I Want Diablo Cody’s Career 😍
I just finished Diablo Cody’s memoir, Candy Girl: A Memoir of an Unlikely Stripper. It was published in 2006, the year before Diablo won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (Juno, 2007).
I can vividly remember when Juno came out. What millennial can’t? It was a formidable volume in our canon, the pregnant version of Pretty in Pink. Diablo was just as skilled as John Hughes at creating a quirky vibe that was so distinct, it could only be itself: the Moldy Peaches songs woven all throughout, sounding like a witchy children’s choir. The treasure trove of knickknackery spread over Juno’s room (the hamburger phone came right into your mind, didn’t it?).
And of course, there was the language itself. Juno spoke how Michael Jackson danced, how Michael Jordan played basketball, how Austin Powers made love. She was fanciful and funny, and so was everyone else around them—never mind that they were in rural Minnesota (it actually worked for them). She was a teenager, but fired off an AK-47 of references and metaphors, all with drawling delivery and coltish cockiness. (I think my favorite was talking to her pregnant belly and saying it sounded all “20,000 leagues under the sea” to the baby). I had never seen anything quite like it.
When you see a lot of movies and TV, you notice a great river of similitude running through them. It’s almost like these writers have a pull-string doll that gives them certain phrases to say. For instance, I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed the “couple making up” scene without one of them warbling, “I never meant to hurt you.” (That line hasn’t penetrated my skin since 2004). There are stock characters aplenty: the slutty one, the fat one, the uptight one, and so on. By cinematic law, their assigned adjective must become their entire personality.
But Juno was different, because it showed slides of life for the sole purpose of tenderness (I.e., best friend Leah laying in bed, stroking her rabbit. The little sister, Liberty Bell, mute in her ice skating costume, sprinkling Bacon Bits on her potato. Juno chugging Sunny D and Slushies). And that was all owed to its writer, Diablo Cody. One of my queens for sure.
Diablo is an accomplished multi-hyphenate writer. She wrote Candy Girl, the aforementioned stripper memoir. She also wrote Tully, Jennifer’s Body, Young Adult, the television series United States of Tara, annnnd a few other movies which I haven’t seen. She also wrote Jagged Little Pill, the Alannis Morsette musical, which I saw in Philly last year. I thought the show was a pastiche of trendy problems facing American families—almost like she was playing Scrabble with social issues (I.e., throw in a queer, adopted POC daughter here; add in a mom with an opiate addiction there; sprinkle in a workaholic dad). Still, the songs and dialogue were the snappy, witty work of an absolute genius. Which Diablo is.
Diablo sets a majority of her movies in Minnesota, where she worked as a stripper. It’s not her home state, she moved there for a relationship. She clearly fell in love with the folksy, farmy classification of people there, as well. She is responsible for the Minnesota fetish that I find myself living with (well, her and Fargo). Every time I make an extra $1000, I wonder if it’s time to finally visit the Land of a Thousand Lakes. Minnesota reminds me a lot of my hometown of Binghamton, NY. I describe my town as being like “worn flannel sheets; cozy sweats; and a second heap of cheesy casserole.”
I credit Diablo (and the Coen Brothers) with pioneering a genre of film I call “Midwestern Gothic.” We know what Southern Gothic is - it’s the writing style attributed to Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers (who my parents named me for). Southern Gothic is very stoic, with an odd mystery afoot (think Twin Peakes). With Midwestern Gothic, we project a plot of crime or disfunction against the hunky-dory, homey backdrop. It’s Midwest Nice, served on ice, with a taste of lye.
Diablo’s 2011 movie Young Adult is precisely that. It’s my favorite film, not just of hers, but of all time. It stars Charlize Theron as a 37-year-old divorce who is numbing her pain with bourbon, KFC, and reality TV. She hatches a plan to return to her hometown and steal back her high school boyfriend (who just had a baby with his wife, by the way). She is operating under a fantasy of regressing to her teenaged self, the time she was most in her Prom Queen glory. (It doesn’t help that she writes Sweet Valley High-esque teen fiction for a living). Her delulu is detroyed in a denouement with the entire town as her audience. It’s incredibly humbling, because you witness the live death of someone’s ego. She goes back to her friend in her wine-soaked dress and says with the vulnerability of a doe, “I’m crazy.” In spite of her contempt and superiority, you want to cradle her like a baby.
Basically, I want Diablo’s career. She quantum-leapt from writing a blog about stripping to winning an Oscar for a Screenplay, in about 3 years. She wrote a book, several screenplays, a TV show, and a musical. I think it’s great to flit across mediums like that (I’ve been ping-ponging between essays and plays myself). We have a similiar writing style - and her wordsmithery makes my Gemini brain purr.
I suggest you read Diablo’s Candy Girl, if you’re curious to see how the whip-smart, punky librarian found herself on the pole. Or to hear someone discuss sex work in that quirky voice that has Juno’s register. Diablo presents the classic conundrum that every girl faces, or at least considers: should I capitalize on my body to outwit capitalism? Indeed, she decides to ditch her copy editor job, and starts making serious bank on the pole. When she can finally buy a house, she stands inside it and thinks, “this is the house that 10,000 erections built.” A sobering thought.
But her quest is about more than a soulless desire for cash. She has human curiosity. She has anthropolical interest in stripping, seeing it as a grand experiment in the most hush-hush of human behaviors. And I like her for that. It’s the same curiosity that makes me talk to homeless people, strangers, children, sinners, and all walks of life. I asked my Israeli landlord yesterday how he feels Netanyahu is handling the war. I just need to go there, and get the view from the edge.
Candy Girl is a (mostly) fun romp through sex work. Stripping is basically the big sister to Only Fans. I just listened to a podcast interview with Bonnie Blue, the British woman who’s making $2 million/year on Only Fans. Her “niche” is younger men—she had sex with a bunch of 18-year-boys on film at an Australian university. (Before you go clutching your pearls, remember that “teen” is the most searched porn genre for men). Bonnie also had sex with 1057 guys in one day to set a new world record. She argues that she’s pro feminist, and wanted to leave her 9 to 5 behind. For $2 million/year, is she outfoxing everyone, or is she degrading herself? Diablo toys with this questions well in her memoir.
here are some of my fave quotes:
“I deep-sixed the librarian act, shut my smart mouth and rode them like ponies at the Preakness. I made over $1,000 within my first three days. I’d figured it out. Riddle solved. Case cracked. I felt like I’d graduated, only instead of “Pomp and Circumstance,” the band played Warrant.”
“and I sensed the need to escape the rabbit warren of gainful employment before they got me for good. For the first time, I was seeing the alternative: living by my wits, pissing on my solid Second Wave feminist education, becoming a con artist disguised as dimbulb arm candy. And I liked it.”
“The ideal persona to assume on the floor was that of a self-centered, brain-dead circus contortionist, loose of both moral and sinew. This was a difficult exercise in mixology, but a successful actress could retire in furs by twenty-eight and buy a four bedroom Tudor in Shakopee.”
“I envied the girls who’d been stripping for years, even though they all had hammertoes, coke-worn sinuses and intimacy disorders as a result. They were cool. They had champagne in their veins; they glowed like radium. Customers bought them appetizers, jewelry and the occasional Porsche.”
Interesting stuff!
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