Analysis of Moxie
The 2021 Netflix original movie Moxie, directed by Amy Pohler is a beautiful coming-of-age movie following the lives of young girls navigating their way through womanhood. Within the movie you watch the main character Vivian Carter go through many rapid changes that force her to take a dive deep within herself and push on new ideas to the rest of the female student body with her “zine” creation. The zine was started through Vivian’s self-discovery and reflection on her mother’s life when her mother was a political activist at Vivian’s age. The zine brought together the female students and uplifted them to take a stand for the misogynistic wrongdoings that occurred in their high school.
Moxie shows many characters from different religious, cultural, and gender backgrounds and their interactions with each other and allows the viewer to understand that even though all of these characters have their differences, at the core they share the same values. At the end of the movie, there is a scene where the student body walks out to stand with a victim of sexual assault. There are many characters that come together to express how they are different from each other but still stand with the victim. The expression of differences, along with certain misfortune different characters face due to the way they look can relate back to the information we have been taught over the semester with intersectionality.
As we have learned over the semester, intersectionality is the disadvantage a person can face due to differences in race, sexuality, class, and gender. In Persepolis, Marji was looked at differently due to where she was from, and the same can be said about the characters in Moxie. There were many points in the movie where the girls are not given the equal chances that the boys do at their school, and how deep-rooted misogyny is in their school’s culture. It is clear that Pohler wants the viewer to understand the importance of owning who you are as a person and taking a stand for what you believe in rather than allowing people to take advantage of you based on the way you look. I feel as if my classmates could look at this film and take away some points about self-realizat
ion as they follow through Vivian’s story. There is a lot of growth that comes out of her self-discovery that impacts the lives of the other students.
Moxie. Dir. Amy Poehler. Paper Kite Productions, 2021. Netflix. Web. 1 December 2021