by Isia Jasiewicz
There was a time when Alexis Bledel, or rather, her character Rory Gilmore on Gilmore Girls, was the girl that my friends and I all wanted to be. She had everything: beautiful eyes, flawless skin, a fun, young mom who was also her best friend. More importantly, she was also smart and successful: she was valedictorian of her prep school, went to Yale, and became editor in chief of The Yale Daily News, all while bouncing from hot boyfriend to hotter boyfriend.
Imagine my generation’s collective sigh of disappointment at Bledel’s newest role. In Post Grad, which opens today, Bledel plays Ryden Malby, the anti-Rory, the girl no one wants to be. Ryden has just graduated from college with an English degree and is forced to live at home with her dysfunctional family because she can’t find a job. Many of my college-aged friends told me that they don’t even want to see Post Grad. Why shell out 12 bucks and an hour and a half to watch a girl struggle to find a job, when they spend all their time stressing out about entering a recession-plagued job market anyway?
Well, as it turns out, Ryden is indeed the girl no one wants to be, but not because the recession hates her. Apparently, she just can’t find a job because she’s incompetent: she’s the only one of her friends who’s unemployed. She also makes bad decisions: buying an L.A. loft before she even interviews for a job, and, worst of all, (SPOILER ALERT!) once her career is finally on track, short-sightedly dropping everything when she suddenly decides that she’s in love with her best friend.
I’m not saying I don’t appreciate a grand romantic gesture like the one Ryden pulls when she quits her long-sought dream job, packs up her things, and flies from L.A. to New York to surprise the object of her affection at his Columbia Law School dorm. But I had hoped that the movie, whose publicity promised that Ryden would discover “a whole new world of intriguing possibilities,” would send some sort of message about doing what you love, or learning to change course—any message, in fact, other than the one that it actually sends: that a girl doesn’t need a job, as long as she has a boyfriend with a promising and lucrative career.
The annoyingly optimistic music playing over the film’s closing credits (“Brand New Day”) made it clear that I was supposed to walk out of the theater feeling euphoric. Instead, I just felt depressed. Why can’t I go to a movie and watch an ambitious young woman build a fulfilling life for herself, and if love comes her way, so much the better?
Post Grad is just one of a host of recent films that left me feeling empty. When Legally Blonde came out in 2001, it seemed that movies had found a new kind of heroine in Elle Woods. Her natural savvy and well-tuned gaydar solved a murder case, turning her into the star of her Harvard Law School class—and the girlfriend of a guy played by Luke Wilson. But since then, when have we ever seen a female character who’s smart, sexy, values her career, and is able to open her heart to a man she loves? In The Devil Wears Prada, Anne Hathaway’s character discovers that she has to choose between having an awesome career and no man in her life (like her steely soon-to-be-divorced boss), or a lower-profile job and a boyfriend with Adrian Grenier’s godly face. In Confessions of a Shopaholic, Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) is a pretty face and a witty, funny writer, but she doesn’t care about having a career. She wants to get a job so that she can buy more clothing, and when she loses said job, she only wants it back so that she can get cozy with her British bombshell of a boss (Hugh Dancy). Even in (500) Days of Summer, whose male lead quits his greeting-card-company job to follow his passions as an architect, the same girl who inspires him to make his big switch has no apparent career ambitions of her own, leaving her happy to be a well-dressed secretary with a mildly interesting personality.
What’s especially disappointing about Post Grad, then, is not so much that Ryden is another one-dimensional, boy-seeking female character, but that the movie goes whole hog in promoting gender roles that should be antiquated. Ryden’s Prince Charming, a guy named Adam, abandons his aspirations as a (not half bad) musician in order to go to law school, for no apparent reason other than a desire to end up richer than his grocery-store-manager dad. If Post Grad is trying to teach anything, it’s that the guy’s supposed to have a well-paying job, while the girl is supposed to follow him around like a puppy, because she can’t possibly be happy otherwise. (Hear that, single girls seeking jobs? Your lives must really suck!)
I suspect that the makers of Post Grad thought they were teaching young women that one’s career isn’t everything, which by itself would be a harmless, and maybe even welcome, message. There’s a scene tucked in before Post Grad’s silly hop-on-a-plane finale in which a guy Ryden made out with a few times tells her, “What you do with your life is really just half of the equation. The other half—the more important half—is who you’re with when you’re doing it.” If that’s true, then why does Ryden give up one half for the other? I think it’s time for a new Elle Woods to come along so that, for once, a happy ending can hand a girl the whole equation.
