There are things that happen in 20th Century Women, the brilliant new film from writer and director Mike Mills, that do not happen in other movies. For one, it stars Greta Gerwig as a feminist punk. Better yet, its definition of punk is refreshingly complex.
Set in Santa Barbara, California circa 1979, 20th Century Women tells the tale of an eccentric, chain-smoking, 50-something single mother named Dorothea (played by Annette Bening), who raises her wise teen skater son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), in an unusual household. Dorothea rents rooms to two boarders, including Gerwig’s character Abbie, a 20-something photographer and recovering cancer patient who’s eventually tasked with helping to raise Jamie. Delightfully, a central axis of the film lies in Jamie’s introduction to Abbie’s favorite punk records and feminist literature. This week, the film earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
In one scene, the newly enlightened Jamie is beat up after he explains how female orgasms actually work to a fellow skater (who prefers Black Flag to Jamie’s Talking Heads). Retribution continues when the tag “ART FAG” is graffitied onto the family car; Abbie explains to a bewildered Dorothea, “The punk scene is very divisive!” These are details Mills could have only gleaned first hand, and he did. As a fan of the era’s more aesthetically eclectic and daring punk bands, Mills was himself called “art fag” by aggro hardcore guys in the early ’80s. “In my little dumb Santa Barbara scene, the punk rules were so strict,” Mills said. “Even liking Joy Division would get you in trouble with the real hardcore kids. I had a Talking Heads shirt, and it was kind of illegal to wear it. I wasn’t so into the Black Flag/Circle Jerks industrial complex back then.”
In an attempt to understand this world, Dorothea attends a local punk show without her son and also attempts bedroom dancing to Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown. She’s not a fan (though apparently, in real life, Bening herself is). Early in the film, Dorothea has a similar reaction to UK art-punks the Raincoats’ raw debut single, “Fairytale in the Supermarket.” “Can’t things just be pretty?” she asks, to which her son replies, “Pretty music’s used to hide how unfair and corrupt society is.” It’s Abbie, though, who offers a most inspired monologue about the Raincoats, musing rapturously about “what happens when your passion is bigger than the tools you have to deal with it.” I nearly fell out of my theater chair. Mainstream culture rarely grapples with punk, let alone feminist outsider art, with as much nuance as Mills does in 20th Century Women.
Surprisingly, there is a precedent for this Raincoats nod: In 1999, the teen blockbuster 10 Things I Hate About You affixed a pivotal scene to the band as well—set at a rock show, where Heath Ledger’s character beguilingly proclaims to fellow outcast Julia Stiles, “They’re no Bikini Kill or Raincoats, but they’re not bad.” Still, the grist of 20th Century Women’s script here is remarkable. The Raincoats scene—and the whole film, it turns out—were inspired by critic Greil Marcus’ 1983 essay “Disorderly Naturalism,” which served as liner notes to the Raincoats’ live ROIR cassette The Kitchen Tapes. In it, Marcus unpacks how the music of the Raincoats captures “the process of punk,” defined as “the move from enormous feeling combined with very limited technique—more to the point, enormous feeling unleashed by the first stirrings of very limited technique.”
Mills is himself a Berkeley-born, matriarchy-raised, art-schooled punk who’s done graphic design for the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth (including the cover of Washing Machine) and made videos for the likes of Yoko Ono and Air, not to mention wrote and directed the films Thumbsucker and Beginners. Mills spoke to me about his film’s Raincoats scene, its definition of punk, and more.
Pitchfork: Why were the Raincoats an appropriate band to anchor that moment?
Mike Mills: There are a bunch of reasons. That song came out in ’79, so it’s totally perfect. As a movie called 20th Century Women, it’s great to have a female punk band in there. And another is the way Greta talked about the Raincoats: I showed her the Greil Marcus piece and she spun out her own version of it. What Greta says in the movie is a processing of Greil’s process-of-punk piece. Greta, in real life, also loved the Raincoats. We both have a lot of respect for them. So it was a big honor for us. They’re actually holding the 7” label in the scene; we got the record from [the band]. We felt like we were on hallowed ground.
What Greta’s saying—about how, if their band was based on virtuosity, it would detract from the rawness of the expression—it really actually spoke to Dorothea, and her problem of not being able to say her inner life. Being born in the ’20s, she didn’t have a culture that supported that. These ’70s kids have a culture that supports it. So in a way, the Raincoats weren’t just this cool cultural-musical reference. I was able to use it to speak really directly to the problem of my characters. The theme of the movie is expressed. Greta is going on and on about the Raincoats’ emotionality—and how they’re saying something raw and messy and that they can’t control—and that’s exactly what Dorothea can’t do in the movie, and needs to do.
The Raincoats’ music is really nonlinear. Your movie also doesn’t sell you that false narrative of everything being neatly figured out.
My film doesn’t follow plot structure strongly, or it doesn’t rely on that to hold the film together. It is sort of open-ended; the characters are a little ambiguous. And everything about the Raincoats is open-ended. There is a wobbliness to the music on that first record. I think a lot of people really love that because there’s something more human and inviting in the fragility of it. I definitely like that. In ways—mostly in the writing—I’m trying to do that, too.
The Raincoats are so much about this beautifully flawed statement. In that way, they do sort of echo the philosophy of this film, which is trying to promote these imperfect connections between people, and imperfect people generally. Everyone can’t be who they thought they were supposed to be, or who they want to be. But within that mess, there are some nice moments of connection, or little moments of grace. I feel like the music is doing that same project in a different way.
What else inspired Greta Gerwig’s character?
In real life, Greta’s based on my sister. Both of my sisters were a lot older than me, and worldlier. They turned me onto the Talking Heads, and a different way to be subversive and creative, like: “Here’s a different way to be men and women in the world.” So much of punk—Sex Pistols, Ramones, or even the Clash who I love—it’s so Guys On Stage Being Watched By Women. Abbie’s enough of a feminist that, if she’s trying to teach this young guy about music, she would be showing him the Raincoats, Siouxsie, the Slits—not just a male-centric version of punk. She would be hip to the misogyny and the dude-ness of a lot of punk music. That was important to me, and Greta, too. Greta is that person.
You made mixtapes for Greta—what did you give her to check out?
I’m a Frances Ha fan, and I knew she had this history of being into dance. So I did focus on slightly more dancey things from 1979, like Gang of Four and Siouxsie. I gave her a bunch of links to Siouxsie and the Banshees performing—a historical period-correct dance reference. There are these great shows she did in Germany and her dancing is amazing—a woman with so much charisma and style. Greta’s got a lot of style in the movie. All those punk women had a lot of style. Style is really important as an identity and sexuality signifier. Greta gets all that, and has her own version.
One of the first things we did was make a record collection for Greta’s character, figuring out her history with music. My sister loves Bowie. Bowie was her entry-point to the New York punk world; she came from Bowie/Roxy Music/Velvet Underground/Lou Reed into punk. Greta also loves Bowie—Bowie is like her favorite, favorite, favorite artist. I’d always be playing Bowie on the set when it was time for a Greta scene. I’d be playing “TVC 15” or something while setting up, to sort of enchant Greta.
You said Greil Marcus’ Kitchen Tapes essay was an influence on the whole film. Can you elaborate?
He phrased [his definition of punk] really beautifully—a key part is that these formerly anonymous, unfamous, and I would add unpowerful people have decided to find a voice and get up on a stage and say something. In a way, the whole movie is a little bit about self-discovery. All the characters are figuring out ways to be versions of themselves that are more real for them. We all have versions of ourselves that our family or our society want us to be—or consciously or unconsciously prod us to be—and these people are trying to figure out, “Well, what actually makes me happier? What feels real for me?” in different generations and different genders and different ways. Everyone in my movie, in a way, is undergoing the process of punk as Greil Marcus describes it. It’s a little grand to say that, but I’ll go for it.
Rock criticism and writing about punk music is so amazing in the late ’70s. I also read a lot of Lester Bangs. Lester Bangs is off the chain. His 1979 review of Fear of Music is one of my favorite things—it’s a pretty profound piece of writing summing up ’79 and the ’70s and what it meant, in a way that really resonated with my interpretation of it for the movie.
What other punk books did you and Greta discuss?
It was mostly photography. I showed her Stephen Shore, and a bunch of Hans Peter Feldman, and Cindy Sherman from that time—[Sherman’s] film stills and the early work she did of people on the subway. All the conceptual Pictures Generation people. I have a lot of photography from the Mask, the club in L.A, which I kind of rediscovered for the movie. It was like a cultural meeting point for pre-hardcore L.A. punk: the Screamers, the Weirdos. The Dickies played there, the Germs, and that version of punk is more arty, more queer, more eclectic-bohemian-intellectual. And that’s me—I went to art school.
How exactly would you articulate 20th Century Women’s definition of punk?
Well, it’s interesting. Punk is a tricky word, right? I go around saying it all the time in press, and some people have a real expansive understanding of the word, where you would include the Talking Heads or Suicide. And other people, when you say “punk,” they think of the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, whatever, which are decidedly not in my movie! And Suicide and David Bowie are.
The view of punk you’re talking about—mainstream culture doesn’t often understand it.
Even a lot of punks don’t understand that definition of punk. My version of punk is about breaking creative rules, but it doesn’t have the sort of macho-violence part to it, and it has an emotional aspect to it. It’s open to being emotional, or some quest for real emotion. And that’s what punk did for me in my little bedroom in the ’70s. It kind of saved my emotional life. It helped teach me that there are other ways to be than what the television-infused suburban America story was telling me were my options in the late ’70s. There’s a whole different world.
The film is in the same space: There’s another world besides the false, consumerist, conformist, trope-ridden culture, which just gives you these few select roles that you can live in. And that goes for Elle [Fanning]’s character, Greta’s character, the mom, the boy. They’re all trying to find some way out of those tropes that our culture provides. And I feel like that’s a punk gesture—a move that punk taught me.
