The Girls of Summer: My Girl 1 and My Girl 2

Every child of the movies hopes to have it: The Summer that Changes Everything, a series of golden afternoons bathed in sunlight and hope, where the child in question gets their first kiss (or if they're older, loses their virginity), hangs out with friends spouting quotable quotes and riding bicycles, and makes memories that they'll carry with them into the winter of cruel adulthood.  Every generation gets a movie of their own to accompany said Magical Summer, and for 90s kids, that movie was My Girl.

Starring Macaulay Culkin and Anna Chlumsky, the first My Girl explores That Special Summer in the life of Vada Sultenfuss, an eleven-year-old misfit.  Vada has to deal with multiple issues; her mom’s dead, leaving her with nobody to consult as her life and body changes; her dad is a mortician and they live above his funeral home, bringing her in constant contact with death and making Vada morbid and hypochondriacal.   She's unpopular at school, where she has an unrequited crush on her English teacher, who also teaches her to fall in love with the English language. Thankfully, she also has a best friend: Thomas J., who – shocks of shocks – happens to be a boy.   Vada’s summer involves the appearance of Shelly, who becomes her father’s assistant at the mortuary – and begins to date him – and the way her relationship with Thomas J. changes.  At first using him to practice on in hopes of attracting her teacher's esteem, her buddy soon seems more like a potential first boyfriend.  But Vada’s time with Thomas J is cut short in a shocking fashion.

I think modern generations – brought up to expect major plot twists to be tucked into their media like a teaspoonful of raisins tucked deceitfully into a plate of cookies  – underestimates how shocking the death by bees of Thomas J. was to young moviegoers in 1992.  Macaulay was our hero, and watching him die onscreen for the first time provided a shock that actually resulted in this and his follow-up vehicle, the horror movie ‘the Good Son’, to be critically condemned for false advertising and traumatizing impressionable children.  It was the beginning of the end of his career and led to further movies like "Richie Rich", "Getting Even with Dad" and "The Pagemaster" to bomb, it pretty much killed his career.  For many 90’s kids, too, this movie provided them with their first brush with mortality.   Their heroes could indeed pass away, just as they themselves might someday.

But Thomas J.’s death only occurs to further point up the tremendous resolve of Vada, who socially blossoms and connects with Shelly in response.   Finally winning Vada's approval, Shelly ends up becoming her stepmother by the end of the flick.   Vada, meanwhile, becomes a writer, learning to draw inspiration from her English teacher and slowly overcoming her crush on him. 

My Girl – like Now And Then, like The Wonder Years - is part of the phalanx of coming of age movies that came out in the 80s and 90s about the hazy magic of growing up in the 60s; boomers expiating their own pangs for a return to childhood while raising their children on their own nostalgia.  It’s an interesting but a true thought – those of us who grew up on thisfondness for all things 60’s - love beads, the Monkees, and retro flashback movies and TV shows - grew up to become nostalgic for the 70’s and 80’s in our teens and twenties, decades we have sparse memories of or never experienced ourselves.  That’s all thanks to the simple realism espoused by movies like My Girl, which have a distinct sense of place and time.

Sadly, not so much the sequel.  Coming about a year later, My Girl 2 is set in the mid-70s and Vada has grown up into a serious girl, and the big mission this time is to figure out who her mother was.  It’s not odd that her father wouldn’t keep many mementos of the woman he tragically lost to childbirth around – but  not knowing or volunteering anything about his wife’s past beyond their marriage, to the point that Vada travels all the way to California to research her mother’s youth for a school paper (!?) feels a little ridiculous.  While there, she tangles with the son of her uncle’s girlfriend, who tries to fulfill the love interest role.

The odd  thing about the sudden appearance of a real love interest in Vada’s world – never mind a love interest who’s quasi related to her through potential marriage – is that the character is clearly a placeholder for Thomas J, who should be moving along with Vada to the next step of her life. 

My Girl 2 has odd priorities, for both Vada (whose jealousy over her soon-to-be-born half-sibling and gradual move into early adolescence is thrust aside for a pursuit of the truth behind her mother’s life) and the others in the movie (does anyone care about her uncle’s ploy to get his girlfriend to marry him?  Shouldn't he be paying closer attention to his niece?)  Interested in seeing how Vada's dad and Shelly are coping with marriage?  Well, you're out of luck because they're barely in this movie.  In fact, Shelly's pregnant at the start of the movie, but you wouldn't know for all the focus it gets; Vada's baby brother is ACTUALLY BORN OFFSCREEN WHILE SHE’S IN CALIFORNIA.  But it’s totally cool because then she sings to him just like her mother used to sing for others (because of course the Tragic Backstory Vada unlocks for her mother lets us know she could sing like a lark and wanted a stage career but gave it all up for Vada’s dad). Vada's next big step toward adulthood and rebellion is getting her ears pierced, a step that feels positively babyish compared to where she was in the previous movie in this series.   The romance with her Uncle’s girlfriend’s son ends in a kiss, but Vada seems for forget about him the second she’s on the plane home.

Flaws like these, scattered over the movie’s surface like pimples, tell us why there wasn’t much of an audience for it when it bowed in fourth place its opening weekend and then sank off the charts to be ignominiously forgotten.  Everyone remembers Thomas J’s death, but can anyone recall offhandedly the name of Vada’s love interest in this film?   I had to look it up (It’s Nick).

In the end, though, not even a crappy sequel can outshine the sentimental yet realistic portrayal of adolescence that is My Girl.  Put it on and smile away.

(Fun fact: for an inverse of the Summer Everything Changed trope, see Now And Then, which is less about a summer where everything changed and more about a summer that originated the personality quirks and beliefs that will turn up in the character’s future, adult selves.)