(I'm introducing a new feature about Hollywood's sick fascination with traumatizing youngsters and the toll that this personally took on me throughout my adolescence and now as an adult. I'm looking to post something new every Monday. What better way to kick things off than with the Godzilla of soul-crushing family films: My Girl.)
Heartwrenching films usually move toward a single grim climax. At which point, we, the audience, tear up, feeling either genuinely moved or emotionally manipulated. The structure of these movies and our reactions to them really just follow that basic plot chart from high school English.
My Girl's structure, however, looks like something you might see on a seismograph.
 |
| (click to make bigguh) My Girl is relentless and it's that lack of emotional respite that makes it so heart-shattering. You watch this movie and you feel like you really went through some shiz.  |
It's brutal! Every time I sit through My Girl, I spend the last fifteen minutes of the movie crying.
When I was younger, that crying was just straightforward sobbing. These days, though, it's more about me trying and failing to rage against the inevitable tears--the end result being a lot of gulping, hiccuping, and an overwhelming feeling of lunacy. My Girl just hits me on this incredibly visceral level; the government should seriously look into somehow weaponizing it.
Thomas J.'s death is disturbing. Clearly. And when you're ten years old, even if you have a firm grasp on the concept of death, the last person that you expect to see die in a movie is a kid. Especially, a kid with glasses.
Like going to prom or accidentally calling your teacher "mom," crying at the end of My Girl is a rite of passage. I honestly love this movie but I've gotten to the point where I don't need to watch it anymore because (a) life is already depressing enough, I don't need to deliberately inject any tragedy into it and (b) I can't believe or accept how easily Vada gets over her BFF's death. I mean, it was kind of her fault that he died, right?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
