“The Starling Girl” Movie Analysis
I love movies about cults and fundamentalism, and there are few ones that come close to the brilliance of “Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene” and “The Other Lamb,” but this one does.
This is a detailed synopsis and analysis.
Jem (Eliza Scanlen) grows conflicted when youth pastor Owen (Bill Pullman’s son Lewis) returns from his mission work in Puerto Rico and she takes a liking to him, because his brother Ben had just been given permission to court her. Pastor Taylor, Ben and Owen’s father, made clear that courting is supposed to lead to marriage, which is why it requires permission by the girl’s parents and basically involves the whole community.
Owen is over a decade older than 17-year old Jem, and from my understanding, Jem is mainly interested in him because of what he represents to her: worldliness, a way to escape, curiosity, experience, a broader view. At the same time, Jem feels guilty due to the extensive brainwashing she grew up with.
There’s a very telling scene in which Jem prays for forgiveness for her sins, vowing to want to keep her focus on God. But she is sitting in front of a window whose struts form St. Peter’s cross. To add some context, St. Peter felt unworthy of being crucified in the same position as Jesus, hence he chose an inverted cross, so it is originally a sign of fervent faith to the point of delusional self-denial and a minority complex.
Of course most people associate the inverted cross with Satan. And Satan has been named the “lord of this world” in the Bible, mainly representing earthly pleasures, hedonism, temptations to lead people to evil. These are all things Jem believes she is now fighting that she has reached puberty and awakens to romantic feelings, begins questioning church customs and starts forming an individual personality that the congregation suppresses because it can only sustain itself with blind obedience.
So this ambivalent scene and camerawork is quite excellent and thought-provoking. The devil, they say, is in the details, after all.
One thing had me do a double take; Pastor Taylor quotes Romans 12:13 as, “Let love be without deceit,” while talking the Starling family through how the courtship between Jem and Ben will work. But what he quotes is actually Romans 12:9, whereas the other verse speaks about a different issue (hospitality) altogether.
I wonder if this was to show the conceitedness of fundamentalists who speak with authority, yet have none whatsoever, or whether the filmmakers just didn’t do their due diligence. I would like to imagine it was the former.
Ben Taylor (Austin Abrams whose character we all grew to hate in The Walking Dead) shows himself to be an immature child. He makes fun of sick chicken in pain and enjoys poop humor. He is a far cry from his older brother Owen and a bad match for thoughtful Jem, who already remarked that Ben had never previously spoken with her, thus the courtship appears more to be based on lust rather than genuine fondness of her as a person.
When Jem catches her father Paul (Jimmi Simpson) succumbing to alcoholism again, she learns that he used to be a worldly musician, which surprises her, and she encourages him to tell her a little more about it.
This is a lovely scene because it shows how similar Jem and her dad are. Both are deeply artistic and it becomes apparent they need art like air, also expressing their innermost feelings that way.
Jem experiences some jealousy when spotting Owen with his wife after church, and she uses the opportunity to make him jealous by paying special attention to Ben as well as snubbing Owen as Pastor Taylor asks if she’d like to even work on a farm, whereas she had previously been the one to advise Owen to build a farm in the likeness of the one he’d worked on in Puerto Rico. Despite some discomfort, one gets the impression that Owen perhaps enjoys her jealousy, but more on that later.
Of course Owen and Jem keep “running into each other,” and one night, as they spend some time alone at the church center, Jem tells him she’s not allowed to have earrings, then asks him to pierce hers. He obliges but she stops him, saying she wants to do it herself and he watches her jam a needle through her own ear, after which they share their first kiss.
Quite a few things run together here, metaphorically speaking. First of all, the penetration with the needle has a very obviously erotic connotation, but it’s more than just that. It almost appears as a metaphor for both Owen and Jem “opening their ears” to each other, starting to listen to their own feelings and musings, rather than answering each and every question with the church’s interpretation of Scripture. This path will “pierce” you, and though you may want to ask someone else to do it for you, you can only walk it alone, even if you have a companion walking with you/watching.
Soon after, Owen, like a lovelorn teenager, slips Jem a note as she is teaching a dance class for an upcoming church event. In it, Owen is requesting for her to meet him near the woods at midnight. She obliges and they sleep together; her first time.
After a misunderstanding that leaves Jem feeling rejected, she runs off towards the river, washing off her blood. To Jem’s dismay, Owen, again acting like a teenage boy, starts splashing her with water until grabbing her and sitting down to have a talk.
He confides in Jem that, although he prayed about it, his feelings for her don’t seem wrong (a favorite line of many religious men and self-appointed prophets, regardless of creed). According to Owen, he and his wife can’t stand each other, having gotten married at too young an age, and that when he is with Jem, he can be himself, wanting so much for her but also for himself whenever they spend time together.
This all nicely highlights one particular issue of fundamentalist churches: They keep their flock infantilized. Owen followed the rigid rules dictated by his father’s church, not the Bible’s, not Jesus’. He never got to make mistakes, experiment, organically fall in love for love’s sake instead of being paired like cattle for the purpose of procreation to sustain the church essentially. So mentally, he is still very much a teenager, on the same level as Jem (or Ben, for that matter). And his supposed worldliness due to extensive travel is yet limited because he mentally remained in the confines of the church: preaching and converting.
This isn’t to say that a relationship between a 28-year old man and 17-year old girl are generally advisable, just because the older party’s development may have been stunted. In a real world and in a secular setting, it is far often alarming, as, despite the age of consent, the older party may depend on grooming younger potentials, not being able to hide their disastrous flaws or outright abusiveness from prospect partners their own age.
The main issue in this particular film isn’t so much age, as it is deceit due to fear. Owen cheats on his wife and turns Jem, whose brain isn’t fully developed, but is in the throws of teenage hormonal imbalance and who has no life experience to speak of, into a paramour.
It’s yet difficult to loathe Owen for such a manipulative misstep, solely based on the grounds that ordinary people often understimate the hold such cult-like churches have over their flock. This isn’t a matter of simple choice, for if you grew up with the cult being your enclosure, with a holy book supposedly answering your every question, if you knew nothing else of the world, other than it was sinful and you would invite a supernatural creature — Satan — into your heart if you even just permitted any thoughts the church does not approve of, it becomes very, very difficult to free yourself from these iron clutches. Will you leave all of your family behind? Who even are you without the church? What if you made a mistake and you can never return to the bosom of the church once you leave? Such questions are simply overwhelming. Add to this that in communities such as the one Jem and Owen grew up in, education is a non-entity. The prospect of making it out in the real world on their own is precisely what cult churches seek to keep the black sheep of their congregations from.
After Owen and Jem’s first intimate encounter, she tries to sneak back inside, and is yet caught by her heavily inebriated dad, who once more talks about his band. Jem asks him if he misses it, to which he replies you have to give up something to make room for “him,” meaning God. The irony is that Paul gave up secular music instead of the actual issue: alcohol, which creeps back into his life. He hoped the yoke of religious rigidity would help stop him from getting intoxicated, instead the only thing that helps him forget his love for music is alcohol.
The boiling point is reached when Owen’s wife Misty (Jessamine Burgum, who plays Misty like such a Karen you immediately hate her character) instructs Jem’s church dance troupe to change a few of their “individualistic” routines, meaning she doesn’t like when not all girls follow the same choreography and Jem, as leader of the troupe, stands out. In her view, it looks as if Jem is being worshipped by the troupe, rather than God. Luke 6:41ff comes to mind here. “How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove that splinter in your eye,’ when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye?”
In retaliation, Jem scratches up Misty’s car with her keys. A short-sighted action, as it immediately is relayed back to Owen, who grows agitated, ostracizing Jem and warning her that such actions will give them away. This sentiment alone clearly indicates that although Jem brought up divorce, i.e. planning a real future with Owen, he himself doesn’t appear to have any intention of going straight and being with Jem in a legitimate way. Still, he remarks with some satisfaction that Jem is getting jealous of Misty. It is just as mentioned earlier in this text. Owen is flattered to receive attention again, perhaps attention freely given, rather than the forced attention one receives from an arranged marriage. His hormones are running rampant and he mistakes the dopamine rush for love. What he somehow forgets in the process, however is 1 Corinthians 13:4–8. “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.”
Amid their frantic canoodling on the marital couch, Misty makes a surprise return, forcing Jem to hide in the couple’s bathroom. Of course, Misty is sick, puking her guts out over the toilet, remarking she thinks she might be pregnant. Of course, this comes as no surprise to the mature viewer who is aware of how the mechanisms and machinations of illicit affairs, yet Jem’s face still broke my heart a little when she learned of Owen still being intimate with his wife.
Once Misty retracts to the bedroom, Owen whispers to Jem to let her out of the bathtub behind the shower curtain as soon as possible, but day turns to night, and eventually, Jem escapes on her own. Not without getting caught by her sister, however, whom she is then forced to confide in about the affair.
Once Owen learns about this, he grows irate, even more so when Jem suggests this might be God letting them know it was time to share with the congregation they were meant for each other. Owen retorts that he wants to stop seeing Jem, “just for a little while,” to pray on “it all.” Raise your hand if you know what that means.
Having escalated over the past weeks, Paul overdoses on pills and alcohol and ends up at the ICU. Jem’s mother reacts aggressively and dismissively when Jem makes a shy attempt at relaying to her this was not an accidental overdose.
Thus, rejected and abandoned by everyone in her life, Jem finally falls apart in the middle of the church event as the dance troupe Misty kicked her out of performs Jem’s — by now vastly altered — piece. An attempt to confront Owen, begging him to talk to her ends with further rejection by him, though it does not go unnoticed as Misty is watching on from a distance, the suspicion apparent on her face.
Dejected, Jem runs off to be alone in the creek where Owen and her first seriously talked after their clonky lovemaking in his car, yet she is being chased by Ben. Although she keeps begging him to leave her alone, he follows and goes as far as constantly touching her, even chasing her as she escapes into the river. Feeling like a cornered animal, Jem starts holding his head underwater until he struggles to breathe and ultimately frees himself, calling her a psycho as he runs off to snitch to daddy Pastor.
At home, Heidi (Wrenn Schmidt) greets Jem with the revelation that she snooped through her belongings after Pastor Taylor called to complain about her treatment of Ben. Naturally, she discovered the secret cell phone Owen gave Jem to communicate with her. Heidi outright asks if Jem slept with him, saying that Jem is now “ruined.” Jem yet holds true to her feelings and the narrative Owen fed her, insisting that it is God’s plan for them to be together. Enraged, Heidi throws Jem out, asking if her father knew about it and that’s why he tried to kill himself, accusing Jem of speaking with Satan’s tongue. It’s a terribly upsetting scene in which you can feel the weight of all the world that rests on this confused teenage girl’s shoulders.
Jem ends up spending the night in her dad’s garage and is awoken by Pastor Taylor. Taylor is a dangerous animal because he, unlike Jem’s mother and father, isn’t prone to anger. He is a man of conviction; stoic, presenting himself as rational despite the outrageous nonsensicalness of his beliefs, yet the quiet intensity he operates with screams, “authority figure.”
This is exactly how the smartest of cult leaders operate. They do not come loudly as Pat Robertson did, they will not outright but subversively condemn, instead tell you they are concerned, that they are fighting for your very soul and that you can still be saved and forgiven, if only you obey.
In a not-at-all-surprise twist, Taylor shares with the Starling women that Owen claims Jem seduced him, that he was incapable of restisting her. “You let Satan into your heart,” Taylor concludes.
The female aspect of God was written out of the Bible (as were the apocrypha, but that’s another topic for another day), the mainstream Christian interpretation of Genesis is that a woman condemned all of mankind to original sin, you even have the rabbinical tale of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, being cast out of Eden, cursed to roam the earth as a child-eating demon, and of course it was a 17-year old girl who is solely to blame for an affair. Here it is for you. Mainstream Christianity, i.e. churchism, rather than true Christianity the way Jesus taught it.
In reference to my earlier remark, Heidi and Pastor Taylor indeed use every manipulation tactic known to man to have Jem agree to go to a cult reprogramming camp.
It’s a fascinating development of our society that we don’t struggle to identify an abusive relationship, naming without fail or fear all it entails: Gaslighting, guilt-tripping, blackmail, isolation, mind control, physical coercion, blame shifting, victim shaming, making resources scarce; all so that the victim will be bound to the abuser body, mind and soul. And yet. As soon as religion is involved, many throw their hands up in the air, citing religious freedom, the founding fathers’ intentions, etc. pp.
Scripture being perverted into serving as a manual for how to best abuse people surely cannot be acceptable to any person with just a shred of logic and compassion. Call a spade a spade. Religious freedom is the freedom to enhance or even ruin your own life with whatever you so choose, NOT another’s.
At the church service, Taylor outs Jem to the congregation, forcing her to confess her sins and asking for each member’s forgiveness. The congregants are asked to step up to the pulpit to look Jem in the eye and tell her they forgive her. Amongst them is Owen, who — thanks to being a (grown) man as well as the Pastor’s son — does not have to live through the same ordeal.
The morning after, Jem is about to leave for her cult camp, yet Owen appears out of nowhere, begging her to follow him as he will return to Puerto Rico. His only response to Jem inquiring, “What about your family?” is met with a response lacking integrity and resolve: “None of that matters.” Owen remains the boy he always was. Instead of forcing a divorce and making a clean cut, he runs, leaving himself the option open to return and yet again blame Jem.
We’ve heard it all before: Owen apologizes for letting his father get into his head, assures Jem he loves her. “You are the only one who sees me.” Translation: You are the only one who doesn’t hold me accountable and adores me because you are too young to understand the full scope of the situation.
Although Owen is chased off by Heidi, Jem ultimately sprints after him and the two drive off into the sunrise.
(This obviously in no way influenced my rating but does anyone else struggle with seeing easily preventable mistakes in movies? There was a considerably sized hole in the back of Owen’s green shirt in this scene. It served no plot purpose, so it was an oversight, and I wonder how on earth you can’t in the very least adjust the camera to conceal a distracting mess like that. Alright, moving on.)
Jem yet appears doubtful while with Owen at the motel, though he doesn’t appear to even notice. She seems not to want to spend time with him, staying behind as he goes to grab dinner, so she can pray to God and put on her dad’s jacket for comfort. In it, she discovers his iPod, listening to one of his songs, which appears to give her both determination as well as peace.
After this experience, Jem waits for Owen to fall asleep before stealing his car and making a getaway. Entering a bar, she first asks to use the phone, then thinks better of it, rising from her bar stool and starting to dance to a country blues song of the same kind her dad used to play with his band.
This ending has some obvious parallels to the movie “The VVitch,” which ends with Thomasin dancing upward into the night sky to frolic with Satan and her fellow witches. Except of course here “Satan” is just an independent life, not devoid of God, but also not lived in fanaticism.
What is Jem’s overall plan? Where will she sleep, where will she work without a GED, will Owen return to Misty or go through with his plan to return to Puerto Rico? Will Paul recover? Will he understand Jem, try to find her? Leave the church? All these and far more questions remain.
But “The Starling Girl” is less about closure, because in reality, you seldom get if if you escaped a cult. This ending, as I personally took it, was more about showing that any uncertainty was better than living in oppression.
Although you know better, you can’t help fall in love with Owen’s boyish charm and inner grappling. You want to root for the two but soon realize that Owen, too, would only hold her back and keep her trapped. Just because he wants her doesn’t make him different at the core. There were two scenes in particular that showed that. Too subtle, perhaps, for many to notice.
It was when Owen on two occasions told Jem to spit out her gum because he personally didn’t like her chewing it. It served no purpose other than to exert control, to make him happy, although her chewing gum posed no risk, was not sinful, had absolutely no impact on his life. And if such a small thing as gum is already an issue, that’s a pretty bad sign for far worse control and coercion to come once the big life issues need tackling and figuring out together.
That Jem, at still so frail an age, subconsciously realized Owen was not the path to independence and followed her heart/what God revealed to her in prayer, shows that she is more mature than Owen likely ever will be.
If you are an avid Bible reader, you may have recognized other Biblical (or if not Biblical then still deeply symbolic) names in the movie:
Paul
Although some Bible scholars contest this, others still hold that the apostle Paul’s name used to be Saul. He was a persecutor of Jesus and his disciples, a worldly man until he renounced the world to follow God. Although movie-Paul certainly persecuted no one, we can see that he, too, renounced who he used to be, leaving even things he enjoyed (music) behind so God could fill that space.
Jem/Starling
Short for Jemima, meaning dove; a symbol of freedom, hope and peace. Jem’s last name, Starling, is equally symbolic. The starling is a black bird that flocks together with others of his own kind. BUT. It is also a bird symbolizing freedom and love, according to various European folklore traditions.
Owen
Welsh for “noble born,” “young warrior.” Own was born into the church, which, as all cults do, considers itself directly linked to God, so in that sense, he is “noble born.”
Despite Owen’s cowardice of not wanting to publicly divorce his wife, and going back and forth between wanting to escape (Puerto Rico) without being able to indefinitely stay away from Kentucky, he certainly is fighting a war in his own mind, so in that sense, he could be viewed as a young warrior.
Pastor Taylor
It simply means tailor, to cut. And truly, the Pastor did tailor himself his own fancy church that views him as their direct line to heaven, following his every lead, believing his interpretations of the Bible and living according to him, rather than God and their own conscience.
Ben
Hebrew for “son.” This name denotes a lack of character and is a mere description of a “position” within a family. That fits quite well for movie-Ben.
Misty
Considering we don’t know much about Misty other than what Owen tells us and what we see at the dance troupe meeting, she is a shadowy figure without many discernible characteristics to viewers. Owen speaks about how they didn’t know each other enough to get married, that he misread the signs, so to him, Misty appears to be eternally a figure shrouded in just that: mist, a fog, obscurity.
Whether these names were chosen deliberately or not, they fit. It is little things like this as well as the meticulous camerawork, storytelling and superb acting that made “The Starling Girl” a watch deserving of ten stars.
Pullman, Scanlan and (despite his small role) Simpson, carry this movie with ease, gluing the viewer to the screen as we are cast from one emotional scene into the next: fear, attraction, temptation, repentance, broken vows, secrecy — it just never stops until the very last sequence that finally brings relief as we trust Jem to finally find her way to safety.
Verdict: This is a true coming-of-age movie with an empowering and beautiful message.
