by Matthew Crump, Staff Writer

Over the past year, I’ve grown to despise the term “coming-of-age.” Yet, time and time again, it was the best, most concise way I could satisfy someone’s questions about the stories I was writing. Now, once again, I am brought back to this compulsion as I’m tasked with telling you about the writer who inspired me enough to go into thousands of dollars of debt for a silly little thing called screenwriting.

As my unwitting writing mentor, I know deep down in my soul that Diablo Cody would resent being categorized under the “coming-of-age” label too. If you’re going to put someone in a box, at least choose a sexy one like “thriller” or “mystery.” Hell, even “documentary” has that kinda drab, no-nonsense appeal that you just know has some whips and chains hiding somewhere in the third act. But “coming-of-age”? That’s the kind of cutesy box that no one wants to be put in.

Yet, if you Google what movies fall under the genre, Diablo Cody’s break-out film will be among the first you’ll see. It was in early 2008 when Cody walked up onto the stage sporting a leopard print dress and pin-up girl shoulder tattoo to accept the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Her first screenplay. Before that, her biggest writing credit was a memoir about her brief stint as a stripper. For better or worse, this unlikely path to the Academy Awards cemented her status in the industry as the ultimate outsider.

If you still haven’t managed to place the movie that scored her the win, just picture a young Michael Cera in the bright yellow running shorts that his movie mom washes in color-safe bleach. That should jog your memory. After discovering Juno (2007) at the ripe age of eleven, I remember going to my cool, older sister to gush about it, thinking it would buy me some brownie points among the indie boys and quirky girls that made up her high school friend group. When she tore it to shreds I was shocked.

Having picked up a rebel streak from faraway corners of the internet, my sister lambasted Juno for its apparent espousal of the pro-life rhetoric that we were surrounded by in our conservative, Christian hometown. As certified Preacher’s Kids™ this was just one of the many confining beliefs that would lead her to duking it out with bigoted family members in our grandparent’s kitchen while I stood by a crockpot of soup in dumbstruck awe.

My secret pre-teen admiration of her is why I often took my sister’s word as seriously as God’s. If she hated something, I hated it too. Juno was perhaps the first time I dared to disagree (as privately and non-confrontationally as possible, of course). Sure, she was right about being pro-choice, but I still knew she had this movie all wrong. 

As it turns out, Cody herself agreed with my sister’s newfound political stance. After the film won the Oscar, she was horrified to receive a letter from her Catholic High School thanking her for writing a pro-life movie. Cody has repeatedly decried any such intent, remaining a staunch advocate for reproductive rights and even using the film’s 10-year anniversary to raise money for Planned Parenthood.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I was eleven. The reason I knew Juno was a great movie had nothing to do with any of that. What I saw in the movie that my sister seemed to miss is that she was Juno… well, without the whole pregnancy thing. But that unabashed, cutting wit that I saw her use to eviscerate stodgy adults on the daily was the very reason why Juno MacGuff resonated with me in the first place.

As much as I love it, that’s enough about Juno. To reduce Cody’s initial collaboration with director Jason Reitman down to her magnum opus would be a gross injustice to a writer who has worn her outsider badge with pride and taken risks at every point of her career. In the last 15 years, she’s offered more range than many *cough* male *cough* critics are willing to admit. 

So how do you categorize someone as multifaceted as Diablo Cody? I know slapping a “coming-of-age” sticker on her because of a movie from 2007 doesn’t cut it, but for someone whose work has influenced my own, real-life coming-of-age journey, it’s what feels the most true to me. Please indulge me as I share a few things that the lesser-known works in her canon have taught me about growing up, no matter what season of life you’re in.

United States of Tara (2009-2011)

When I encountered United States of Tara in high school, I was a few years older and wiser than I had been for my initial Juno screening. It was around this time that I discovered the writer’s room structure of most US television shows and I began privately planning my own career in screenwriting. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t wised up enough to ever consider who had written the televised masterpiece laid out before me.

Spoiler alert: it was none other than Diablo Cody. While the show’s compelling premise of a suburban housewife living with Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID) seems to trace back to Steven Spielberg, the one who gave the show its signature heart— sprinkling wacky banter among such lovably broken characters— was the recent Oscar winner herself. 

But the character who impacted me the most wasn’t the titular Tara or any of her idiosyncratic alters; it was her teenage son, Marshall. If Cody snatched my sister’s wig when writing Juno, she lopped off my entire scalp when she wrote Marshall. This tea-drinking, silent film-loving weirdo with zebra stripe bedroom accessories offered me a mirror— it was the first time I fully recognized myself in a piece of media. He reflected my high school self to such a T that I’ve recently hired a lawyer to guide me on the parameters of retroactively suing someone for your life rights. 

All legal fees aside, after binge-watching United States of Tara as a teenager, I ended up falling into a 6-month long rabbit hole reading about and researching DID. While nothing concrete ever manifested from it (yet), this was the earliest non-school-related deep-dive that I ever embarked on. Without even realizing Cody was the show’s creator and writer, in a roundabout way she taught me about the importance of understanding your protagonist’s inner psychology. 

Even if it isn’t as rare and complex as Tara’s, this key element of writing compelling protagonists is what I now use as my guiding star when starting a new passion project. I’m proud to say that, in the last decade, these creative efforts have accumulated tenfold; the majority of which now live on a wildly disorganized hard drive that I would love to pitch to you if you happen to know and/or be Steven Spielberg.

Jennifer’s Body (2009)

It was my freshman year of undergrad when I was finally inducted into the cult of Jennifer’s Body. This film took me from the status of a burgeoning horror fan to cementing me as a certified horror fanatic. I’d never seen a scary movie that was so explicitly queer. It created the kind of seismic shift in my world that left me in the rubble somehow questioning if I was a lesbian.

It would be another year before I concluded that I was just another run-of-the-mill gay like Marshall, but the impact this film had on me and my ambitions as a writer remains unparalleled. Did I just spend six years writing my own high school succubus romp? …Maybe— but I swear it’s more original than it sounds! If I’m lucky, maybe one day Cody will have some grounds for a counter-suit. I’ll take whatever attention she’s willing to give me.

All copyright infringement aside, I could gush about this movie all day (and I have) but perhaps the most important writing lesson this entry from Cody’s filmography taught me is to follow your instincts. After the success of a hit film and TV show, I’m sure she had endless options to write cheap Hollywood cash grabs. Instead, Cody chose to write this. And it flopped. 

This was due almost entirely to the film’s distributor marketing it to straight male incels looking to lust after Megan Fox’s body when instead they could’ve been focusing their efforts on literally any single letter of LGBTQ. The only thing that’s preventing me from ranting about this longer is that I already have (seriously, go read that article). Now that all of those letters have come together and reclaimed the film in all its bisexual glory, the only point I really need to make here is this: if you let your passion lead your writing, it’s always going to shine through.

Young Adult (2011) and Tully (2018)

Of the more recent works from Cody’s career, these two films are the biggest testament to her range as a writer. They also represent a return to working with Juno director Jason Reitman, as well as a new partnership with actress Charlize Theron, who plays the lead role in front of the camera as well as producing behind it. Despite the similarities in their credits, both films bring vastly different stories to the screen, challenging the basic tenets of screenwriting along the way. 

The first act of Young Adult initially seems to subscribe to a traditional film structure. However, its commitment to the anti-hero protagonist, which was all the rage in the early 2010s, slowly warps throughout the remainder of its running time. Theron plays Mavis Gary, an emotionally stunted YA author who makes a pilgrimage back to her small town to crash a high-school beau’s baby shower. All of the chaotic and cringe-worthy shenanigans eventually culminate in an ending that just might be my favorite fuck-you to the Hollywood formula ever committed to film. 

Instead of playing with structure, Tully bats around the game of film reveals, taking a more recently canonized trope and masterfully cloaking it in the story of a woman recovering from her 3rd pregnancy. Without spoiling any of its bite, Cody executed a script that juxtaposes Theron’s brutal maternal authenticity against a character who speaks in “fun facts for fourth graders.” While it feels stilted at times along the way, the final act reveals the strange quality of the writing to have been intentional from the very first line.

As with all of her work, the lessons that could be pulled from these films are innumerable, particularly when considering the uncertain stages of life that come after the typical “coming-of-age” 14-21 age range. I encountered both of these films at a time when I no longer qualified for learning a life lesson that would end in me throwing a freeze-frame fist into the air on the school’s football field. The reason I group these two films isn’t because the lessons they teach are the same, but because they both speak volumes to the importance of finding creative collaborators who will push you to explore new terrain.

While a continued collaboration with Reitman might’ve easily resulted in a tired rehash of where we were at culturally in 2007, instead it gave us not one, but two films that carry relevant messages to their respective eras. Similarly, the choice to re-cast Theron in Tully carried the risk of recreating the embittered performance of Mavis Gary. Instead, she rose to the call of Cody’s new script and brought a tenderness to her character that honors the range of both artists’ abilities in their respective mediums.

Oh, and both movies are funny as hell, too.

With the release of Lisa Frankenstein right around the corner (this week!), there’s no better time to dig back through Cody’s filmography and catch some of these gems that you might’ve missed. Such a karmic reparation feels long overdue to her after how abruptly that sticky movie theater carpet was pulled out from under the last teen horror movie she wrote. 

Even though her latest film looks like a return to Jennifer’s Body territory, it will no doubt still manage to offer even more sage writing advice to the mentee she doesn’t know exists (humble brag alert: technically, that last bit isn’t true since we briefly exchanged Insta DMs in 2019, the impact of which I’m certain caused the same monumental shift in her life as it did for me). 

All desperate pleas for attention aside, the real reason I keep coming back to Cody and her unique POV is because each time I do, I recognize myself. Somewhere among all the kitschy dialogue and messy protags that are the cornerstones of her style, I find a new way to navigate this ludicrous world through the current season of my life. She continues to offer me the words I need to refill my bowl… So I can finally step away from the crockpot in my grandparents' wainscotted kitchen and demolish my republican uncle with the ladle. 

Now that’s what I call a coming-of-age story.