Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore

A Super-indie, Grrrl-style, Revolutionary Rom-com 
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Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore | Directed by Sarah Jacobson | 1996 | 95 minutes

by Hazel Cochrane

Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore (1996) is a freakin’ bridge between utopia and realism in a teen girl’s life. A cute rom com, a beautiful and relatable coming-of-age story, an ode to one’s weirdo friends, and a brave commentary on gender, sexuality, and class in 90’s America come together in this grrrl-style revolutionary film. It’s the kind of movie that makes you laugh and kick your feet and decide to wear a cute dress tomorrow–– and get to philosophizing!

Mary Jane is a feisty, loveable girl misplaced in a largely Christian high school in the suburbs. She fits in better with an older punk crowd, who she found through her job at an independent movie theatre in the city, but she hasn’t totally found her family– some of them, like Dave and Ericka, are really close with Mary, while Grace and Mary get along except for when Grace is in a bad mood, which is often. She has romantic tension with Tom and Ryan, is constantly bullied by Matt, and keeps running into Steve who she had an awful sexual experience with and would really like to avoid. The complexity of “fitting in” and finding true friends is something we are constantly reminded of– like when Mary says she doesn’t want to go to one of those “throw-up punk rock parties” where her friends like to hang out, or how nice-guy Tom keeps his friendship with the lame, drunk, sexist Matt.

Something rarely portrayed in movies is the ambiguity existing in the “punk” world when it comes to being accepting and not discriminating against specific groups of people– in this case, focusing on misogyny and homophobia. Mary finds a place where she’s understood better than she ever was at school, with people she finds true friendship with, but somehow her social life is still dominated by creeps and bullies. Matt is criticized for his hatred toward Mary for being a privileged suburban girl with plans to go to college, but Ericka points out how he fawns over more privileged and shallow girls than Mary, not applying the same standards when he finds someone attractive. And it’s even shown that the punk scene– and even specific people we’d expect to be open minded– can turn out to be not-so-accepting of same-sex relationships.

Even though Mary is straight and the characters who are queer aren’t focused on, their struggles do not become secondary– nor do anyone’s. What Mary is forced to put up with BECAUSE she is heterosexual is not accepted but confronted, as Sarah Jacobson sticks to each rule laid out in her “S.T.I.G.M.A.” manifesto (https://sjfilmgrant.wordpress.com/the-s-t-i-g-m-a-manifesto/). And through honest conversation, each character becomes relevant and has something to say that is going to help Mary, or the audience, navigate their own problems with relationships and identity.

Nobody in this film is perfect– all the good ones seem to contradict themselves at some point, and the mean ones are humanized at some point (with the exception of Steve, whose purpose is to give us a revenge fantasy, and fulfill it!). The film in itself is against romanticization, but retains a powerful optimism and doesn’t give up any chance to show a cute moment. Relationships and sex are portrayed in a disgusting realism to convey the hard truth that in our society, it’s a seriously effed-up, imposed rite of passage for a girl to have a horrible first sexual experience with a man in order to go through her sexual awakening. But, it also shows us that straight men can be respectful, great in bed, and not inclined to say weird things like “let me show you how special sex can be” or “olive juice”, and the nice thing is that we get to make fun of the ones who DO say that stuff!
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This film shows that unique things naturally emerge from a low budget film, with amateur actors who are actually just the director’s weirdo friends. Mary Jane takes the classic mumblecore visual style and turns it into a colourful, punk, satirical fever dream of womanhood and romance and gross-out. A punk soundtrack is integrated diagetically to bring us into Mary’s world, and non diagetically to bring us into her mind. And jarring ways of editing give us those same awful feelings the film requires us to understand in Mary– so that right off the bat we’re ready for the investigation and revolution of sexual norms that this film “thrusts” upon us.