Easy A (2010)

and the Girl Who Told Her Own Story

A comedy about a reputation a girl didn't earn, inspired by The Scarlet Letter. What it teaches about carrying someone else's shame, "who would you believe?", cruelty dressed as virtue, the same story that makes a boy and ruins a girl, and "nobody's business."

Easy A (2010). Directed by Will Gluck, written by Bert V. Royal, partly inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Emma Stone as Olive Penderghast, Penn Badgley as Todd, Amanda Bynes as Marianne, Aly Michalka as Rhiannon, Dan Byrd as Brandon, Lisa Kudrow as Mrs. Griffith, Thomas Haden Church as Mr. Griffith, and Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci as Olive’s parents.

“I might even lose my virginity to him. I don’t know when it will happen... But the really amazing thing is, it is nobody’s goddamn business.”

Olive Penderghast, on her webcast.

This page belongs to On Screen. It is a refusal, and the gentle issue after a heavy one, The Girl on the Train. It’s a comedy about a reputation a girl didn’t earn, and what happened when she stopped letting other people tell her story. It knows the 80s films in this series by heart: Olive wishes, out loud, that her life were “like an 80’s movie.” And then it does something none of them did. It lets her tell the truth herself.

Like every entry on the On Screen page, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. The church group in this film is satire, aimed at cruelty, not at faith; this page reads it the same way. What it reads is how shame travels, and who ends up carrying it.

The Story

Olive Penderghast, seventeen, tells her best friend, Rhiannon, a small lie to get out of a camping trip: she has a date with a college boy. On Monday, pressed for details, she lies again: she lost her virginity to him. Marianne, the head of the school’s church group, overhears, and by the end of the day the whole school knows. The church group decides to “save” her.

Olive tells the truth to one person, Brandon, a classmate who is bullied for being gay. She agrees to pretend to sleep with him at a party, so people will leave him alone. After a fight with Rhiannon, she leans into the reputation: new clothes, and a red “A” stitched on, like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, which she’s reading in English class. Boys who’ve had no luck with girls pay her in gift cards to let them claim they’ve slept with her.

Then a rumor she can’t laugh off. Marianne’s boyfriend, Micah, has caught chlamydia from the school’s guidance counselor, Mrs. Griffith, and he says he got it from Olive. Mrs. Griffith is married to Olive’s favorite teacher, and Olive takes the blame to protect his marriage.

The church group, now including Rhiannon, starts harassing her to drop out. A date with Rhiannon’s crush, Anson, ends with Olive storming off when he tries to pay her to actually sleep with him. Todd, the boy she’s liked since eighth grade, tells her he never believed the rumors.

Olive asks the boys who paid her to tell the truth. None of them will. When she tells Mrs. Griffith she’ll expose her, Mrs. Griffith tells her no one would believe her. So Olive tells Mr. Griffith herself.

After talking with her mother, Olive invites the school to watch her webcast that night, promising a show. Instead, she tells the truth: the whole story the film has been showing us. She signs off, apologizes to Rhiannon, and rides away with Todd on a lawnmower.

Easy A was made for $8 million and earned $75 million, and earned Emma Stone a Golden Globe nomination.

What It Gets Right

A great deal, and with very good jokes. It shows how fast a story about a girl’s body can become everyone’s business. It shows who pays for a lie and who walks away from one. It gives Olive two of the warmest parents in the series. And it ends with a girl who refuses to let anyone else narrate her life.

What It Teaches

1. Taking the blame for someone else

When Micah says he caught chlamydia from Olive, the truth is that he caught it from Mrs. Griffith, an adult and the school’s guidance counselor. Olive takes the blame anyway, to protect a teacher she loves.

The Decoder’s Card 6, Shame Inversion, is “Making you feel ashamed of their behavior.” Mrs. Griffith lets a teenager carry her shame, and later tells her: “My guilt stems from my indiscretion and yours for lying.” As if the two were the same size. Many women have been handed someone else’s shame, and told it was theirs to share.

2. “Who would you believe?”

When Olive threatens to tell the truth, Mrs. Griffith doesn’t deny anything. She asks her a question: “if you were an adult, who would you believe?”

It’s one of the most honest lines in the film, and one of the cruelest. It’s what a person with more power says when they know the story will go their way. Olive’s answer is the right one: she doesn’t argue with Mrs. Griffith. She goes to the one person who needs to know.

3. Cruelty dressed as virtue

Marianne’s group says it wants to save Olive, and spends the film harassing her to leave school. Marianne explains it herself: “Jesus tells us to love everyone, even the whores and the homosexuals. But it’s so hard, it’s so hard because they keep doing it, over and over again.”

The Decoder’s Card 19, Righteous Justification, is “Cruelty dressed as virtue.” The film’s target isn’t faith; Olive’s own parents, and plenty of decent people, are nowhere near Marianne. The target is cruelty that has found a good reason. If you’ve been treated cruelly by someone who was sure they were doing the right thing, the cruelty was still cruelty.

4. Paid to lie

The boys who pay Olive to say she slept with them get a reputation. She gets a worse one. When she asks them to tell the truth, none will give theirs up. And Anson, on a date, tries to pay her for the real thing.

That’s the double standard in miniature: the same story makes a boy and ruins a girl. Olive learned the hard way that a reputation built by other people is never really yours to control.

5. “Nobody’s goddamn business”

What ends it isn’t a speech at a pep rally or a confrontation. It’s Olive, on her own webcast, telling the truth, every bit of it, from the beginning. And then the line at the top of this page: whether, when and with whom is “nobody’s goddamn business.”

It’s one of the best refusals in the series. She doesn’t argue with the rumor. She doesn’t ask anyone to believe her. She tells her own story, once, and then she leaves to live her life.

A Reputation She Didn’t Earn, Side by Side

	Heathers (1989)	Mean Girls (2004)	Easy A (2010)
The rumor	A false story about her, spread by boys	That she pushed Regina in front of a bus	That she slept with half the school
Who started it	Two football players	Rumors in the halls	Her own small lie, and everyone else’s
How it ended	She walked back in	She took responsibility	She told the truth herself

Three films about a girl and a story told about her. In the newest, she takes the microphone.

If You Grew Up on This

Many readers watched this as teenagers, or with one. Nothing on this page asks you to stop loving it. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.

Some questions to sit with:

Have you carried the blame for something someone else did?
Has someone with more power ever reminded you who would be believed?
Have you been treated cruelly by someone sure they were doing right?
Did the same story that helped someone else hurt you?
What part of your life is nobody’s business but yours?

Olive stopped letting other people tell her story. She told it once, herself, and rode away.

You’re the audience now. It’s nobody’s business but yours.