Disney’s “Stargirl”: Mysticism, Nature, and Nothingness
“Was it real or was it something else?” The characters of this film are left questioning their experience of reality due to the mystical Stargirl.
The newest Disney+ original, Stargirl, carries the YA tropes of creating or finding yourself and being authentically you, but it’s impact is more than those. The movie makes arguments about knowledge and experiences and communicates that there is no knowable origin for either.
A New Mexico high school with empty trophy cases and a crummy football team lacking enthusiasm sets stage for the life of Leo Borlock (Graham Verchere). He narrates his life story up to the present, his junior year at Mica High School. He describes the disenchantment he feels in his town, repeating the phrase “where nothing happens… like zero things,” a few times.
Telling the story of his childhood, Leo highlights the loss of his father and the sentimental relic he held closest: his father’s porcupine tie. He wore the tie proudly even when his mom and him moved from Pennsylvania to Mica, where on the first day of school the tie gets cut up by a bully.
Young Leo is devastated and he responds drastically. He is going to be like everyone else, he says. This is the beginning of his journey toward being himself again which is carried throughout the movie. The main figure who helps Leo on his journey to regain comfortability in his own skin is the mysterious and enchanting Stargirl Caraway (Grace VanderWaal).
Leo becoming himself again is present throughout the plot, but it is aided by some blatantly mystical happenings. The prominence of the mystical in the story is too great to be ignored. Stargirl’s mystical qualities and the response to them throughout the story are not neutral; they make an argument about our experiences of the transcendent, that we cannot know the source.
Taking Mystification for Granted
The yearly birthday tie is a moment of mystification in Leo’s life. He speaks brightly of receiving the tie every year, all the while not knowing who it was from. It is intentionally charming that he receives these every year, but how should that strangeness be dealt with? Only smiling and gladly opening the flamboyant gift boxes every year, never expecting the mystifying force to stop bringing the ties.
This is turned into an expectation by Leo and not seriously looked further into. It’s not apparent that his mother was alarmed by this either, when she only shrugs upon seeing him open the box. The mystification continues with the arrival of Stargirl to the school. Leo spots her across from the field where he is doing drills with the marching band, and he stops in his tracks to look at her. And after this, his friends all ask him if he saw her. This is also odd, even for characteristically odd 16 year-olds.
Stargirl’s presence is never not strange in the film. From the first sighting, her clothes make her stand out and she has a ukulele sticking out from her book bag, reminding viewers of the being yourself trope, but she transcends this trope quickly.
A little later on, after Stargirl’s presence has turned the luck of the team around and raised the morale of her high school’s community, her and Leo go for a walk by her house. This conversation is particularly strange for a couple of teenagers.
Stargirl: “ You know, in Iceland they have officially designated enchanted places.”
She thinks it would be great if they had places like that in the U.S.
Leo: “They should put one at your house.”
Stargirl: “Take off your shoes. We’re here.”
The scene changes to late dusk, meaning at least an hour had passed from where the sun was in the sky, so they have been here an eerily long time.
Stargirl: “Close your eyes. Have you ever done nothing, Leo?… like really nothing.”
Leo: “Is there a trick to doing nothing?”
Stargirl: “There is no trick. You’ll find your own way.”
She goes on to describe her process of doing nothing. She describes a process of focusing on different body parts until she cannot feel them anymore, at which point she begins focusing on forgetting her senses, with eyes closed.
If she’s “done a good job at the end, there’s just nothing.” “Now that I’m nothing, there’s no difference between me and everything else. I’m a stone. I’m a paper cup. I’m rain.”
It begins to rain. This is perhaps the most confusing moment in the film. She says “I’m rain” and it begins to rain, which prompts Leo to halfway petition: “did you…?” Before he finishes asking, she answers “I don’t know. I’m nothing.”
This concept of closeness to nature carries several possibilities of meaning and implication. This could be taken as an Existentialist claim to the absurdity of life: the paper cup, the stone. It could be taken as a Romantic individualism glorying in the natural world. Perhaps this is a sort of Ode to the desert, and the earth more widely? Maybe a Secular, sort of Darwinian relishing in the beauty of such a complex system by which life springs, or even a New Age religious experiment with the self and nothingness, or one with the natural world. The symbolism of the desert and the highly featured disenchantment Leo experiences with the town lead me to think that it’s primarily existential or New Age spiritual.
The nothingness could be a scream into the void of the indifferent universe, but whatever it means, this scene will make viewers think about nothingness. This is not the only instance in which nothingness makes its mark on the film. The ending is wrapped up in questions of what the nothing is, and where the something of Stargirl’s presence came from.
The movie feels like Stargirl herself is its focus. Her character seems more than human.
There are many more examples of the mystical quality of Stargirl in the film, and this quality is more than the average human contains according to Leo’s narration.
Fast-forwarding a bit to the prom, we can see this topic arise again. There is romance and dancing and all is well. They run outside to dance and just as Leo finds Stargirl amidst the crowd, in her typical stand-apart style, and it begins to snow. They laugh and cherish the snowy night in the grass, dancing, until they return to the indoor part of prom.
After an encounter with another character where she apologizes for something she did out of good will that hurt her family, Stargirl runs away from the scene of the prom into the desert night.
What follows is chilling for me, so I imagine it would be for a young teenage audience.
“And just like that, she was gone. Her mom sold the house.”
Leo utters these words with a chilling and content finality. Continuing, he says, “but even though she was gone, she was everywhere.” Following this are scenes of students getting along better than they had at the beginning of the movie.
“But I still didn’t know. Was it real or was it something else?” Leo’s inquiry of his experience of reality is telling about the kind of impact Stargirl had on him. She left with no goodbye and no explanation for any of it.
The football games, the happy birthday singing, the rain and the nothingness are all left to be interpreted by the one closest to this mysterious figure.
Leo goes to Archie (Giancarlo Esposito), the trusty and wise male figure in his life, to sit and talk. Archie picks up a dinosaur bone and says, “look at this bone. Now nothing is more real than that. But that doesn’t make it any less magical… the best things are both.” This is a key moment for Leo in explaining the presence of Stargirl.
Archie’s answer, in using dinosaur bones, actually shifts attention to a grandiose history of nature itself, forcing Leo and the viewer to go back further than humanity to find answers.
Stargirl’s quality of nothingness is a point of intrigue that the movie does not answer. In turn, the movie passes this question over to the viewer with no answer for what makes things real outside of the film. Now, I don’t believe that anyone watched “Stargirl” to find answers to the big questions, and I wouldn’t recommend it to help find those answers. However, the film asks the questions and doesn’t give answers to them. This questioning of our experiences speaks louder to the young adult audience than Leo’s rediscovery of his porcupine-tie-wearing self.
Leo’s ending narration leaves his questions unanswered and replaces explanations with speculation that borders on apathy. He says that people began to wonder and make up stories about her, that she could fly and do fantastical things, and that after a while, even his friend group began to wonder “she was just a girl, wasn’t she? A girl just like anyone else. It was silly to even talk about it.”
The end is a rather existential spiral into meaninglessness with these final lines coming from Leo: “After all, nothing ever happened here. Nothing at all.” Taken as a charming nod to the beginning of the film after all that had happened, this could be a sarcastic restatement of that idea and an epiphany that all of this was real and that it did happen after all, and that it happened in Mica. But, the ending isn’t nice and total that way.
In this way the movie is sad. The romance of the story is shed without resolution, the friendships continue on in Mica, and continue after they graduate, but this seems empty. Especially since the end of the movie is the screen cutting to all black and those final three words: “Nothing at all.”
The path of understanding this movie that isn’t sarcastic and friendly is quite deep for a young adult audience. The takeaways are that the world has some inherent magic- like Archie says, “the best things are both”- that existed in Mica through the presence of Stargirl, which had a great impact on the school and the football team and the lives of many because of all the fond memories and stories.
The end renders all of this optional, though. Leo doesn’t know if Stargirl was real even after the conversation with Archie, which his final monologue makes clear.
This uncertainty makes the viewer wonder in the same way. Was the story even real? By extension, viewers are nudged to wonder about their own existence, and their own experience of reality. Is the world real? How can we know? Disney’s “Stargirl” is not asking these in a clear or meaningful way, though. There is no answer given but a black screen followed by credits.
So, was she real? Did the story happen? Are our lives real?
No matter what beliefs we may hold about the nature of life and the universe, you and I have experienced mystifying things in life. Experiences like these cannot be explained away as being nothing unless we impoverish those moments and our experience of them, unless you and I make ourselves believe that our experiences are indifferent chemical reactions occurring in our brains.
Leo and his friends are shown meeting at a diner just before the final scene of the film, and they are laughing while retelling their varying memories of Stargirl. They were clearly unsure of how to explain their experiences with her, but they told stories anyway. They mostly forgot the details of those experiences, but there was an unforgettability to that year in high school, so they discussed it.
This is the way that we live in the world. When mystifying things happen to us or we witness them, we talk about them with those close to us. We don’t just move on, but we are left to question. We don’t experience chemical reactions going on in the brain- we experience human life and the beauty perceptible through sight and hearing and touch and emotion. This beauty will cry out to us that we are, indeed, something.
Just as Leo’s friend group met to discuss and make sense of their experiences, so do we. We meet and talk through the odd and mystical things we experience and our search for the answers continues. Searching only in immanence will lead us to the near apathy of Leo’s conclusion, but when we recognize the real something-ness of ourselves, we may find the answers that most aptly account for our experience.
