The Secret Lives of Teenage Sidekicks

Another film that debuted last month, Selah and the Spades, is a less intimate work, but one that takes on the timeless subject of high-school hierarchies in a way that rivals Mean Girls. The queen-bee lead of Selah rejects the kinds of close ties that shape Ellie and Devi, because she doesn’t think she needs them. Sharp-tongued and suspicious of those around her, Selah isn’t the straight-talking Dionne Davenport to someone else’s carefree Cher Horowitz; she stands on her own. At her predominantly white boarding school, she presides over her “faction,” one of the groups responsible for keeping the students’ social life buzzing, with all the ferocity of Regina George. Selah sheds light on a more miserable dimension of teenagehood: the fear and loneliness it can engender, even in those at the top. (In a recent conversation with my colleague David Sims, the filmmaker Barry Jenkins named the writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s debut feature one of his eight quarantine selections.)

Crucially, Selah’s antagonism isn’t positioned as an evil force that a white teen must overcome in order to flourish. It’s just a mechanism by which Selah keeps things the way she wants them. The show’s racial dynamics don’t bother with faux-solidarity between Selah and the other black characters. Her relationship with the school’s headmaster and primary disciplinarian (played by a somewhat distractingly cast Jesse Williams) isn’t one of obvious de facto racial camaraderie. And sometimes the person who presents the greatest risk to Selah’s authority is another black girl attempting to navigate the same hostile environment.

Selah’s empire extends further than the domain of any Mean Girls extra—she doesn’t just lead the “Unfriendly Black Hotties,” though all three descriptors may apply to her. Free to roam the entire proverbial cafeteria, rather than being restricted to one table, Selah never rests. The film brings a Machiavellian energy to its depiction of Selah’s escalating insecurity about her own power; unfortunately, it stops short just as it builds the most momentum. Still, Selah’s portrait of a troubled teen girl is bracing in its specificity and in how it revels in her capacity for villainy without turning her into a villain.

During one scene, in which Selah’s stern mother (Gina Torres) reminds her daughter that only excellence is accepted in their household, I thought of an exchange from MTV’s Daria that’s stayed with me over the years. Jodie Landon, one of the only black students at her school, tells Daria that the disdain she feels for Lawndale High doesn’t stem just from the lameness of her classmates. “At home, I can say or do whatever feels right,” Jodie laments. “But at school I’m the Queen of the Negroes, the perfect African American teen, the role model for all the other African American teens at Lawndale.” Jodie’s parents instilled in her a drive to succeed, particularly in that setting—one in which white students get to be individuals and rebels but their black classmates can’t.

Selah’s familial lessons are more understated. Aside from the one scene at her mother’s kitchen counter, Selah’s home life is largely unaddressed. References to her early childhood carry notes of the “twice as good” aphorism, but not much else. Selah nearly seems to have created herself on campus, which lends the film a sense of focus that doesn’t sacrifice its protagonist’s complexity. The camera follows Selah’s gaze, fostering a kind of intimacy the teenager doesn’t experience with any of her peers. Poe’s film feels almost voyeuristic at times, as though viewers are being invited to read its protagonist’s journal. What we find there often isn’t sanitized, but it’s rich and honest. In the broader history of teenage heroines, Selah, Devi, and Ellie aren’t uniquely conniving, lustful, or brooding. But as the leads of their respective works, they broaden a canon that’s still expanding, all too slowly. They each tell more than one story.

Hannah Giorgis is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.