The Starling Girl (Parmet, 2023)
I have identified as Christian for just over forty years now, though I have never embraced any of the cultural, theological, or denominational labels that have commonly modified that category in my life. Perhaps because I was neither born into nor reared in a religious community, my understanding of what those modifiers signaled has fluctuated from vague to confused. Even before I developed a specialty in Early-American literature in part to understand the nexus between American politics and religion, I grasped intuitively that there were some people who identified as “Christians” but did not practice the religion in any form that I could recognize as consistent with my own understanding of what the New Testament called for. For far too long I tried to understand these differences in theological rather than sociological terms, and it wasn’t until I taught for four years at a Bible college that I truly came to understand that there were people who called themselves Christians who meant by that term only “others like me — those who share my background, my heritage, my politics, my culture.”
My own religious identification has little bearing, of course, on my qualifications for making or ability to make formal analyses or aesthetic judgments about narrative art. It is perhaps relevant, though, to my qualifications to address the most important thing about The Starling Girl. In the press notes, writer/director Laurel Parmet says:
“When making the film, it was important to me that we not mock or condescend to those in
Christian communities. I want audiences to be invested in these characters, not watching
judgmentally from afar.”
I have seen a lot of films in my adult life about emotionally or spiritually damaging religious communities. Some of them apparently written to show they are toxic (Jesus Camp; Boy Erased). Others are sometimes written to celebrate what the filmmakers don’t necessarily realize is toxic (War Room; Left Behind). That certainly corroborates my own experience, which is that religion in general and Christianity specifically, can be both a sincere source of joy and strength and a painful source of oppression and suffering. Aside from the technical competence, what has consistently differentiated such films for me is nuance. Those who see Christianity (or Evangelicalism if you prefer) as singularly and almost completely bad suffer from the same problem as those who see it as always good and any criticism of it as persecution. Art is as allergic to self-righteousness as it is to toxic hate.
The Starling Girl is a painful film to watch — perhaps more so if you are familiar with such subcultures — in part because the people in it at times do hateful things. But it is savvy enough to know that very few parents simply wake up one day and say, “I’m going to crush the dreams of my daughters and teach them to hate their bodies and souls.” The thing that elevates this movie is that Parmer approaches the material with an anthropological curiosity. Even the statutory rapist (trigger/spoiler warning I guess, for anyone who can’t see where this is inevitably headed early on) is presented less as a self-conscious predator and more as a product of an environment that is as poorly equipped to develop loving, humble, Christian adult men as it is to train girls how to deal with those who are unworthy of the positions of absolute power and privilege that their warped cultural theology gives them.
It might be one of the hardest and most important things that the movie does is recognize how such a culture warps and damages men while also recognizing that it shields them from the consequences of their own brokenness by scapegoating women. Very few, if any, of the men here are cynically patriarchal for their own convenience. They honestly think that is the social organization that God has ordained. But nearly all of them are to some degree aware of (and trying to repress) their own inadequacy to meet the demands that such a system places on them for integrity, intellectual honesty, and self-discipline.
The most obvious cinematic touchstone for The Starling Girl is probably Women Talking, and if I prefer Parmer’s film it is not because Polley (or Miriam Toews) is untruthful or unaware of how men and boys are soul-crushed by patriarchal theology and sociology. It’s just that Parmer’s status as an outsider allows her, I think, to push past the immediate identification with those more brutally victimized and seek to understand as well as condemn. Parmer says in the press notes that she identifies as a *woman* with the characters in patriarchal purity culture. One needn’t be an Evangelical Christian to know what it is to be told that one’s sexuality is not just something potentially dangerous that ought to be carefully managed to avoid self-harm but something downright evil that must be obliterated to avoid the snare it is for others who cannot discipline their own. Her ability to partially identify with the victims who are not exactly like her is what makes The Starling Girl a dramatic tragedy rather than merely a horror freak show.
Without giving plot spoilers, I will also say that the film has the best ending of any film in its genre that I can remember. Not since Two Days, One Night (different genre, but bear with me) have I been so conscious midway through a film that I saw no possible way for a singular story to end satisfactorily in a way that would be both credible and yet not despairing. A film that ended in (physical or more often spiritual) death would be too bleakly deterministic, Yet a film that ended “happily” always risks underselling the degree and scope of the perils that such environments create for its women. The Starling Girl shows a young woman on the verge of having her internal, spiritual compass permanently damaged looking for a way to avoid a spiritual lobotomy while realizing that she may yet be too young to protect herself from the physical dangers that confront someone who is cast out by family and community.
For this reason — I kid you not — it reminded me of A Man Escaped. Narratives of those who escape seemingly impossible situations by trusting their own internal compass are precious to me. It’s what I love about Jane Austen’s Emma. It is, in a more mythic sense, where so much of the poignancy in The Lord of the Rings comes from. I’ve reached a point in my own Christian development where it doesn’t bother me if others scoff or call that internal leading an evolutionary survival mechanism, luck, or a freak Spider-sense. In my own experience, I call it being spirit led, and it is a reminder to me that God sometimes answers our cries and prayers while we are groping in the darkness even as we are training ourselves to assume that the only dialect He speaks is that of disapproval and condemnation.
I haven’t even addressed some of the technical proficiencies that elevated the film, so before I close, I’ll just say that in addition to its writing being impeccable, this film is masterfully edited. What you see and what you don’t see, what is shown and what is left to the imagination, drives the story in such a way that makes you understand what happens rather than just know it.
In this age, one almost hates to saddle a feature-film debut with too-effusive praise because it is the nature of the Internet to push back on anything enthusiastic. But, hey, bravas to Parmet and star Eliza Scanlen and kudos to the whole team.
The Starling Girl is available for streaming on demand through AppleTV and Amazon in addition to select other platforms.
