None of this, however, kept me from watching My Girl dozens of times over the course of my childhood. (Macaulay Culkin), she says that she only likes to surround herself with people who she finds “intellectually stimulating.” These most common of things—classic novels, periods, best friends—all become part of Vada’s curated, darling uniqueness. News Corp is a network of leading companies in the worlds of diversified media, news, education, and information services. Our journalists strive for accuracy but on occasion we make mistakes. Not true, I thought. A more realistic depiction of illness, death, and change might have been too much for its young audience—though only the most innocuous of films would settle for as rosy an ending as My Girl does, with Vada trading in her overalls for a dress, riding her bike with a new best friend, and saying (in voice-over, no less) that everything is fine. I wouldn’t find a kindred spirit in gritty, realistic angst until Lauren Ambrose smoked, screamed, and photographed her way through Six Feet Under as Claire Fisher. Revisiting the film today, I can’t help but see Jamie Lee Curtis’ character as a kind of balm to a child like me who might be worried over a divorced or widowed parent finding a new partner. Vada’s various cries for attention are, despite being somewhat indirect, at least healthier than silence. It bothered me as an adolescent to hear my friends brag about how much they cried watching the movie, and this scene in particular. She uses 50-cent words like “hemorrhaging” instead of “bleeding” when she gets her period, and when referring to her best friend, Thomas J. Vada suffers from an intense hypochondria and an even more intense need for attention. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you,” he says, at the film’s start. However, unlike the offscreen death and absence of Vada’s mother, my parents’ divorce wasn’t something that I openly mourned but rather quietly endured. Phil Collins's wife dumped him with ‘I’ve found someone else’ text, Gemma Collins looks slimmer than ever after getting 'permanent contour' on her face, Philip Schofield puffs on cigarette during night out with pals, Katie Price jets to the Maldives with her 'married' name on her suitcase, British woman, 26, adopts 14 orphans after gap year trip to Africa, Covid cases rise by 30% in a week as 16,982 test positive and 67 more die, ©News Group Newspapers Limited in England No. "The Sun", "Sun", "Sun Online" are registered trademarks or trade names of News Group Newspapers Limited. Nearly the same age as the film’s protagonist when the movie premiered, I had a few things in common with Vada—namely that I was an overachieving kid with a sometimes sad adolescence. Shelly, with her tall boots, stylish bangs, and makeup advice, is like winning the stepmom lottery. But Shelly offers Vada something far more important than girl talk—something her father, at first, cannot: sympathy when Vada’s best friend in the world dies. See, kids, stepmoms aren’t so bad! And she lives in a groovy camper that she lets Vada and Thomas J. explore. Our protagonist is an unusual girl who lives in an unusual house, the movie insists. Even as a 10-year-old, I found the 1991 film’s 11-year-old protagonist, Vada Sultenfuss, a bit too much—too precocious, too dramatic, too confident.
My Girl’s funeral scene is misery porn, there to elicit a specific response. She’s getting her feelings out and asking for what she needs—albeit through behavior that’s seen as charming and silly rather than troubling.
To see all content on The Sun, please use the Site Map. Feeling threatened—“Dad likes her better than me,” Vada tells Thomas J.—Vada tries to disrupt their courtship. Another potentially disruptive force in Vada’s life comes in the form of her father’s new love interest, Shelly. Even the knowledge that Vada’s mother died giving birth to her operates as more an amorphous source of the protagonist’s idiosyncratic attention-seeking and wistful depth. This service is provided on News Group Newspapers' Limited's Standard Terms and Conditions in accordance with our Privacy & Cookie Policy.
Yet with an entire town’s worth of doting adults, Vada gets more than enough attention elsewhere: not only from the aforementioned English teacher, her doctor, and his nurse, but also from a writing workshop full of vibe-feeling hippies, as well as myriad other sympathetic listeners. View our online Press Pack. She then points out her grandmother sitting in the other room as the rocking corpse of a punchline, the grandmother’s illness again used mainly for humor. It’s not until Thomas J. dies that Vada admits out loud that she’s afraid she killed her. “Sometimes when we get them, they’re not completely dead,” she explains. No sooner does a body come in than Vada suddenly begins exhibiting symptoms of its cause of death, biking off for a check-up from her rather accommodating family physician, who seems to have nothing better to do than humor her. Her weeping monologue over his casket felt, and still feels, melodramatic.
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