Little girls have
a lot in common with rock stars: after all, they're
both rebellious and they can scream like nobody's business.
Why, then, is the carefully focus-grouped Hannah
Montana the closest thing that girls have to a rock
icon? Her brand of pop stardom is worlds away from Girls
Rock, the new documentary set at the Rock 'n' Roll
Camp for Girls -- the kind of place where your counselor is
Carrie Brownstein from Sleater Kinney and your vocal coach
is Beth Ditto from The Gossip. I know a lot of women
who would love to spend a summer at a place like that
(especially since a good majority of the camp
counselors are lesbians), but this Portland,
Ore.-based camp is strictly for 8- to
18-year-old girls, and it's their interplay that makes the
film so fascinating.
Among the girls
profiled here are four primary subjects (including
Amelia, an 8-year-old who writes songs about her Chihuahua,
and Misty, a teenager from a broken home), but there's
no doubt about who the two stars of Girls Rock
are -- and they couldn't be more different. Laura is
the most sympathetic, an adopted Korean teenager from
Oklahoma who's full of bubbly, awkward personality and
given to saying things like, "I hate myself already, so high
school doesn't degrade me that much." Let loose in the
welcoming environment of camp, she's unable to contain
herself, hugging other campers relentlessly (in what
appears to be only a half-joke, she asks the shyest
one to be her "life partner") and making cringe-worthy
remarks about being overweight (as when she suggests a
plan to chew her food and then spit it out).
If Laura
dominates by default, 8-year-old Palace does it by design.
The daughter of a fashion designer, she's obsessed
with the spotlight, wresting the mike away from other
girls and shrieking when she doesn't get her way. One
of the most fascinating things about the camp is the
vast gulf apparent between girls who have had their voices
encouraged and those who don't know how to speak, and
Palace is determined to take advantage of it, cowing
the quieter girls in her band until they fall in line.
She's so bossy that her demeanor practically matures the
girls single-handedly; the same campers who were
afraid to scream out loud on the first day of camp are
leading an insurrection against Palace by Day 4.
Though many of
the girls seem to come from affluent, liberal backgrounds
(witness the exotic names like Palace and Sunshine, or the
lyrics written by one preteen: ""Bush is such an
idiot/He won't sign the Kyoto treaty"), the lessons on
display here are essential to anyone navigating a
little girl through today's pop culture minefield. The camp
works not just because it encourages girls to develop their
voices, or because it gives outcasts a place to fit
in, but because it teaches young women how to relate
to each other (yes, even Palace) without emulating
"Mean Girls" behavior. The film is best when it trusts its
subjects to deliver these messages to us and weakest when it
tries to employ 1950s newsreels or fact-driven title
cards to educate us -- for example, will anyone with
eyes really be shocked to find out that women tend to
wear more revealing clothing than men? Girls Rock
tries to float Britney Spears as an example of all
that's wrong with pop idols, but little girls are already
more savvy and more specific than that; witness Amelia, who
says blithely, "I'm not someone like Haylie Duff who
just wants to be famous." It's a good sentiment, but
it's a shame -- if more Amelias were famous, we might
not need the Haylies anymore.