The director of My Old Ass wanted to tell a different coming out story
In time travel comedy My old assa teenage girl named Elliott (Maisy Stella) does a lot of magic mushrooms and meets the older version of herself (played by Aubrey Plaza). The older Elliott has one very specific word of warning for her younger self: do not falls in love with Chad (Percy Hynes White), the cute boy who works on her family’s cranberry farm this summer.
Up until now, Elliott has only been attracted to women, so at first it’s easy for her to brush aside her older self’s warnings. But when she gets to know Chad, she can’t deny the attraction between the two of them. After discussing it with a friend, she realizes that her sexuality may not be as solid as she realized and that it’s okay for her preconceptions about herself to be challenged.
You could interpret the film as if Elliott just needs to find the “right man” to reveal that she really is straight. That’s understandable, considering decades of stories that play on this lazy and reductive trope. But for director Megan Park, that interpretation flattens the depths of Elliott’s journey. Her story is less about the details of her sexuality and more about adolescent self-discovery, especially as someone who was previously super confident about her place in the world. My old ass is a deeper dive into the spectrum of queer identity and how it aligns with one’s own self-perception.
“It was really important that the takeaway wasn’t this: Oh, okay, here’s a girl who identifies as one thing and now she’s straight,‘, Park explains to Polygon. “That was never Elliot’s journey and that’s not the story. But I thought it was interesting to have a character who was really confident in her identity who wasn’t heterosexual, and then suddenly started wondering if she was bisexual or pansexual. And that might have been a bit of a strange feeling (for her), because usually it’s the other way around. I just hadn’t seen that.”
It’s one different view on a coming out story. Usually we see one flavor in movies and on TV: a character assumes he is heterosexual before realizing he is attracted to someone of the same sex. But as common as that particular path is in the media, it is not the only one. Based on Park’s encounters with people who have seen the film, those who have discovered their sexuality in a different way, Elliott’s journey is valuable.
“Once I started talking to so many people involved with the film and also in the community, they said: this is something I haven’t seen yet, that’s my journey. And this is never shown. I’ve never seen this before. And it’s so refreshing,” says Park. “It’s a very truthful experience for so many people. It was just something I hadn’t seen before that felt really authentic.