The Visual Grammar of Lady Bird

Part I: Story Structure

When I saw Lady Bird on Netflix last year, I instantly remembered a quote that a filmmaker once told me. Your film must smell of the solidity of the earth, he said. A great aficionado of the auteurs of the French New Wave, he often persuaded me to capture people in their candid best, almost cinema vérité or documentary style, to understand the language of cinema better and in a more deeper sense. Lady Bird (2017) by Greta Gerwig, along with others like Boyhood and Marriage Story (directed by Gerwig’s partner Noah Baumbach) did that for me — it was a good blend of fiction and non-fiction. And beyond all, it was a film made with artistic weight and integrity.

Lady Bird is a coming-of-age story of high schooler Christine McPherson (aka Lady Bird) who believes that she is born on the “wrong side of the tracks” as she longs to break out of the loving womb of her ordinary Sacramento family home on a journey towards culture and sophistication, which she believes she can get in a college on the East Coast — only to discover at the end, that home is where the heart is. It reminds me oddly of a quote by T.S. Eliot — We shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. This, I believe, is the controlling idea of the film.

Structurally, Lady Bird is very much like The Wizard of Oz (1939). In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wants to fly over the rainbow, as thinks it is better elsewhere, and then comes back around and realises that there is no place like home. In the first part of this essay, I will be deconstructing Lady Bird from the lens of Joseph Campbells’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, who describes heroes (rather loosely) as those who take the journey away from safety, into danger and back home again.

Lady Bird is about Two Worlds, represented by the two sides of the tracks. One, which is the ordinary world, or the poorer side, where Lady Bird is from, and then the other, is the rich side where Kyle, Danny, Jenna and Julie are from. Julie is from the rich side of the tracks, but is a Master of the Two Worlds and Lady Bird’s ordinary world attachment. The rich world is fake, unlike the real world of Lady Bird, but she is attracted to this world of abundance. Lady Bird has a desire for the sense of freedom that money can buy, which her parents don’t have. However, she must go through an entire course of failed relationships, false friendships and even a journey halfway across the country for her to finally realise the value of her very own roots and upbringing.

The film begins as we establish Lady Bird’s ordinary world in the boring town of Sacramento. Lady Bird is in the car with mother Marion, expressing her desire to break free from her Catholic schooling to experience something more cultured by taking admission in a liberal arts school on the East Coast. “I want to be where culture is,” says Lady Bird. “New York, or at least Connecticut or New Hampshire where writers live in the woods.” Her mother Marion snaps back at her, telling her that those schools are unaffordable. We establish two different archetypes in the story at this point. Marion is appreciative and foreshadows where Lady Bird is going to be emotionally by the end of the film. On the other hand, Lady Bird is still a child who has to go through her own emotional upheavals, moral transformations and identity crisis to come back around to where Marion is.

Over the beginning credits, we’re further introduced to Lady Bird’s high school Sacred Heart,  in a montage where we see glimpses of her fellow classmates Julie, Danny and Kyle, who are pivotal characters in the rest of the film.  However, this mundane normalcy is disrupted by the Herald of the story, Sister Joan who suggests that Lady Bird should try out for the Fall Musical. This is her Call to Adventure. Lady Bird auditions for the part, and although she doesn’t land a big role, she falls in love at first sight with the lead of the play, Danny. They meet again at a grocery store and this begins their relationship. They have their first kiss during a slow dance at the school prom. It is during this time that Lady Bird’s father is fired from his job, raising the stakes and reinforcing the idea in her head that money equals contentment and happiness.

Danny is the Supernatural Aid who takes her into the First Threshold, triggering the journey to the other side of the tracks — the side of the rich and abundant. Danny’s grandmother owns a bright-blue house with white shutters and a trim, perfectly manicured lawn. When she visits their house for Thanksgiving, she tells his grandmother, almost star-struck, that “your house is my favourite in all of Sacramento.” However, after the school play is finally over, Lady Bird finds out that Danny is gay, catching him in the act with another boy. Her romance, this experience, therefore has turned out to be false. But she’s not disillusioned about the other side of the tracks just yet.

This takes us into the Belly of the Whale, signifying the deeper change that she is going to go through. That’s when she tries to befriend Jenna to get closer to Kyle, a bohemian musician who comes across as a bit of a narcissistic anarchist. She lies to Jenna that she lives in the bright-blue house in order to fit in. She further goes through a road of trials — Lady Bird goes through further separation from her ordinary world attachment, her best friend Julie. During this time, she is also suspended from school and has more differences with her overbearing mother. This forces her to want to distance herself further from her ordinary world further and become a part of this new rich world she doesn’t necessarily belong to. After exiting the road of trials, she now completely integrates into this new wealthy world, by becoming Kyle’s girlfriend and Jenna’s best friend. 

However, Kyle lies to her about being a virgin when he has sex with her. Lady Bird’s idea of special sex is broken and she begins to feel cheated in the relationship. It is during this time that Jenna too discovers that Lady Bird is from the poor side of the tracks. Sandwiched between this drama are moments where Lady Bird and her mother Marion begin to bond quite a bit. When Kyle and Jenna come to pick her up for a party, she decides to ditch them and go back to Julie instead. This is the moment of Atonement/Apotheosis in the film. She’s made a decision about the person she wants to be and who she wants to be with. Lady Bird is now on the path to Return from the new wealthy world, back to her ordinary world on the wrong side of the tracks.

Lady Bird now gets a Boon — the letter of acceptance from an East Coast college. The mother, who was unwilling to let go during the First Threshold, must now come to terms with the fact that her daughter will be leaving. After these experiences, she has now grown to be a young adult, capable of making her own life decisions. In the new city, she gets extremely drunk and begins to further realise the falses of that new world and begins reattaching herself to what is real. She drops her pseudonym Lady Bird and begins to reintroduce herself as Christine McPherson. By the end, Christine walks into a Catholic Church (which she completely abhorred, at the beginning of the film) and is overcome with the need to call Marion. She leaves her a voicemail telling her how much she loves her. 

Christine McPherson has now grown into a mature adult. That streak of rebellion is lost and she is reconnected back to her roots, the place where she first began, confident in her own skin and not insecure at all about her humble upbringing. In fact, she has become appreciative of her mother, her birth name and her Catholic schooling. According to Campbell, “We are all heroes struggling to accomplish our adventure. As human beings, we engage in a series of struggles to develop as individuals and to find our place in society. Beyond that, we long for wisdom: we want to understand the universe and the significance of our role in it.” This is exactly what we see in Lady Bird. According to an article in The New Yorker, Lady Bird “takes its protagonist through adolescent solipsism to recognition and gratitude, back to a radiant reconciliation with her family, home town and her Catholic upbringing.”

Part II: The Style of Lady Bird

My father once told me, “as a storyteller, watch the world from a distance and do not become a character in your own story.” I’ve always believed that good storytellers understand when to step in and step out of this world. A filmmaker must step in to this world to be able to write characters with a certain amount of depth and honesty, yet be able to step out and take an observational vantage point to take a balanced, unprejudiced view of the world and show things as they are, without getting to wrapped up in the compulsion of taking a moral stance (I’m not suggesting that that is not important in some cases). This also ties in to Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of “epic distance” which he talks about in his exegesis on literary criticism, entitled Epic and the Novel. In a certain sense, the visual style of Lady Bird is quite epic-like. Here, I will be elaborating further why I think so.

In an interview with IndieWire.com, director Greta Gerwig mentions that she “wanted the film to look like a memory.” She wanted the emotions to be intimate yet at the same time, wanted the viewers to be a little removed from the film. Gerwig wanted the film to visually look nostalgic in a sense, and personally I understand why that could have been the case. The film seems like it is a genuine cathartic attempt for the director to re-live her own childhood through the eyes of her character of Christine. Gerwig goes on to further explain that she “didn’t want [the film] to be intravenous, I wanted to sense the proscenium, to sense the frame, that it was this magic lightbox.”  Her DP Sam Levy and colourist Alex Bickel helped her achieve this visceral and abstract idea.

According to Sam, the look of the film was largely inspired by the photography of Lise Sarfati, who made portraits of young women from 2000s. The idea was that the look should be “plain and luscious” much like Lady Bird’s life itself.  

The final look of the film actually emerged by accident. Levy took colour copies of Sarfati photographs and some from Gerwig’s own yearbook, and noticed that the colour copies were distressed in a great way. It suddenly seemed like it’s lost a generation. Finally they decided to replicate this very distressed look in-camera instead of heavy post work and adding artificial film grain. They shot on Arri Alexa Mini in 2K, as the 3.6K they felt was too vivid and too sharp.

Even the camera in the film only moves when she is moving, responding to her motion. There’s no movement for the sake of movement when the characters aren’t moving. There were not Steadicam or hand-held shots used in the film, only dolly shots. The camera movement was completely subservient to the story and followed the protagonist throughout in the decisions that she made.

In another interview with Vanity Fair, the production designer, costume designer and director of photography talk about their homage to 2000s’ Sacramento. The process started as Gerwig gave her creative team her own personal yearbooks, photographs and journals. Apart from works of Sarfati, they also referenced specific works of art, including  the paintings of Gregory Kondos and Wayne Thiebaurd (especially). In an attempt to keep it as naturalistic as possible, Gerwig and production designer Chris Jones had a lot of initial discussions about what the mundane Sacramento felt like in the early 2000s. Much like what you’d see in Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings, they arrived at using a lot of green, yellows, pinks, golds and pastel colours. Thus, capturing the flatness and beauty of Northern California. Specific colours were also used to highlight her characterisation and specific emotions. For example, Lady Bird also prefers pink to wear and keeping her bedroom walls in that colour, which represents her youth and vulnerability but also her shallowness and inability to see what is real versus what is a farce. Jones also incorporated the blues of the Sacramento River in the colour palette, which is seen especially on the bright-blue house belonging to Danny’s grandmother.

All the sets in the film were real practical locations. In terms of the design of the spaces we see in the film, Jones says that they “wanted the house to be well loved, not sad or disgusting.” The tone of the set was a bit pastel and muted, showing that there was a bit of sadness in the house. As per online publication Apartment Therapy, set decorator Traci Spadorcia also did small personal touches to the bedroom, “like tying up a ribbon that didn’t make sense why it was there, or even putting a picture at a certain angle.” At the end of the movie, Lady Bird paints over the walls, symbolising a fresh start.

For her costumes and style, April Napier describes Lady Bird as a “thrift-store, punk-rock shopper.” Napier explains that nothing was really expensive and that she sourced most of her costumes from thrift stories and flea markets. The team further understood that though the characters went to the same Catholic school, and everyone had to wear the same thing, they all wore it slightly differently as per their characterisations.

The film edits together like a slice-of-life European film, which is not surprising as Gerwig showed her crew The 400 Blows by Truffaut as reference material during pre-production. The shots are long and editing is minimal in order to get inside the character’s heads through their performances. The editing is also quite fragmented and staccato, much like how memories are. It breathes when it needs to, but also moves when required. 

I personally think that this film should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. Gerwig completely understood the world that she was attempting to create, its characters as well as the overall tone that she was going for. It’s impossible to believe that this is her directorial debut (as a sole director), as it reflects her maturity as a filmmaker and her understanding of the complexities of human relationships in general. It also reflects her knowledge of foreign-language films and creating what Tarkovsky calls “a mosaic in time.” If there was one thing I could change about the film, it would be perhaps the characters of Christine’s brother and his fiancé. In my opinion, they were miscast for their parts, and a part of me is also wondering if we needed them in the film in the first place. They’re not directly involved in Lady Bird’s journey, not contributing much to the overall plot or character development.

Part III: My Take

Being unfamiliar with the geography of the US, being from another country, I am not sure if would be equipped to make a film like Lady Bird in the first place. If I had to make a film like Lady Bird, my first creative choice would be to set the entire story in a world that I understand on a personal level. In that case, the film would probably be set in the city of Mumbai, nostalgically recounting my own nouveau riche upbringing and own my personal desire growing up to break out from my ordinary world into a new world of the affluent. My teenage years were constantly spent in drawing comparisons with what my friends could afford and what I couldn’t. In fact, when I saw Lady Bird, it dawned on me for the first time that this isn’t something that I felt alone, but a lot of teenagers do too.

The theme of growing up is universal in a sense, irrespective of which part of the world you are from. The reason I could relate with Christine was because during my teenage years, I too have been through the politics of relationships, innumerable broken friendships, piercing heartbreaks, and mutiny against my then-controlling parents. I relate with the relationship of Marion and Christine all too well. Their relationship with each other is a push-pull dance of ambivalence, typical of a combative parent-child relationship. On one hand we see her pulling her mother closer for her love and care, but other days pushing her away for her demand for autonomy. This is a common characteristic of most teenagers. However, I think that every mature adult has had a tumultuous past which has shaped them into who they are, and their vision of the world.

It is for these reasons that the film resonates with me on so many different levels. I can see myself in the character of Christine, and it is almost satirical as I can laugh at my own adolescent stupidity now that I am older and understand this cyclical process of growing up. Creatively, I think that the idea of making the film look like a distant memory makes each shot look like it’s straight out of a yearbook. The film is touching in a sense, especially since it’s so personal, has been made with such tender loving care and gives me an enlightened sense of the director’s own life story.

I think every film is an extension of the filmmaker’s mind and thinking. Gerwig’s interpretation of the story is personal and unique to her own identity, and from her creative standpoint, the film is flawless and has been made from the heart and integrity. Would I make the same film? I’m not so sure. It’s difficult to imagine what I would do differently, but perhaps in my version of the same film, the cast would be diverse, the setting would be Indian, music done in Hindustani Classical, and the characters perhaps a tad bit more socially conservative.

After all, the main reason why the film is critically acclaimed is because it is local. And local flavours are universal. If local means Sacramento in Gerwig’s version, local in a version that I would direct would mean the streets, gutters and the sickness of the city that I come from — a city that is truly on the wrong side of the tracks when compared to the clean, elite landscapes of the Californian soil.

Works Cited

Universal Studios. (2017). Lady Bird. USA. 

Miller, J., Lawson, R., & Aylmer, O. (2017, November 3). How Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird came to "Look like a memory". Vanity Fair. Retrieved December 14, 2021, from https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/greta-gerwig-lady-bird-design 

O'Falt, C. (2017, December 14). How Greta Gerwig's brilliant use of colors turned 'lady bird' into an emotional nostalgia trip. IndieWire. Retrieved December 14, 2021, from https://www.indiewire.com/2017/12/lady-bird-greta-gerwig-color-sam-levy-1201907175/ 

Brody, R., Lane, A., & Rosner, H. (2017, November 2). Greta Gerwig's exquisite, flawed "Lady bird". The New Yorker. Retrieved December 14, 2021, from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/greta-gerwigs-exquisite-flawed-lady-bird 

Schocker, L. (2019, May 3). Here's how 'lady bird' created an iconic teenage bedroom from scratch. Apartment Therapy. Retrieved December 14, 2021, from https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/lady-bird-set-design-bedroom-meaning-256361