Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (Kelly Fremon Craig, 2023) (Patreon)

Ideologically, the polar opposite of Air, although perhaps the comparison is unfair. But where the Nike film mobilized and fetishized the past to release endorphins of nostalgia, Are You There God? returns to a point in history that is selected because of its difference from our own time. In our hour of need, Kelly Fremon Craig (re)turns to Judy Blume, because she reflects a very different moment in young adult literature. Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) is not endowed with superpowers. She is not an extraordinary youth beset on all sides by crushing mediocrity. She is normal, and that normalcy contains multitudes. Of course it's strange to see a contemporary YA-based film dealing frankly with adolescent female sexual maturity. (Gen-Z's supposed decorum about sex in media is more than likely linked to their mostly abstinence-only sex education.) But to see a film about a young girl undergoing a crisis of spirituality -- whether or not to believe in God, and if so, what kind -- is almost unthinkable.

That's not due to some evil machinations or wingnut agenda, really. It has to do with the film industry's desperate need to make films that appeal to everybody (kids, adults, Dems, GOP, the Chinese Communist Party), since every project is only as good as its shareholder return. You can't address meaningful topics without potentially alienating someone, so it's easier to generate fantasy worlds that may address class warfare or homophobia or what have you but always have the plausible deniability of allegory. 

Put another way: if you look at random pop culture artifacts from the 70s and early 80s, you will see that religion is often treated as part of the overall fabric of daily life. Early Simpsons seasons had the family going to church, mostly at Marge's behest. Hell, The Flintstones had a whole episode about Pebbles and Bam-Bam possessing a miraculous ability to sing before they could speak, performing a song about letting the sunshine in to defeat the Devil. I'm not saying this was a good or bad thing, but it was a thing, since at that time there was a general post-60s consensus regarding liberal democracy. That consensus included an ecumenical attitude in public life, a nondiscriminatory contract that defined what it meant to be American. This is gone now, with media liberals behaving as if religion doesn't exist, and conservatives threatening to boycott or cancel any depiction that doesn't jive with their increasingly narrow spiritual views.

So Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. revives that ecumenical attitude as a means to reclaiming the current discourse on God from the lunatics. And lo and behold, this allows for a meaningful consideration of doubt, isolation, theodicy, the importance of ritual, and the limits of that generally liberal religiosity itself. To believe in something, one must decide they don't believe in something else, and so Margaret's twin challenges -- the start of menstruation and the struggle to figure out her relationship (or lack thereof) with God -- are seen as equally normal. Ordinary in life, extraordinary in contemporary American film.