Desire and Meaning in Palo Alto
Palo Alto encases its characters in a world of intense desires. They hook up, drink and get high. In a sense this could be viewed as intense self expression and passion. Yet Gia Coppola’s more interested in the aimlessness, the lack of direction, along with the intense passions that her characters inhabit. While treading close to vapidity, Coppola’s film keeps surprising you — scenes that intimately portray teenagers on the brink of adulthood without any coherent conception of what life is for. The characters respond differently and they act our their need for direction through sex, drugs, and bizarre behavior that feels like creative authentic expression. Moral and ethical dimensions become the backdrop of Palo Alto’s wandering landscape — moments where the potential harm and vulnerability that breaks through the vivid intensity of Coppola’s characters becomes tangible and real.
There’s April — shy, thoughtful and deeply conscious. She seems to be purveying the scene rather than partaking. However she relinquishes her posture of distance through the slow seduction by her soccer coach who ultimately convinces her that his affections are more than just lust. Their sex scene is visceral and poignant with April’s darkly lit face portraited, her eyes highlighted with a sense sadness. As April quickly realizes that her coach was using her the morality becomes apparent. Palo Alto fascinatingly turns its characters from agents to victims, not capital V victims but recipients of ill-intentioned desire; young adults without the capacity to discern what love really is. When the counselor speaks to her about her future, her words seem like cymbals clambering against her insides, “You do well in art class, what about art school April.” She runs out of the room and starts crying in the bathroom during which two girls walk in and start the bathroom beauty-image-sex talk in the mirrors. There’s something fascinating and human about this image. A girl lost without direction, reeling against the fact that she’s becoming an adult and has no idea what that means — alongside the exact things, the image, that she’s been immersed in and their ultimate vapidity thrust in her face in her moment of truest authenticity; directionless, aimless, loveless.
There’s Emily — she’s looking for love in all the wrong places, but the film implicitly asks who can blame her? In a certain sense she too (thinking of the Bling Ring here) is embedded in a social context that has told her certain things — a culture that accepts giving sex for love. Within those dimensions why not give yourself to everyone? Palo Alto speaks truth because in every sexual act she’s alone afterwards, the same as she was before. Emily’s character is given room to act as she hits Fred with a bottle after he harasses her — realizing that she’s being used and that sex is not an aimless affair of universal love, it’s an action encased in a desire for something or someone. Again, morality, not moralism, is narratively intertwined to show us the truth of characters and how the moral dimensions to their lives play out scene by scene, hurt by hurt, unraveling the layers of desire and action.
And then there’s Teddy, on probation for drunk driving; stuck in between his own world of expression and fun, and the consequences of shedding responsibility and ignoring morality. The film actually mentions this directly — Fred declares, “F*&K Good”. There’s literally a part of him that wants to ignore the morality of being human. It’s in a completely different social landscape — the children’s library that he learns that there’s a certain fragility to the world. Teddy paints with an elderly woman, drawing her picture and the joy of her face proves to him that his actions do matter, that there’s another way to live. When he tells April he loves her, it’s his most vulnerable moment, and we believe him. Coppola does such an incredible job with this scene because even though it’s understated it strikes the viewer as ultimately real. We believe Teddy loves April because in a certain sense he’s seen her character, her personhood, and fallen for that. Teddy has choices to make and in the end when he gets out of Fred’s car to walk to April he’s turned the corner into adulthood.
Meaning lies at the center of human inquiry. We keep asking what does it all matter? What is good and even if it does exist why do it? Palo Alto gives us insight into characters and ultimately into ourselves as we too find ourselves aimless in the world and needing a reawakening of what love is (and isn’t) and that meaning embedded in relational love is the antidote to aimlessness. There are people hurting, crying in bathrooms, looking for love in the wrong places that need a sincere “I love you” without asking for something in return.
