One of the best scenes in last year’s Barbie was a quick montage giving us a sense of a world populated and run by actualized super-women. Margot Robbie’s Barbie watches as the Supreme Court (all Barbies) hear closing arguments (from a Barbie) seemingly about campaign finance reform. “This makes me emotional, and I’m expressing it. I have no difficulty holding both logic and feeling at the same time,” Lawyer Barbie says after her final point. “And it does not diminish my powers. It expands them.” It turns out that this moment was anticipated by a group of Missourian teenagers, holding hands in a circle while they affirm one another, themselves making up a Supreme Court hearing cases at Girls State. It’s one of the more impactful scenes in Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ Girls State, a documentary that can struggle to tie its young politicos to the outside world, but thrives when tying them to each other.
A follow-up to their 2020 documentary Boys State, McBaine and Moss’ Girls State returns to the American Legion’s week-long government workshop, this time observing the girls’ side of things as, for the first time, the Boys and Girls State programs will be on the same campus in Missouri. While their first movie—as our Dom Sinacola put it, “a dramatic account of modern American masculinity in the making, blisteringly hormonal and desperate to be taken seriously”—was interested both in this microcosm of politics and the concentrated Lord of the Flies testosterone that comes up with the “screaming masses of peachfuzz and popularity contests,” Girls State finds more compelling ground as its subjects not only question U.S. politics, but the very event that they’re attending. It does a heart good to see a bunch of TikTok teens across the political spectrum use their informed, confident stances to confront power…especially when that power lies with, say, the counselors and organizers of Girls State.
There’s not an immediate analogue to the collapsing political machine of America, like with the howling boys, because Girls State finds kids interested in issues over politics. Sure, there are still the conservative, Christian, overachieving glad-handers who’ve planned to be president since grade school. But they’re easily outnumbered—in GOP stronghold Missouri, no less—by progressives repping Bernie Sanders, ex-conservatives rebelling against their alt-right families and girls still figuring out what they think by valuing decisions over demagogues.
Wherever these kids currently fall in the painful process of political surgery that excises an individual’s ideas from that of their upbringing, they have shared personal stakes in the world that the boys have the privilege of never thinking about. It’s not just that Girls State was filmed as Roe v. Wade was being overruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, putting rights to privacy and to one’s own body at the forefront of conversations both personal and political. It’s that, by virtue of hosting two unequal political events at the same time, on the same campus, the American Legion made itself a case study in sexism—one that (at least half of) its highly informed participants weren’t going to miss.
This angle emerges from Girls State naturally, but is so much more compelling than the rest of the film that you resent McBaine and Moss for bothering to hammer on some of the more conventional points of friction, like a mock gubernatorial election whose process never really clarifies. In fact, with its conventional structure (lots of confessionals) and the overbearing patriotic flutes and drums of T. Griffin’s score, Girls State can contribute to the same frustration expressed by its participants. When the debates finally start up, which is what most of the film’s interview subjects have been waiting for this whole time, they’re only half-heard, crosscut with a pep rally stomp-clap routine. An opening credits sequence emphasizes the only women in famous political images…though, with some of its selections (Hi, Condoleezza Rice!), it can fall face-first into Eric Andre’s biting interview bit: Do you think Margaret Thatcher had girl power?
And sometimes, Girls State punches back. McBaine and Moss shoot eerie images of an all-women crowd with frozen grins plastered across their faces, maliciously complying with, as a governor candidate notes in her speech, an expectation to smile. A bald eagle, brought to a festive rally, desperately and symbolically tries to escape its handler. But most of the commentary comes from the subjects themselves. They’re the ones tallying the injustices: That they must follow a buddy system when on campus, not the boys; that they have a strict dress code, while boys go shirtless; that the boys have a gym, while the girls do not; that the boys’ elected official is sworn in by Missouri’s governor, while the girls don’t meet with any actual politicians; that Boys State has three times the budget of Girls State.
As the cutesy observation of Girls State falls away, in its place rises a searing grassroots rebellion. Counselors deflect while dogged student journalists outwit them. The pleasure taken in oddly gendered activities—bracelet making, cupcake decorating, hand clapping—quickly fades when, in the moment, participants wonder why they’re stuck in a weird farce. Didn’t they sign up to run for Attorney General? To argue cases, to elect officials? Why is their challenge for the day “give two people a compliment?” It’s bracing to see that, despite their ideological differences, all the girls already seem more feminist than the organizers of their event.
And the subjects themselves are deeply charming. There’s an imbalance to how they’re handled, with only one or two getting any sort of larger backstory in the midst of the larger narratives, but there are still gems that stick out. On one hand, there’s the Legally Blonde-like earnest-sweetness to quotes like, “There’s something in the air, and it’s politics.” On the other, there’s a simmering political seriousness that comes in two parts. First is the insight gleaned from things like a handful of representative campaign speeches, the most conservative focused on rhetoric and the most progressive focused on policy. The most successful is the third candidate, who combines the two. Second is the sadness inherent in the girls play-acting what they would do if they were in charge while, in the “real world,” a bunch of men take their rights away.
It’s when identifying this hellish torture, or allowing its subjects to do the heavy lifting, that Girls State makes the most of its compelling juxtapositions. McBaine and Moss’ filmmaking may err on the side of safety, and may never seem to hold convictions as strong as those it films (a dribbled-out finale wants to be both critical and feel-good), but it’s embedded in an event that truthfully captures our present while posing implicit predictions for our future. And, thanks to these girls’ confident willingness to push back on everything in front of them, it looks a whole lot brighter than when focused on the boys.
Director: Amanda McBaine, Jesse Moss
Release Date: January 22, 2024 (Sundance)
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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