Young Adult Character Analysis

Submitted By sospen24
Words: 725
Pages: 3

In the film, Young Adult, the main character portrays a severely damaged image of self that is exhibited through her relationships with her family, her substance abuse, and her dismissal of empathy toward others. Her personality and relationships with others indicates that she had many unresolved issues during her child and adolescent development. The film introduces the main character, Marvis, as a competent, successful woman with a career as an author for young adult novels. She lives by herself and initially seems to display somewhat of a flat affect without any clear emotion of pleasure or discontent. Marvis receives an online email about her ex-boyfriend from high school and his wife having a baby. She starts to show signs of confusion, frustration and even disgust. She begins her quest to rekindle their past love and disrupt his marriage. She travels to her hometown to find him and arrange a meeting. Despite her parents living close by, she checks into a motel to stay by herself and avoid her family. She begins to show loneliness, isolation and ambivalence in her stay at the motel. She has no feelings toward her pet dog and has very few social interactions with others. The social situations she is presented with make her uncomfortable, angry, and avoidant. She is not friendly to the motel clerk and does not seem to find pleasure in anything except knowing that she is going to see her ex. She first runs into a former classmate from high school who tries to speak to her and have a conversation. She resists his friendly demeanor and shuts him off without really paying attention. Soon after, she carries the discussion into how she is going to win back her ex. She has no shame in her delivery to this acquaintance she barely even knows and finds nothing wrong with her statements and what she is after. She is devoid of an emotional humanistic quality, and appears to be closed off and very withdrawn. The fact that Marvis seems completely unaware of her true feelings shows that she did had disruptions in her development which affected her attachment style. She begins to move toward an established relationship with no feelings of guilt or even slight hesitation. She meets her ex at a bar, and the way she is dressed and presents herself shows her using her sexuality and physical attraction in a way that seems to be an attempt at masking her true self. She seems aggressive in her approach and appears to be momentarily happy about the possibility that they could be back together. Her distortion of reality seems to reflect her repressed anger toward earlier experiences in her life. She has recently divorced and immediately brushes away the subject of her ex husband in front of her love