My Girl isn’t the film I was expecting to see.
For context: it came out the year after Home Alone. Macaulay Culkin was the biggest child star on the planet, an adorable little scamp with the comic Munch scream who proved a well-prepared eight-year-old could take out two grown men with paint and a blowtorch. That was the kid front and centre with Anna Chlumsky on all the promotional material for My Girl. Prominently and deliberately.
So when we queued up, we were expecting… something similar, I think. Quirky, probably. Charming. Who knows, maybe a coming-of-age thing. But whatever it was, one thing seemed too obvious to even consider: if you cast a brand-new A-lister fresh from their comedy breakout, the last thing you’d do is make him a love interest and then kill him off horribly three quarters of the way through.
Hm.
As we all know by now, Thomas J dies going back for Vada’s mood ring. The boy who’s allergic to everything goes back for her trinket and dies screaming in fear as he’s swarmed by bees. But, to this day, the thing I struggle with is how the film presents his death as her breakthrough.
Vada grew up in a funeral home. She’s surrounded by death every day and carries the knowledge that her mother died giving birth to her.
She’s grown a callus around all of that because, who wouldn’t when the alternative is constant emotional pain. And what we’re shown is that her best friend dying in a horrible and senseless way while retrieving her mood ring – that’s the thing that finally makes death real to her and that somehow this is healthy. Because she can’t see her best friend as another dead body she’s forced to react and cry and panic because he can’t see without his glasses. Vada, apparently, needed Thomas J to die before she could learn how to feel.
And so, for us, death is transformed into something *more*. From a grim inevitability into an after school special that teaches us a Very Important Lesson.
Why, Thomas J’s death wasn’t senseless at all! His entire existence is defined as a marker of emotional development in a traumatised child. That must be a great comfort to his bereft mother.
In return, Mrs Sennett gives Vada the mood ring and explains Thomas J was holding it when he died. It’s a poignant moment and a demonstration of how Vada was the most important thing in Thomas J’s short life, which… argh… No I can’t.
Because the film shies away from following this through to the truer consequence: that this child is now burdened for the rest of her life with the knowledge that her friend died because of her. And instead of letting that devastation breathe in the moment – My Girl presents the ring as a fucking consolation prize that we’re somehow supposed to find beautiful.
That’s what bothers me. The sanitising of death at all cost to avoid audiences having to sit with discomfort for any length of time. The inability to treat people as rational, thinking beings capable of dealing with a difficult subject. The desperate need to immediately offer a placebo to comfort them, so they can move on and spend more money at the concession stand. The creation of mawkish and harmful concepts like “closure” which leaves hurt people searching for something they’ll never find.
And, I’m sorry, truly. I know this film holds a special place for a lot of people – and it does feel like the intention was an honourable one that was just too difficult for a film coming out in that market at that time. But the attempt, the failure and subsequent sanitisation is worse than leaving it be – it accumulates into a crushing weight of social expectation that leaves us crippled at a time we most need to reach out. We can’t talk about death, which means we can’t understand how it’ll affect us until we’re faced with it ourselves. But that does mean we’re left unprepared and faced with having to learn it the hard way: individually, painfully and slowly. But eventually, we all understand something very basic and fundamental after losing someone we love.
Death doesn’t have to mean something. It doesn’t have to be uplifting or redemptive or beautiful. It just has to be, and your job afterwards is carrying on. Not finding a silver lining, not growing from the experience… Just continuing to live and finding worth in the life you have in front of you.
My Girl had every opportunity to say that. Instead, it backed away from the bleaker, less-profitable truth and handed us a mood ring labelled “healing”.
-Mom