Dirty Girls Documentary
Showing Now!

A couple of weeks ago, the LA Weekly ran a story about a 1996 student documentary shot by Michael Lucid at Crossroads School in Santa Monica. I was immediately intrigued because Crossroads is right down the street from us, and it’s kind of known as the hippie school stinkin rich people send their kids to to be “alternatively educated.” The film was edited and released to a few festivals in 2000, but it really went viral in the past two weeks due to attention from the LA Weekly and then VICE. The two protagonists – the “dirty girls” – are two sisters named Amber and Harper, and the short film documents their attempts to be different and politically active in a school that, while pretending to embrace difference, actually ridicules them for their appearance and their feminism. Amber and Harper call themselves Riot Grrls, and they make a womyn-centric zine to distribute to their mostly mocking peers at Crossroads. I wonder how many of those “pretty” bitchy people feel dumb and regretful today about the flippant and mean remarks they made about these two girls who were just trying to be themselves. For me, it hit home about my own high school experience in a lot of ways. My group of friends were weirdos who kind of self-ostracized ourselves from our fellow classmates and school. At a point in high school, I decided to stop dressing like other girls wanted me two, and I actually had a couple of girls try to stage a clothing and hair intervention on me, to no avail. The way the Dirty Girls dress is how I remember dressing in the mid-90s, and definitely not the ridiculous attempt at blasphemous 90s fashion you see at Forever 21 and Urban Outfitters. But I don’t remember the hate these two girls experienced in Dirty Girls – maybe it was just my school or my city or the fog of weed on my brain, but I didn’t find out that people thought we were lesbian stoner freaks until after high school. These two girls were shit on every day at school for looking the way I thought cool chicks looked when I was in high school. And I’m sure for some or maybe a lot of you, this experience will look familiar – douche bags judging you, when you know they actually hate themselves more than you could ever hate them. I can only hope that other parents out there are teaching their kids not only to tolerate difference, but to embrace it, so that life is not made miserable for creative and interesting people when my daughter is in high school (because she will, no doubt, be creative and interesting and a die-hard metalhead). After the jump, watch Dirty Girls!