[Editorial] Being a Teenage Girl Sucks: Excision

That is correct; being a teenage girl completely sucks. It happens to be one of the most tumultuous and confusing times in a woman's life and so much of what happens during that short period makes a lasting impression for the rest of your life.

Finding your path during your teenage years is akin to asking a blind donkey to pick up a pen in a desert - the odds really aren’t in the donkey’s favour. Which is similar to how it felt trying to navigate the landscape during teenage years, because your hormones seem to be unruly and without rhyme or reason, the majority of adults around you all seem to be the worst, school is forcing you to decide on a career, boys are horrific, girls are equally as horrific and on top of all that you’ve just been burdened with the fact your womb decides to expel bloody tissue on a monthly basis which makes you cry, scream, heave in pain and feel like a potato. So as you can tell, being a teenage girl sucks. 

Which is exactly why falling in love with Richard Bates Jr’s 2012 horror film, Excision, came to me so naturally. Pauline is an adolescent girl just trying to make her way through high school, she wants to have sex with boys, she’s interested in becoming a surgeon and she fights with her mother over the most trivial of things. But Pauline is a little more fascinated by something that most others would describe as disturbing; she fantasises about blood and visceral and performing horrifically gory surgeries on the people around her. With her younger sister Grace, struggling with cystic fibrosis, all she really wants to do is perfect her techniques and find a way to help her sister. In many synopsis’ for Excision, protagonist Pauline is described as ‘disturbed and delusional’ which in all honesty was probably quite similar to how my parents would have described me as a feisty teenage girl: the disturbing element could have come from the beginning of my love for horror or from the fact that my mood and mental state could switch from one extreme to the next, even resulting in having a short bought of counselling after an rage induced outburst. As for delusional, perhaps during my teenage years I wasn't quite as close to the mark as Pauline is, but there were moments where becoming entwined within my paradoxical mind was easier than facing the harsh realities that the world held for me. In Excision there are some suggestions that Pauline has some concerning problems, but most of these are from external sources such as her mother or some of the girls at school, and whilst watching it never feels like the audience should be concerned for her welfare as it’s easy to see that everyone around her has many problems of their own that they haven’t fully addressed either. 

Pauline is seen as an outcast at school; she has unkempt hair, pimples and doesn’t wear short skirts like the popular girls do. She asks strange questions in biology class such as if a human can contract an STD from having sexual intercourse with a dead person and the female peers around her make remarks about how disgusting and weird she is. As someone who wasn’t popular at school, these girls perfectly represent the daily monsters that I had to navigate at school. Known merely as “the populars” at my school, this clan of short-skirted, make-up clad, stick-thin and beautiful girls were the ones that everyone aspired to be with and the ones that all the boys put on pedestals to admire and ask on dates. Whereas I was into heavy metal, carried a Sid Vicious back-pack, wasn’t allowed to have a skirt above the knees and was a little bit chubby. This instantly put me in the category of ‘outsider’ and meant that getting through school on a daily basis was like climbing over the top of a trench and heading towards the enemy every fucking day, but the only upside that was perceivable to me at the time was that at least I was smart. Pauline is seen as the exact kind of outsider at her school, however, she doesn’t fight it and that felt really commendable. Not once does she strive to become like the popular girls at her school, instead she fully embraces her weird side and is irrevocably herself. 

Let’s talk about boys. Those teenage years are so detrimental to how we begin to see sexuality and the world around us through a sensual lens. The boys in Excision are of course dating the pretty girls, however, Pauline doesn’t really care too much about that and goes ahead to invite Adam, one of her peer’s boyfriend, to have sex with her so that she can lose her virginity. The way Pauline approaches the subject comes across as very matter-of-fact yet through her fantasies (not delusions because otherwise we are all completely delusional) we learn that she is trying to find a way of exploring her growing appetite for sex, even if that hunger is slathered with blood and visceral. Even though this might seem strange at first, it is very normal for teenage girls to be exploring their sexuality and trying to understand what they are into, with strange fantasies nothing but part of beginning to know what you like and dislike. Virginity is often placed into the hands of young women as this sacred aspect that we must cherish and keep until we find the loves of our lives, the person we’re going to marry, but really we’re just the same horny teens as everyone and therefore virginity really isn’t this sacred object we need to protect. Pauline understands that and instead of even choosing someone she is remotely interested in, she just chooses someone that will take the bait so that she can get the deed over and done with and almost push past the stigma and expectations that hang over teenage girls when it comes to virginity. During intercourse with Adam, we see how Pauline only indulges in her own fantasies and even gets lost within her own mind full of gore and visceral. She asks Adam to go down on her without explaining she’s on her period, and when he screams in horror she simply smiles and looks proud of her achievement as he tries to remove blood from his mouth. Again, this feels like pushing past and even breaking a boundary that is forced upon young girls by society; periods are one of the most naturally occurring things to happen to a woman’s body, yet when growing up we are always made to feel ashamed and dirty for having them. When it comes to sexual acts and periods, it seems to be some almost unspoken rule that you just don’t have sex whilst you’re on your period because boys will find it gross (as we see in Adam’s reaction) but that’s not always necessarily true. 

As previously mentioned, Pauline is described as disturbed. She is obsessed with becoming a surgeon and we often live rent free within her mind, exploring her fascination with the human body. There are scenes of men suckling from her chest as she has eight defined nipples just like a pig. We see scenes where she is revered as some form of Queen or Goddess, adored by those around her, all partially nude with blood and guts surrounding them, even some with leashes made from human intestines. In one of these surrealist scenes we see how Pauline, after convincing herself there is a chance she is pregnant from Adam, performs an abortion on herself by simply reaching down and pulling the foetus from her womb and holding it up in the air to examine. Throughout these bizarre dreamlike sequences, Pauline is always centre of attention and slathered in some form of human body part or blood, and presented looking more conventionally beautiful by the standards of society. As a teenage girl and as an outcast, you often daydream about growing up to be seen as one of the beautiful girls, but typically when you’re that age you’re immediately cast aside by your peers if you exclaim to having an interest in the macabre. Pauline’s infatuation with the macabre means that she struggles to connect with those around her, because no one else seems to exhibit this lust for blood. People a female with an interest in horror always raised eyebrows when growing up, family members, friends even strangers would remark on it being a little strange and would refuse to acknowledge that this was just part of who I was. Even to the point that family would continuously buy me presents for my birthday which were your typical ‘girly’ presents including flowery dresses, dolls, stuffed teddies, and an assortment of cute things when really all I wanted was books about monsters, black clothes and anything to do with horror. Even now people frown upon my obsession with extremely gory and nasty films. Pauline represents how difficult it can be growing up as a teenage girl and having an interest in something that is either defined as being a boy’s interest or just something that shouldn’t apply to a female. 

Finally we come to the heart of Pauline’s problems and why she struggles to come to grips with the reality around her, culminating in a horrific yet heart-breaking end scene. Her sister Grace is gradually becoming more beholden to her cystic fibrosis, with the potential it could even claim her life from her. Even though Pauline seems to simply overlook this throughout the entire film, it is when we come to the end that we see everything Pauline has done is because she desperately wants to save her younger sister from her ailment. Couple this with trying to live up to her mother’s expectations, constantly feeling like she isn’t good enough nor like she is loved by her mother, and we see a young teenage girl simply struggling with feeling like her world is crumbling around her. In the last scene of Excision we see Pauline perform a homemade surgery on Grace and a young girl from next door. She performs the botched surgery in the basement, replacing Grace’s ravaged lungs with the healthy lungs of the other girl. When her mother walks into the basement and discovers what she has done, Pauline explains that although the procedure looks messy, it was her first surgery and that what she has accomplished is fantastic. Her mother might scream in horror but she quickly pulls Pauline into an emotional embrace, with Pauline breaking down into frantic sobbing and screaming too. This finale represents Pauline’s true combat with feeling inadequate in her mother’s eyes and coming to terms with the grief of her sister potentially going to die. She performs the surgery as an attempt to save her sister from her sickness but also to prove to her mother that she can achieve great things. As a teenage girl, emotions are complex and difficult to deal with, and all we ever strive to feel is loved, secure, and like everything around us is perfectly going to plan. However, for many of us being a teenage girl is complicated and feeling good enough doesn’t come easily, and if you throw on top of that any type of familial troubles such as sick siblings, divorces, deaths, you have a recipe for trauma and problems. 

Excision might represent all of these aspects in an exacerbated form slathered and oozing with blood, however the heart of the film merely tells the story of the struggles with being an outcasted teenage girl, trying to figure out hormones and sex, whilst striving for her parent’s approval and coming to terms with the fate of her dying sister. 

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