This movie has been consistently misunderstood. Most like and enjoy Winona Ryder's performance and it does work moderately well as a Breakfast Club/teen angst sort of movie, but the movie actually has three poles between which the action moves:
Dinky's exploration of her own emerging personality and sexuality
The town-representing conventionality and conformity, on one hand, and various adults and peers who are more-or-less sympathetic and ready to help...if Dinky will let them
Roxy, the larger-than-life image that means something different to everybody.
The editing of the movie has come in for criticism over the years but the various cuts are there to show that everyone, including Dinky, has a *different reason* to be in an uproar over Roxy's impending arrival. Some commenters were angry that Roxy never arrived, but by that point in the movie she had served her purpose. Her nonarrival served as a moment of self- revelation for everyone who had been reacting to her in their individual ways, baring their motives at least to themselves.
It may seem a reach, but in plot structure this movie actually reminds me just a tiny bit of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" In that book, the grandmother dies, they load her coffin into the wagon and begin a trek to town to bury her. A saga of mishap and delays ensues. As the grandmother gets riper and riper, the wagon moving in a miasma of stench, everyone who meets them is unable to understand why each and every family member is adamant about burying her according to her last wishes. In various chapters Faulkner makes the readers aware that each of these family members would have been easily turned aside and sensibly buried her as soon as possible but for their different individual, private reasons to go to town.
Baz
Dinky's exploration of her own emerging personality and sexuality
The town-representing conventionality and conformity, on one hand, and various adults and peers who are more-or-less sympathetic and ready to help...if Dinky will let them
Roxy, the larger-than-life image that means something different to everybody.
The editing of the movie has come in for criticism over the years but the various cuts are there to show that everyone, including Dinky, has a *different reason* to be in an uproar over Roxy's impending arrival. Some commenters were angry that Roxy never arrived, but by that point in the movie she had served her purpose. Her nonarrival served as a moment of self- revelation for everyone who had been reacting to her in their individual ways, baring their motives at least to themselves.
It may seem a reach, but in plot structure this movie actually reminds me just a tiny bit of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" In that book, the grandmother dies, they load her coffin into the wagon and begin a trek to town to bury her. A saga of mishap and delays ensues. As the grandmother gets riper and riper, the wagon moving in a miasma of stench, everyone who meets them is unable to understand why each and every family member is adamant about burying her according to her last wishes. In various chapters Faulkner makes the readers aware that each of these family members would have been easily turned aside and sensibly buried her as soon as possible but for their different individual, private reasons to go to town.
Baz