With the rise of a dividing, algorithmic, and seemingly unavoidable social media, a certain commonality is becoming more noticeable than ever: The ridicule of impressionable young adults, mostly women, for having a libertine lifestyle. I am referring to collecting sexual experiences, partying, and what these critics sum up to be complete, expendable hedonism. It seems to be for a dime a dozen videos and articles made by conceited individuals accusing today’s young adults of living meaningless lives while ignoring the entire point of their own argument: everyone is the product of their own culture.
“No Hard Feelings” is a sex comedy/tragedy that follows a 32-year-old libertine woman named Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) who is about to lose her house, and takes up an offer by two helicopter parents to date their 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) so that he can “experience adulthood” before starting college in the fall, all in exchange for a new car.
The crux of the parents’ plot is that Percy and Maddie share very little in what they value out of a relationship. The film makes it clear from the beginning that Maddie has been emotionally damaged by her father’s absence since her birth. She has had an empty sex life all of her 20s, and she ghosts any men who begin to have feelings for her. Her initial plan to sleep with Percy consisted of throwing herself at him and expecting that Percy, just like all other men she’s been with, will take advantage of the situation and reciprocate. Percy, however, is a sensitive soul who wants a relationship and meaningful sex, so Maddie has to learn to allow herself to love.
While the film is raunchy, full of foul language and containing a graphic scene where a naked Jennifer Lawrence beats up three teenagers, it is a very good film. While the basic plot of the film has been done many times as far back as the 60s with “The Graduate” (1967), “No Hard Feelings” stands out as a critical commentary on what dating as well as sex both including and excluding love has become for the modern youth, and what it shall be for the next generations to come. To that regard, the film gives no other way to feel about our generation’s romantic trajectory but to wallow in its despair.
The film does not provide us with any good closure to this issue, as given the plot, there cannot be a good ending; all sins must be repaid, and that is just the way that the story must function. By the end of it, you cannot help but actually feel bad for these people who subject themselves to a life absent of whole love, substituted for an empty life of making love, especially when surrounded by the topic of what to do about having children.
Just as youth wanes and the past recedes, opportunities evaporate before you with mounting regrets taking their place. Such is for the loveless generation, as the film manages to show with brilliant subtly. Perhaps the most important line of the film comes from a teen house party sequence. Maddie is going room to room looking for Percy at this party, which the film depicts as a suspended, egocentric, sex-less and phone-bound gathering where everyone is consumed in filming themselves for no one watching.
Confronted by two teenage boys, Maddie is mocked for her age, which she dismisses by telling the two to go “f*** each other” and immediately the boys begin recording her and ask why she’s using two guys having sex as an insult. She gets defensive and urges that she didn’t mean it in a homophobic way, only to run away. The clear divide in communication between millennials and Gen Z is apparent in the way in which the teenage boys are not offended by the fact that they are being insulted, but rather that she would have anything negative to say about gay people. The film doubles down on this display when Maddie goes from bedroom to bedroom revealing everyone consumed by their own technology, to which her only comment is “Doesn’t anyone f*** anymore?”
It is this comment which confirms her own problem — that sex is the only behavior worth doing in this setting, and as part of the generation prior, we can comparatively see the decline in the romance of our youth. For her to ask if anyone has sex anymore is only made more ironic by the fact that she has never made sex anything of value in the first place, other than pleasure exceeded by its own plentifulness.
Leave a Reply