In the opening scene of Easy A, we learn three important things about Olive Penderghast. First and foremost, she is anonymous: not only does she say so, but she is seen to be so, for when she first appears on screen, a careless and self-obsessive teenager crashes into her but takes no notice of the encounter. Even Olive’s best friend, Rhiannon, ignores this unfortunate event and instead focuses on more important matters, like how George is a bad name to call out during climax. When Mr. Griffith overhears the word “climax” and interrogates their meaning, Olive quips that they were only speaking about “the stable and self-perpetuating end stage of the evolution of a plant community.” Such quick wit reveals the second important ingredient to Olive’s personality, which is her intelligence. Olive is a young girl who makes note cards for biology class, studies and reads these note cards, and even more miraculously, she remembers them in a moment’s notice to evade getting in trouble with her teachers. This is not your average teenage brain. Finally, the presence of Rhi reveals the third ingredient of Olive’s personality, which is her habit of forming imbalanced relationships. They are not balanced in their approach to sexual matters (contrary to Rhi’s fascination with sexual fantasy, Olive says that she herself is “not that kind of girl”), they are not balanced in their approach to social and religious matters, and most importantly, they are not balanced in what they give and receive from one another (Olive hints at this disparity when she is pushed to tell Rhi, “you call me ‘bitch’ alot; it’s not really a term of endearment”). But when you are anonymous, you will take any friend you can get.
This Olive Pendergast, a promising but volatile teen who is emerging into adulthood, is about to have these fragile and still-developing personality traits thrown into the fire of a California high school, which will have many parallels to the ostracizing puritanism in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Although Mr. Griffith stresses how this book represents ideas from “an entirely different time,” Olive can’t help but notice a great deal of similarity between her life and the life of Hester Prynne, a woman who has a child with a Christian minister and is then ostracized by the puritan public for her sexual immorality. Olive has read the book, and in this film, she gets the chance to live the book, at the cost of some growing pains.
The first of Olive’s three traits to undergo these growing pains is her anonymity. Forced into a bathroom confession by Rhi, Olive says that she lost her virginity to a college guy named George. Although this is a lie, it is received as gospel truth and sends shock waves through the Ojai High School social circles. Now, people begin looking at Olive differently. They notice her, they approach her, they talk about her. For the first time of her life, Olive is not anonymous, and although she regrets telling the lie, Olive shows no remorse for these immediate consequences of attention and fame. She says, “I didn’t mean for the lie to put me on the map, but I got to admit, I kind of liked being on the map”. After so many years of a hidden life, Olive has finally become a high school standout.
Olive does not get to enjoy her newfound fame for long, for almost immediately, someone tries to use Olive’s fame for their own purposes. Attentive neither to Olive’s emotional nor personal needs, Brandon asks her to pretend like they had sex so that Brandon can be considered heterosexual (another lie) and then be accepted by the social forces swirling in this American high school. Olive is offended at this offer, but in her pity for Brandon, she accepts his request on one condition: “You have to tell everyone that I am sensational.” Here, Olive makes her first confession of something that has been percolating underneath the surface of all of her anonymity and forgottenness, which is a bubbling vat of vanity. People have been blind to Olive’s humor, gentleness, fidelity and intelligence, so if they are going to notice her, then Olive wants them not only to notice her but to be in awe of her. This pattern repeats itself with every subsequent customer who seeks to use her for their own social gain, such as telling the over-weight Evan that he must tell everyone that their fake sexual encounter “was a glorious experience for you, better than anything you have heretofore experienced, including cake.” Again and again, Olive shows some hidden depth of vanity that is closely connected to her anonymity and is triggering more imbalanced relationships. But Olive does not have time to make these connections, for she is a high school teenager whose neural capacity for self-reflection is drowned by a pool of hormones and social pressures. Like many teenagers before her, Olive knows how she feels, but she does not know what type of relationships she is forming nor how she is behaving, let alone the connection between the two.
There is one group, however, who knows how Olive is behaving and who tell her exactly what they think about it. This is the “Cross Your Heart Club”, fearlessly led by Mary Ann Bryant, a bible-thumping, guitar-playing, Jesus-loving sexual puritan who, paradoxically, is often seen wearing skirts that are right on the edge of what is allowed by the public school dress code. Although Mary Ann is not a perfect replica of those ankle-length puritans of olden days, she believes in Jesus just as fiercely, and she is fully committed to people either being saved by Him or being burned at the stake for their failure to do so. Very quickly, Mary Ann comes to the conclusion that there is only one way to save Olive, and that is to “get her the hell out of here.” As happens to Hester in The Scarlet Letter, this group of Christians decides to save the sexually impure through a sentence of banishment.
Ordinarily, this would not bother the free-spirited, humorous, lovable, and anonymous Olive Pendergast. But she is not so anonymous anymore, and as the consequences of her lie increase, so does Mary Ann’s aggression and counter-offensive. Things reach a breaking point when it is learned that Micah, a member of the Cross Your Heart Club who is “not the sharpest Christian in the bible,” has been diagnosed with chlamydia. Although he contracted this disease through the guidance counselor, Micah blames the disease on Olive (another lie), and this throws Mary Ann into a fury. This fury is not directed towards Micah, who has been unfaithful to his promise to remain a virgin until marriage (a promise made earlier in the film by all members of the club), but rather to Olive. So the entire club stands outside the school with signs calling Olive a “Jezebel” and other derogatory names, and even Micah is in the crowd, courageously warding off the symptoms of chlamydia with just enough strength to cast a few stones of his own. Olive is prepared even for this level of derision, but in the midst of this hostile crowd is Rhi, and this breaks Olive’s heart.
Olive and Rhi have been through some rough moments in the film already, and although their curious friendship begins to fracture under the strains of high school social life, Olive still says that they are “best friends.” Throughout the whole film, Olive’s room is full of pictures of Rhi (on her desktop screen, on her wall, on her door, on her dresser), and when a confused Hanson observes that Rhi and Olive are no longer speaking to each other after this heart-breaking scene, Olive still insists “that doesn’t mean she is not my best friend.” Their communication begins to break down, but some mystifying bond of friendship remains between these two characters throughout the whole film.
Although a strained relationship is not a broken relationship, when Olive sees Rhi picketing against her sexual impurity, Olive says that “I had never felt more alone.” At precisely the moment when she needs her best friend, Olive finds Rhi on the side of her enemies, throwing her into an identity crisis worse than anything she has heretofore experienced. Olive blames Rhi’s betrayal on Mary Ann: “Never underestimate the power of extremists like Mary Ann. They sense any weakness, and they pounce like jungle cats…but at least they have a pack.” Abandoned by her best friend, objectified by every guy, hated by every girl, ostracized by every Christian, and let down by her only counselor, Olive is sent on a personal quest to resolve this social crisis that is deeply tied to her own personal crisis. She has encountered a challenge that her teenage intelligence is not yet fully equipped to handle.
Paradoxically, the first place she turns for guidance is the bible, and even more paradoxically, she does not understand it. Regarding the bible, she says, “I didn’t have time to read the whole thing, because it is like 600 pages, single spaced.” But we know from the film that she read The Scarlet Letter, not once but twice, which amounts to over 700 pages of literature. When Olive wants to understand something, she studies it and analyzes it, but she does neither with the bible. Unlike other literary situations in this film, Olive can’t handle the strain of spending more than a few minutes looking at this text, which she quickly abandons. She does look up Exodus 20:14 (“Thou shall not commit adultery”) because that was a sign held by Rhi, but she is uncharacteristically confused by what she reads in this piece of literature. So, dissatisfied with this text, Olive goes to seek advice from a Christian minister. She does so, not primarily because she wanted to speak with an expert, but because “I just kind of wanted somebody to talk to.” Olive seems to be looking, not for a theological insight, but for a human relationship, something which no piece of literature has been able to provide her.
The first place she enters is a confessional in a Catholic church, where Olive summarizes all that has happened, from her perspective:
“I have been pretending to be (what is the Catholic way of phrasing this?) a harlot. It’s not that I’ve actually been doing the things that people have been saying I’ve been doing, but then again, I’m not denying them either. So I was just wondering, is that wrong? It’s just that a lot of people have been asking me to do things and I thought it was okay because it wasn’t real. It was make believe, no one was getting hurt, but a lot of people hate me now. I kind of hate me too.”
In the silence of this confessional, Olive’s neurons start to rise above her hormones. She begins to realize that, although her lie was “make believe,” it is causing some disastrous consequences, first and foremost with herself. These fictitious sexual encounters, although “not real,” nonetheless have led to people hating her; even more painfully, they have led to Olive hating herself. Olive was confused by Exodus 20:14, but she is experiencing the wisdom within Exodus 20:17, for it is through her lies that she has become more isolated, more alone, and brimming with self-hatred. Just like Eve before her, Olive has learned that some forbidden fruit is also poisonous fruit.
Because this lie is hurting herself and others, Olive has a burning desire to set things straight. She needs people to know the truth, so she tries to persuade her fictitious sexual partners to confess that their sexual encounters never happened. But there is just one problem: none of them are willing to do so. Brandon has run off with “a big hulking black guy,” Evan is enjoying his new popularity and will not relinquish it, and no one will confess the truth. The poison in this lie seems very difficult to eradicate from the social network.
This leads Olive to reason that Mrs. Griffith, the guidance counselor who is married to Mr. Griffith but who is sleeping with Micah, will tell the truth to others. However, Mrs. Griffith refuses to help, which provokes Olive to go to Mr. Griffith and tell him that his wife has chlamydia and that she is sleeping with a student in the school but trying to blame it on Olive.
Mr. Griffith trusts Olive, so he accepts her words as true, but does this truth-telling finally give Olive peace? Certainly not, for she later confesses that “I hate myself for telling you the truth. I’m so sorry. With my words, even though they were true, I ended a marriage,” and she says that “Looking back, that is the thing I regret the most.” Instead of increasing self-acceptance, shouting this truth to Mr. Griffith has only increased her self-hatred; instead of peace, Olive has only increased her regret. Her statement does make an impact, for Mr. Griffith never speaks with his wife again in the film, but neither does he speak again with Olive.
It is from these depths of regret, self-hatred, social confusion, and communal dysfunction that Olive decides on a very difficult but also very effective way to uproot all this fake news about her sexuality: she turns on her web-cam, initiates a live recording, and states “I, Olive Penderghast, of sound mind and below-average breast size, swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…starting now.” The only way Olive can be at peace is through admitting her lies, and although this comes at the cost of sacrificing her vanity, Olive makes the trade without hesitation. After a good long confession to her digital audience, she has said her peace.
And as this internet broadcast comes to a close, with all of the school tuning in to hear her story and accept her apologies, Olive says goodbye to her viewers, including us who are watching the film. Olive sends a text to Rhi that says “I’m sorry I lied to you,” and then she hears Woodchuck Todd waiting outside her window. Alerting her viewers to Todd’s presence, Olive closes with these words: “I might lose my virginity to him. I don’t know when it will happen; maybe five minutes from now, maybe tonight, maybe six months from now, or maybe on our wedding night. But the really amazing thing is that it is nobody’s god-damn business.” The intelligent, imbalanced, and anonymous girl at the beginning of the story is now side-by-side on a lawnmower with the man of her dreams, having spent all her notoriety (and vanity) on setting the story straight and is now ready to confront the social consequences of this public confession. Having been transformed through this personal and social crisis, Olive is well-equipped to handle whatever comes her way.
When this film is concluded, there is so much to love and celebrate in it. First and foremost, it provides a painfully accurate portrait of high school social dynamics, which is ponderously similar to other social networks. The film is also witty, cunning, and intelligently hilarious: it shows how the world of American teenage girls in the 21st century is not very different from their world in the 19th century, it exposes the paradoxes in a shameful Christianity dedicated to saving people by condemning people, and it gives us permission to laugh at the absurdity of those California parents who love their children almost as much as they love their wine, their organic foods, and their own sexual promiscuity (Olive begins the film by insisting that “the rumors of my promiscuity have been greatly exaggerated,” but no such thing can be said for the adults who inhabit this fictitious world: if anything, their promiscuity has been under-exaggerated, at least when it comes to someone like Mrs. Griffith). Delightful and insightful, perceiving and paradoxical, this film easily earns an “A” from any non-puritanical viewer.
Within this film’s overarching story, several provocative themes emerge. One persistent theme involves the contradictions (and the conflicts) between personal identity and social identity. Olive naively thinks that her social identity is of no great consequence, so she willingly trades her anonymity for notoriety, at the expense of a lie about her virginity. This creates a rupture between who she is pretending to be to others (an adulterer) and who she is as a person (a virgin), which then creates an unbearable burden for Olive and sends her into a spiral of self-hatred, ruptured friendships, and ostracization. Neither the adulteress nor the virgin can coexist, and neither can live while the other survives. So, despite the pain that it will cause, she must repudiate her adulteress persona and re-establish, in the mind of the viewing public, her identity as a virgin.
Olive did have some literary friends who alerted her to the danger of rupturing one’s public identity from their personal identity. In the novel which she read twice, Nathaniel Hawthorne asserts that “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” If Olive was a little more attentive to her reading in school, she could have learned this lesson the easy way. But some truths are best learned the hard way, and although Olive read the book, only by living it could she come to understand and thus embrace some of the truths within it. This is true of the wisdom found in all types of literature, including the best-sellers.
Another major theme is the role of sexuality in forming both a personal and public identity. The film ends with Olive stating that the eventual loss of her virginity to Todd is “nobody’s business,” but such a statement strikes the viewer as childish and naive, for it is contradicted by nearly every dramatic element in the story itself.
For example, Micah tells Mrs. Griffith, “I love you and I want to be with you, and nobody can stop us.” Here, Micah is operating under the same naiveté as Olive, assuming that his sexual relationship with Mrs. Griffith is nobody’s business and should only be determined by his feelings for her. But for the viewer, Micah’s sexual relationship with Mrs. Griffith is seen to be everybody’s business: it is the business of his doctor who is treating his chlamydia; it is the business of all members in the Cross Your Heart Club, with whom he vowed to remain a virgin; it is the business of Olive, who is blamed for his disease; and of course, it is the business of Mr. Griffith, who happens to have his marriage impacted by Micah’s obsession with someone very important to him; namely, his wife. Even in a promiscuous, semi-pagan public high school, where the principle’s most lofty goal is to “keep the girls off the pole and the guys off the pipe,” it is possible to find people like Mr. Griffith who think that sexual relationships are definitely everybody’s business. Like The Scarelet Letter, this film can’t help but demonstrate the ways in which sexual activity is both personal and social; wherever sexual activity is reduced to only one or the other, human nature will reassert itself and teach this lesson anew.
A third and final theme is the film’s reflection on modern communication. After seeing many signs of destructed communication at Ojai High School, Olive ponderously states “I worry about the way information circulates in this school.” At first glance, it seems that modern cell phones are the problem, as they are involved in many of these scenes in which “the accelerated velocity of terminological inexactitude” is on full display. However, although technology is involved in this circulation of misinformation, it is not to be blamed for the problems which arise. Yes, cell phones circulate lies quickly in many scenes in the film, but they also circulate critical truths just as quickly, including Olive’s apologetic text to Rhi and her public confession over the internet. So “the problem” with the way information circulates at the school is not a technological problem but rather some deeper human problem.
Lurking within this human problem is an observation that seems tangential but is, in reality, intimately connected to it. In a very curious manner, the social network at Ojai High School functions almost like a central character of the film, with its own rationality and standards which, in varying ways, are at odds and thus “a problem” for each character. The role of this social force on Olive is most apparent, but it is something that every person has to confront, often at great personal cost. Thus Rhi makes her evening plans based on this social network; Mary Ann Bryant has made it her goal to either convert or condemn everyone swimming in the promiscuity that is exalted by this social network; Brandon wants to be accepted by this social network, but he eventually abandons it for another; Micah desires to destroy the moral standards of this social network (“nobody can stop us, not the school board, not even the President of the United States of America!”), and Mrs. Griffith is heart-stricken at the thought of being judged by the teetering-but-still-present moral standards within this network. Behind every character in the film, there is lurking the presence of some social power, some cultural expectation of great authority, which bends and shapes the characters in their own unique way and is a domineering force to be reckoned with.
So what is most interesting to contemplate is not “the way information circulates in this school” but rather the way such information has binding and authoritative influence on these teenage minds who claim such fierce personal independence and yet are babes sucking from the breast of their social mother. In reality, they can do nothing without her permission, unless they choose to face the wrath of her rejection. This same force is at work in The Scarlet Letter when the voice of the social conscience tells the adulterous pastor that “Hadst thou sought the whole earth over, there was no one place so secret, no high place nor lowly place, where thou coulds’t have escaped me, save on this very scaffold.” This pastor, like Olive, could attain no lasting peace without confronting his personal failures on a public scaffold in plain sight of all. Many people cannot be at peace until they have confessed their personal failures to the social mother they have betrayed.
Olive Penderghast is not the only person who is slow to perceive the relationship (and the reckoning) between her personal conscience and the social authority which is guiding it.