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52 pages 1 hour read

Lynn Painter

Nothing Like the Movies

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024

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Themes

Journey Toward Healing and Forgiveness

Content Warning: This section discusses the death of a parent.

Nothing Like the Movies explores the importance of confronting one’s past to heal and grow through the protagonists’ actions. Both Wes Bennett and Liz Buxbaum have fraught relationships with their pasts. At the start of the novel, they attempt to dissociate from their trauma, heartbreak, and pain to embrace the future. Wes feels “absurdly giddy about [restarting] school” because he believes that returning to UCLA is his chance to forget the pain of the last two years since his dad’s death (11). Liz, meanwhile, tells herself that she’s not the same person she was after breaking up with Wes because she wants to focus on “getting a job in music licensing” (18). The characters are thus attempting to distance themselves from their pasts in an attempt to move forward. However, the frequent narrative flashbacks into the characters’ memories from the last two years prove that ignoring their pain precludes them from healing, forgiving themselves and each other, and moving forward.

Once Wes and Liz learn how to confront their pasts and articulate the pain they’ve experienced, they can better reconcile with each other, overcome their grief and guilt, and embrace renewal. Throughout the novel, the protagonists’ conversations with their loved ones particularly compel them to face their trauma and sorrow to grow beyond it. For Wes, giving the interview inspires him to open up about his dad’s death and the hardship he experienced in the aftermath of losing him. By treating the interview “as free therapy,” Wes learns to “stop overthinking, and talk to Liz [and his friends] like [he’s] telling [his own] story” (180). For Liz, opening up to her dad about her complicated feelings for Wes in the past and present gives her perspective on the emotions she has toward him. These scenes of dialogue usher the characters toward change. Wes and Liz are using their voices to claim their experiences. In turn, they learn that even “the experiences that [don’t] paint [them] in the best light” are part of their stories and identities (180). Owning these facets of their experience helps them move beyond them. They stop letting their past hurts and pain dictate their life in the present by acknowledging it. In these ways, the novel underscores the importance of accepting one’s difficulties as a way to embrace change, renewal, and hope.

Balancing Expectations and Reality

The author peppers Nothing Like the Movies with movie and song references, which show the protagonists’ attempts to balance their expectations with their lived reality. Each chapter of the novel begins with an epigraph from a popular romantic comedy, which grants insight into the chapters’ enclosed events. Throughout the chapters, the characters often think about popular movies they’ve seen and songs they’ve listened to. These pop culture references background both Wes’s and Liz’s outlooks on their lives, identities, and relationships. The novel highlights that Wes and Liz want to believe that their experiences will be romantic, idyllic, and fantastical. However, their encounters with heartbreak challenge their more positive outlooks and challenge them to reconcile with the truth of their experiences.

Wes’s attempts to win Liz back with dramatic, romantic gestures reify the disparity between the protagonists’ expectations and realities. Wes decides that if he is “ever going to have a chance” of repairing their relationship, he needs “to apologize and show [Liz] that [he can] still be the guy she fell in love with two years ago” (313). He tries to apologize to her with hundreds of flowers. He also climbs onto her balcony, writes cue cards with romantic messages, breaks into a baseball diamond, and makes a bet with her on Halloween. These actions are references to popular romantic stories, including Romeo and Juliet and Love Actually. Wes tries to replicate these famous scenes to prove his love for Liz. However, these gestures are symbolic of illusion and fantasy rather than reality.

Wes and Liz can only create a new relationship reality with each other after they articulate their feelings and expectations. Liz no longer “appreciate[s] the romantic angle” that Wes is taking in the present because she’s changed since they broke up (323). While the old Liz would have loved these gestures in the past, the Liz with whom Wes is trying to rekindle a relationship now is more interested in honesty and openness. To reacquaint themselves with each other and pursue a new relationship, Wes and Liz must set aside their idyllic, rosy expectations of love. When they can move beyond fantasy, they make room for honesty and authenticity. Their story is indeed a romance story, but Wes and Liz’s romance doesn’t come about in an expected way. The novel thus demonstrates that not all love stories happen the same way. It underscores that an individual shouldn’t get lost in their expectations because it can make them miss the truth of the love story and reality in front of them.

Personal Growth and Coming-of-Age Journeys

The novel explores the challenges of growing up and maturing amid personal heartbreak via Liz’s and Wes’s parallel coming-of-age journeys. At the novel’s start, both Wes and Liz are ready for a second chance. Wes feels that he “took college for granted the first time”; after “seeing [his] options disappear,” his outlook on life has begun to change (13). In the narrative present, he’s determined to prove himself in his academic and athletic spheres and rekindle his relationship with Liz. He believes that he’s grown and changed because of his recent hardships at home after his dad’s death and restarts his freshman year at UCLA with a positive attitude. Liz is similarly convinced that her past no longer affects her and her new job and that the new term will remake her. Both protagonists are at a crossroads. They are standing between the past and the future at the start of the novel and making plans to grow up on their own terms.

The characters’ encounters with heartbreak, disappointment, and grief throughout the novel complicate their journeys toward growth. For example, Wes faces challenges on the baseball team when he discovers that Liz and Clark are going to be filming the team throughout the preseason. He gets easily distracted by Liz’s presence, which awakens memories of their relationship and breakup. Working on the HEFT documentary also compels him to face the truth of what happened to him after his dad’s death. These experiences complicate Wes’s ability to move into adulthood without looking back. Liz is similarly distracted when “all of a sudden [Wes starts] popping up every time [she goes] anywhere” (102). She thinks that she is a new person since she and Wes broke up. However, her forced proximity to him makes her realize that she has unresolved emotions related to their history. These personal challenges complicate Wes’s and Liz’s coming-of-age experiences and encourage them to self-reflect and change.

Wes and Liz gradually learn how to face their emotional and psychological experiences, which illustrates their internal growth and helps them repair their relationship. Throughout the novel, Liz’s and Wes’s narrations devote an increasing amount of space to the characters’ internal monologues. These monologues include italics, which represent their private thoughts, and questions, which highlight their newfound ability to self-interrogate. These stylistic shifts capture the novel’s central notion that owning one’s feelings and articulating one’s needs is an essential part of growing up. Indeed, after Wes and Liz learn how to be honest with themselves, they learn how to be honest with each other. As a result, they emerge as more realized individuals by the novel’s end.

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