mike is trying to do with this film too, for us as an audience to understand these characters a bit more even though it’s impossible to fully convey who they are.

Punk is a big part of this film, due to Mills admitting that Punk saved his emotional life growing up. He says “When punk came along, it was like, Okay, pain. Depression. Discomfort. Anger. Chaotic feelings that you can’t put labels on. It gave a space for all that.”

The film also comments on the 70s consumerist trappings as showcased by Jimmy Carter’s Crisis of Confidence speech about how we project things and objects with meaning to fill out a void, only to be unsatisfied. They did facilitate communication, however, the things and objects we own and derive and project meaning from don’t tell you a lot about an individual and are insufficient to understand the person who owns them/derives value from them. Mills states he feels his art is about trying to find yourself in a consumerist society. “But we’re addicted to it. It’s part of our life.”

Lauren Oyler writes in her review of the film on Vice that “Women’s reproductive outcomes are central to the conclusion to their stories. It’s perhaps not super empowering to admit that the particular nature of women, both those depicted in this film and those everywhere else, is often defined by the obstacles we face. But it is, unfortunately, the truth.”

It’s about these characters coming together from completely different walks of life affecting, teaching, and influencing each other, and then eventually going their separate ways, before looking back through their idealized rose-tinted glasses and remembering their time together. This feels incredibly life-like, as characterized by its transience. “Good things, bad things all come and go pretty quick. Quicker than you anticipated”, remarks Mills.

So, yeah, if it wasn’t already clear, this is a huge recommendation to check out films from Mike Mills.

I will end on a thing he said in an interview “Personal is political, personal is historical, studying our emotional lives and how they are part of the family story, the city story, the cultural story, history… that’s the only way we can get a little bit free of the roles that we have been put into – man women husband child straight gay – or rather the only hope for freedom or a little bit of freedom, which I think which is the only thing we can get to. History is the story that we are living now, history isn’t over. It’s still happening and is influencing how we are having this conversation. So, in order to understand ourselves, you have to understand the story you are a part of consciously or unconsciously, which also makes for great films”

20th Century Women – Mike Mills.

References and Interviews:

A Strand of Grass

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