Lisa Frankenstein, Diablo Cody’s Women and When to Stop Coming of Age

Words: Anna McKibbin

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There are relatively few screenwriters whose style can break through the hubbub of filmmaking voices, but Diablo Cody is the exception. A thoroughly modern, entirely unique auteur, whose hyper-specific observations of the world merge popular idioms with sharp, shiny cultural touchstones. 

Like Heathers, Clueless and Mean Girls, her breakout hit Juno crafted a brand-new vernacular for her characters, as acidic and sharp as it was fresh. These scripts are consistently delivered with a light, frothy cadence, but they also mine the maligned and complicated turmoil of women’s worlds. Such an esoteric tone extends beyond her teenage stories, traversing new, middle-aged terrain: Cody’s work has been ageing alongside its author.

“Novel of education” is the rough translation of the German word “Bildungsroman” - a genre of literature focusing on growing up and the basis for all on screen coming of age dramas. The Bildungsroman embraces a character’s whole life, moving with them from childish naivete to heroic enlightenment, often only achieved in adulthood. Cody revolutionises this formula, stretching and twisting its standard shape. Most obviously, Jennifer’s Body is infused with a gory nearness, colouring this age in streaked, bloody shades. But perhaps, more radically, each of her films suggest that to grow (in every sense) is a process that spins on indefinitely, long past girlhood. Her character’s development stretches into later life, emerging in ugly, stale patterns.
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While her newest offering, Lisa Frankenstein, is seemingly another high school-locked, teenage reckoning, our protagonist Lisa Swallows’ (Kathryn Newton) is preoccupied with leaving her youth behind. She longs to embrace the certainty of death as opposed to the instability of being young, lurching away from the crux of emotional turmoil into a body and life that makes more sense. She unwittingly resurrects the buried corpse of a (half-rotten) pianist (Cole Sprouse), moulding him into the ideal boyfriend through the disassembled body parts of her vindictive stepmother and gross lab partner. She sits alongside him – a distorted collision course of different timelines, generations converging in one mangled body. She explains the dissonant advice dispensed in the wake of her mother’s murder: “They kept saying ‘time heals all wounds.’ But that’s a lie. Time is the wound.” Such a deep-rooted, existential fear of whatever comes next is explicit in Lisa Frankenstein’s text, concluding in her choosing to embrace the afterlife alongside her monstrous romantic creation.

“The Bildungsroman embraces a character’s whole life, moving with them from childish naivete to heroic enlightenment, often only achieved in adulthood. Cody revolutionises this formula, stretching and twisting its standard shape.”

Cody’s feel-bad offering from 2011, Young Adult, also embraces the ethos of “time as a wound”, offering us the awful Mavis (Charlize Theron), a protagonist whose external beauty is preserved, pickled in the reserves of disdain she has patiently stored. As her high school flame Buddy (played with typical himbo-ish swagger by Patrick Wilson) puts it in a misjudged observation: “The rest of us changed, you just got lucky.” She spends her days drinking, watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians and ghost-writing a series of young adult novels, pouring her own latent and youthful self-assurance into the protagonist, Kendall. When she receives news that Buddy has welcomed his first child, she races back to her hometown of Mercury, determined to win him back and maybe even prove that her life has been in service of something greater. Mercury is a set strewn with Mavis’ dead-end relationships, a disappointing interpersonal history discarded across local landmarks.  

Mavis’ story (rather than arc, or even progression, as she ultimately ends where she began) is a reckoning with the desires and ideas from her past that are worth resurrecting and embodying. Her cringe-inducing flirtation with the happily married Buddy is a poorly conceived attempt to make sense of where she was and where she is and the lack of movement between the two. Cody and her directorial collaborator Jason Reitman, plays with the positionality of the audience; Mavis is awful, and we are exposed to the obsessive attention she lavishes upon her physical form while systematically ignoring her moral rot. Yet by the end she admits to having a miscarriage while pregnant with Buddy’s child. This startling revelation, and the sympathy induced, is a sudden departure from the disgust and frustration prompted throughout. Cody’s script wasn’t judging Mavis, just holding all her unseemly parts together, before they exploded on Buddy’s well-manicured front lawn, in front of waiting spectators. 

This kind of twist is integral to Cody’s scripts, irrespective of their genre. In Tully it is the realisation that the removed, dreamy night nurse (Mackenzie Davis) has been a projection of Marlo’s (Charlize Theron) postpartum fantasies. Davis summarises her character in an interview with Jen Ortiz for Marie Claire: “Tully is in that sweet spot of her 20s… You’re old enough to feel momentum and young enough to think that you have all the time in the world.” It is a credit to Cody that the bright, chipper Tully is not the hero of this story. Rather, that mantle is carried by the determined, bedraggled mother of 3, who eventually submits to the waves of discomfort and emotion defining motherhood. 

The question remains, then: When is it time to stop submitting others to our occasionally violent growing pains? Juno offers a sustainable, sweet answer. Mark (Jason Bateman) is charming, funny, boasting an extensive record collection and “decent taste in slasher movies”; He is the rubric for Cody’s typical hero. But in the end the cool guy persona crumbles under the pressure of real responsibility. He admits to Juno (Elliot Page) that he is planning to leave the earnest and maternal Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), finally succumbing to the desire to live independently and free of meaningful requirements. All of this latent adolescence is represented in Bateman’s childlike pose, sleeves crumpled up to his elbows, with his shoulders hunched forward. “I don’t even know if I’m ready to be a father.” He mumbles. “But you’re old!” Juno exclaims in response. 

Cody’s films generously argue that there is no right way to get older, but perhaps there is a wrong way to do it. Her scripts don’t cast moral judgement on these protagonists, rather extending empathy to each perspective, sitting within the shattered consequences of people’s childish actions. Between Lisa and Mavis and Marlo and Mark and Vanessa it is clear that growing up is unpredictable, a journey that snakes a strange, alinear path. For Cody and her characters, evolution progresses in cyclical shapes, moving around and around the idea of adulthood, getting closer with every rotation.