New Waterford Girl - Essay Example

The feminist concept of subjectivity can be seen in Mooney's character as Mooney Pottie is feeling suppressed by the small-mindedness that surrounds her. Seen as freakish by her family for her incessant reading and a desire to move to New York, Mooney refuses to temper her thirst for knowledge and attend the booze-fueled make-out parties her classmates live for. Enter Lou, a tough boxer's daughter from the Bronx who moves into town with her dance teacher's mother. Before long, Lou is helping Moonie see the town through new eyes, improving Moonie's social life in the process.

But when her sympathetic teacher, Cecil Sweeney, informs Mooney that he has gotten her accepted at an Arts High School in New York, she is prepared to do whatever it takes to escape her oppressive origins. As Mooney, will do everything to get out of New Waterford so the assistance comes in the form of a new neighbor, Lou, whose family moves there from New York. The two girls devise a plot to get Mooney out of New Waterford by ruining her repute, persuading everyone she's pregnant (she's never really had sex), and getting her shipped off to have the baby.

All through the film there is a subplot where Lou gets hired by local girls to blow their jerk boyfriends for some crime or another. The belief is that if they're culpable, they'll fall - and nearly all of them do. The film is a magnificent story of two independent girls being true to themselves. The only thing on youthful Moonie Pottie's mind is to get out of small-town New Waterford. She imagines being in a cosmopolitan city like Paris, Berlin, or New York. Her teacher (Andrew McCarthy) sees the talent in the girl and submits her name to an art school in NYC.

When Lou, a girl from New York and the offspring of a disgraced boxer, moves in next door, she and Moonie gradually become friends. Together they find out about themselves in this coming-of-age story set in grey and harsh Cape Breton. When Moonie gets admission to the school in New York her parents do not allow her to be there, and Moonie comes up with her own shocking scheme to get out of New WaterfordBalaban is Moonie Pottie, a 15-year-old loner in this small coal-mining town in the mid-1970s.

The town is poor, the housing overcrowded Moonie is one of five siblings and a sister-in-law in the house -- and the citizens are good, God-fearing Catholics. The only girls who flee New Waterford are those who are pregnant, and they leave to have their children away from discomfiture before returning. Moonie thoughts of getting the hell out; she stands by the border with a cardboard sign that has "Mexico" scribbled across it, but always ends up hitching a travel with a guy who's simply driving into town.

She knows all about other places through her insatiable reading, and that's part of her difficulty, really: She knows too much. Life is tolerably intolerable only through the understanding of a couple of outsiders. Moonie's hip teacher, Cecil (Andrew McCarthy) resides in a mobile home and seems to be running from life ("I don't exactly jump out of that rollaway bed in the morning," he accepts). But because he is a stranger looking in, he can full well appreciate an insider trying to get out.

Then it is Lou (Tara Spencer-Nairn), a girl from the Bronx who has shifted to New Waterford with her mother (Cathy Moriarty), because "that's where the tracks end."