Girls Rock! is an involving, alternately depressing and inspiring, documentary about the Portland, Oregon-based Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls. If the film makes anything clear, it's this: as much as opportunity and choice have been expanded by and for girls and women, the world is still basically a boys club, making women-controlled spaces and gatherings like the camp absolutely necessary for girls to assert ownership over their identities and to develop tools and skills for approaching the world with confidence and a sense of self.
Indeed, as represented in the film, the camp experience is as much about catharsis, and even therapy, as it is about rock. Besides the playing of music, the forming of week-long bands, and song writing, the curriculum includes a self-defense class, opportunities to talk about body image, and exercises for gaining confidence for self-expression.
Looking at that list of activities, it would be easy to see the “rock 'n' roll” and “for girls” parts of the camp as being only incidentally related, but filmmakers Arne Johnson and Shane King tie these pieces together with multimedia digressions, developed with animator and motion graphics artist, Liz Canning, covering issues such as adolescent media consumption, research on girls' self-image, and the traditional place of women in rock, which is to say, as sexualized eye candy for male fans and sexual prizes for male performers.
The first such side note goes into the history of the camp. Though abrupt and cursory, this first digression roots the camp in the legacy of 1990s Northwest bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney and the broader Riot Grrrl movement. The film represents this movement as having been hijacked by corporate-manufactured pop tarts like Britney Spears, figures who have been used to domesticate girl power and reinscribe it for heterosexual male desire and fantasy.
The film, perhaps unfairly, makes Britney into a central argument for why the camp is vitally necessary. Ultimately, the brief glimpse of a male corporate suit waving dollars around tells more of the underlying story than the more numerous images of Spears bopping around like a naughty school girl. This is important, I think, because as Anne-Marie put it, “So, is the conclusion here that all girls in America are special needs kids?” In a different life, Britney could easily have been one of the featured girls in the film, rather than its straw-villain.
One of King and Johnson's most difficult jobs must have been choosing subjects to focus on. They chose a group of four: Laura, a fifteen year old Korean adoptee from Oklahoma City; Misty, a seventeen old from Beaverton who has lived most of her life in institutional settings; Amelia, an eight year old with divorced parents and a “funny brain;” and Palace (yes, really), a seven year old with a single mom and brother with Down syndrome (I assume these two younger kids are from Portland).
While it isn't clear to what extent any of these girls have or will carry on with their music beyond camp, all of them clearly benefited from having gone, even if it is just this once. Learning how to work with others, finding friends and self-satisfaction from learning and creating, experiencing solidarity with other girls and women, grabbing opportunities for self-expression without immediate censure, these are all ways in which the camp is a positive experience for the quartet of kids at the center of Girls Rock! While different viewers will undoubtedly come away with their own favorites, each girl is compelling in her own way and is represented with thought and sensitivity (For myself, I was consistently fascinated by Laura, a great kid with issues of self-worth that are both frustrating and all too easy to understand).
The adult voices include camp leaders, teachers, and “band managers,” as well as a parents, notably Palace's mom.
Why Palace's mother gets most of the screen time devoted to the girls' parents is not entirely clear, but the time spent with her, and at the family home, does offer some extra insight into what seems to be an angry little kid. Palace has clearly had to take on some of the jobs that would normally fall on a second adult. I don't think that I or the filmmakers are being unfair to mom in this case, she seems loving and supportive, but also stressed. We simply can't control everything that happens to us or our children, but that fact doesn't save us or them from consequences. No amount of love and concern can correct for an adult looking to their seven year old kid to be their “rock” in dealing with adult responsibilities.
Of course, these, and the challenges faced by the other girls, would be difficult regardless of gender. However, as the movie points out, girls demonstrably face added problems, particularly in the areas of self-image and esteem, that are directly tied to social constructions of sex and gender.
Such talk is fuel for the “War against Boys” crowd, who will insist that the world has turned around, and that girls are the privileged set, while boys languish. The kernel of truth in such claims is that little attention has been paid to boys as boys. Boys and men have long benefited from being treated as the “norm,” as simply “people,” while girls and women have occupied the suppressed, marked category within the species. In this context, there is no comparable need for a Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Boys because, quite simply, Rock 'n' Roll is already for boys. In treating males as the human norm, relative little attention is paid to social norms of masculinity as compared to femininity. What it means to be a man has long been taken for granted. Historically, it is women, who are asked to change, to sublimate their own desires and identities, and mostly to enable men in their life choices. Feminism and the women's movement may have unsettled this arrangement, but it has hardly reversed it (just witness, for example, the media manufactured “mommy wars”; and for a more detailed deconstruction of the “war against boys” see Michael Kimmel's 2006 essay in Dissent).
One of Anne-Marie's other observations after Girls Rock! was to note that, even though most of the girls had clearly spent much time working out their stage look for the camp-ending concert, none chose to adopt the kind of highly sexualized, soft core pose more typically assigned to women in rock (or, to use her exact words, “None chose to skank themselves out”). It's hard to imagine that this is unrelated to the fact that their primary audience here is other girls, and not a mixed group of peers including boys, or, even, adults, who are, after all, the primary carriers of social expectations for kids.
I don't want my reading of the movie to give the impression that Girls Rock! is a dry polemic. Far from it. While clearly polemical, it is, more than anything, infused with the complexities, fun, and irrepressible spirit of its subject.
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Short-Circuit Signs