Not So Easy After All

Easy A is a movie that, refreshingly, makes an attempt at something many movies these days neglect: they assume viewers aren't morons. Sure, it explains the joke by having high school student Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) give a nice, three minute rundown of the basic plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne's infamously torturous The Scarlet Letter, but it's left to the viewers to put two and two together as to why all the A's on the packaging are red as well. Well done, marketing guys! And here I thought going in the movie would be about an honor roll student (well it is, but yeah).

So, Olive is a student with a problem she relates in the opening scene: she's ignored by her peers (let's set aside for a moment the slight implausibility that someone who looks like Emma Stone could possibly be unpopular in the hormonal haze that is high school). She finds her popularity in an un-looked-for place: upon lying to one of her friends to get out of an awkward social obligation, it turns out that, through the vagaries of the scholastic rumormill, she slept with a community college guy on their first date.

Naturally, this drives the movie's central conflict: on the one hand, sweet, desirable popularity; on the other, a queerly old-fashioned stigmatization of sex, spearheaded by the super-religious popular girl Marianne (played by Amanda Bynes). Olive takes the ball (pun intended?) and runs with it, and before long she's the school's resident pseudoharlot, catering nearly exclusively to the undesirables at the bottom of the social pecking order—you know, your average dorks, geeks, dweebs, and nerds. She trades rumors of sexual favor for Amazon and Best Buy gift cards to raise her clients' status.

Thing is, this exchange of goods and services isn't a conflict handwaved or outright ignored by the larger plot. It impacts on the life of her favorite teacher (Thomas Hayden Church) in an incredibly intimate manner (not in that way, guys) and the film's climax revolves around resolving the snafu that pops up.

While this plot point is gripping and certainly more important to the overall narrative, I feel the true turning point of the movie comes a few scenes later, when Olive is out on a date with a young man desiring her services, only he's got a significantly more physical idea of what those services should entail (But, come on. It's $200 to Home Depot. They have kickass air compressors). It's at that juncture that the full weight of Olive's choices fall upon her shoulders (not that there hadn't been fallout earlier) and at that point that she comes to chilling awareness of exactly how devastating “mere” words can be.

Easy A does a bang-up job of revealing just how devastating labels can be, and the reader will forgive me if I tie this thought into the heinous shooting in Arizona this past week. It is a sad parallel between the film and real life: words come before and define action, both on the part of the one being labeled and the ones giving and hearing the labels. Sticks and stones indeed break bones, and words are the things that drive people to throw them.