Autumn, the 17-year-old protagonist of Eliza Hittman’s sophomore film Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), first stands out because of her sincerity. The introductory event is a school talent show: after two slick, confident song-and-dance routines, Autumn disrupts the pattern with a stripped back acoustic set and a soon-to-be-sinister rendition of The Exciters’ ‘He’s Got The Power!’. Without harmonies or a backing track, Autumn’s emotions come clearly through her voice, opening her up for a jeer from a smirking jock in the audience: “Slut.” Her furrowed brow and wavering verses are telling a story, but a coded one, conveying a painful truth which elicits loud applause from the audience at large, but which her own family seems uninterested in parsing. At the subsequent celebratory dinner, Autumn’s father holds his praise hostage, only telling his daughter how great she was when prompted by his wife (played by musician Sharon Van Etten, whose own music is as raw as Autumn’s), even then including the qualifier, “Your mother wants me to tell you…”. This is apparently punishment for Autumn’s recent “foul mood”, which is mysterious to him but already less mysterious to us: a potential cause is hinted at when the same sweat-shirted boy from before catches Autumn looking at him and makes a crude blowjob gesture. She leaves the table and throws a glass of water in his smug face on her way out. The boy’s friends guffaw. Autumn cannot win: internalisation gives rise to her father’s irritation, while externalisation generates laughter. She must channel her emotion subtly, through words written by another, if she wants to capture an audience.
The stakes of her disagreement with the jock at the table next door aren’t to be taken lightly – a pan to Autumn’s slightly-bloated stomach as she exposes it in the bathroom mirror seems to say as much. More generally, Hittman isn’t interested in explaining situations or family dynamics – we learn that Autumn’s father is a construction worker when Van Etten drapes his coat around his shoulders, and though we later find out that one of three other girls from the pizzeria scene is Autumn’s cousin, Skylar, we barely catch a glimpse of the other two and must assume that they are little sisters. That Autumn won’t share the problem, so disturbing that she has to drink cough syrup to fall asleep, is enough to know that she feels largely unsupported. Hittman implies a lot but rarely says anything outright; her style is suggestive, conservative. I correctly inferred teen pregnancy from the earlier pan, but the friend watching alongside me thought it indicated body dysmorphia. The shot that confirmed my suspicion was, again, merely suggestive: red marks on Autumn’s shoulder left by newly strained bra straps. Subtlety is often a condition of not only critically acclaimed art, but of women who are liked. Not too much makeup, only enough to achieve a your-skin-but-better look; charming but not loud; flirty but not aggressively sexual. The same with narratives – it’s best to favour a light hand. “My compass kept telling me,” said Hittman when interviewed about her writing process, “don’t have them talk about these things, because it feels cheap.” A dreaded adjective for both a story and a woman’s sexual behaviour.
With her stripped dialogue and terse characterisation, something described by The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis as “understated realism”, Hittman elicits a tension that goes beyond family conflict. She wanted the actress who played Autumn to be able to “transmit her thoughts without dialogue” since the film deals with pain made private via sexual shame, but, as exemplified in Autumn’s cover of The Exciters!, some measure of internalisation is necessary if a woman wants to be taken seriously. A period of surliness, despite a legitimately troubled mind, is enough for Autumn’s silence to be written off as a “foul mood”. Autumn’s mother doesn’t demand that her father treat her kindly, but wheedles. Autumn and Skylar don’t yank their hands away from their boss at the grocery store when he kisses their hands at the end of a shift; they let it happen to keep his good graces and their jobs. Being a woman involves a symbiotic relationship between delicacy and directness that comes with prescribed proportions. In her essay ‘Bad TV’ writer Andrea Long Chu likens women’s experience of being perceived as credible or not to hoarding “subtlety in a world where belief is something you have to save up to buy,” which is similar, she later argues, to the contract of believability an audience unconsciously signs with their on-screen narratives. “At worst, woke TV has all the moral subtlety of an after-school special,” writes Chu. “But trauma rarely announces itself the way it does in the New York Times or on HBO, in the dramas that win big men statues of little women. In real life, trauma is soapy.” And so if, encountering an instance like Autumn’s father calling the family dog “easy” and a “slut” while giving her belly rubs, then countering with “she likes it” when Van Etten tells him to stop, you smell cliché (it’s the second time in less than 20 minutes the word “slut” pops up), you’re staring the paradox of female assertion under the patriarchy right in the face. Yet storytelling as a tool to show scourged psychic interiors is effective: personal narratives, writes Roger Luckhurst in his book The Trauma Question, have proven to be “a key vehicle for the feminist articulation of silenced traumatic violence.”i We don’t even want to see young girls’ shoulders in our schools, let alone sweeping statements and didacticism regarding their emotional anatomy. Stick to what you know and keep it close to the chest; let others infer generalities from your story. Perhaps a girl like Autumn would vocalise an opinion about unfair treatment in her situation, perhaps not, but Hittman wipes the soap from life in order to transmit her message. A film aiming to, as Hittman puts it, iterate the experience of being a woman in America as “navigating this misogynistic and hostile world” fits snugly with feminist tradition. The ecstatic reaction to the film’s impenetrable teens also fits snugly with a sense that when it comes to women’s emotions we like them translated. Critics praising Hittman admire her as being “daringly unafraid of silence,” her “quiet attention to detail,” and her “unadorned, naturalistic style”, and they are right to do so. But although the film’s inferential web is compelling, and often moving, watching it I wish that directness were not so frequently equated with cheapness. Imagine if Autumn were to have a moment, like Diablo Cody’s Juno, to discuss her options with a friend, to pronounce upon the unfairness of her situation, or to commiserate. But Juno (2007) had an abundance of romance and comedy to blunt its few points regarding an American girl’s bodily autonomy.
In Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Hittman lays out the stakes of a moral argument around women’s bodies. Given her distinction as an art-house filmmaker, though, I’m not sure she had any choice but to be subtle in her quest to make a point. Intentional or not, the parallels between this formal question and Autumn and Skylar’s predicament are impossible to ignore. After Skylar guesses that Autumn is pregnant, she pockets cash from the grocery store register and the next day they use it for bus tickets from rural Pennsylvania to New York, where Autumn can procure an abortion that doesn’t require parental consent. The lack of justifying preamble feels refreshing, a nod to the innate rapport between the two teenage girls; they recognise their only choice and wordlessly proceed. Subtlety seems to be Hittman’s primary method of convincing an audience how small and punishing the world can seem for a woman in rural America. Weighted silence from the girls instead of impassioned monologues about the creeps in their lives, for instance. As two teenagers seeking an abortion, this is often the only tool available to them. When Autumn dares to inquire, once and casually, about abortion at the hometown clinic which first tests her for pregnancy, it invites a personal screening from her doctor of a YouTube video: fetus porn that describes all the infants that could exist without the procedure “killing babies”. It’s better to say nothing, to hang up when the clinic calls to check in, Autumn quickly learns. Having oriented us to ally with Autumn, Hittman prods our ethical boundaries – when Autumn sterilises a safety pin over the burner, what do we expect, and for whose safety do we worry? The girl’s or the fetus’s? It doesn’t end up mattering in this particular scene, as Autumn is only piercing her nose. She is, after all, a small town girl, which is an identity I was confronted by when I watched her down Vitamin C pills to induce abortion (a myth) and glanced at the bottle resting on the nightstand in my own teenage bedroom, once suggested by a friend for the same purpose. The internet and word of mouth – an American girl’s sexual health education.
American healthcare is bleak, especially for women. Every body is commodity under capitalism, and women’s the most profitable as both biological factories for more bodies and as veritable screens for 1950s ideals: monogamous marriage, two children, so on. Our bodies cannot belong to us, lest the poor be able to control the size of their family, say, and fail to stay poor, or non-wealthy women cease to have to choose between families and careers, or we stop buying Spanx. In the wealthiest country in the world, those at the top duke it out for that superlative even and especially at the expense of those on the bottom. Nine states are legislatively set up to ban abortion, and 13 more are expected to follow suit; they wait only on the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade, a mission backed by over 200 Republican lawmakers. But these bodies, however controlled by the state, also carry Autumn and Skylar over state lines, where they will be able to access affordable reproductive healthcare and mitigate the repercussions of, at best, a moment of irresponsibility, and at worst, rape. We’ll never find out what happened to Autumn, only that attempts to guess are wasted time when the woman in question has one highly time-sensitive option. An obsession with circumstance implies the wish to evaluate her ‘right’ to an abortion. If she was raped, okay, but what if she threw caution to the wind in a moment of desire? By courting this evaluative impulse, Never Rarely Sometimes Always also criticises it.
Far from the grandiose montages accompanying first times in New York, Autumn and Skylar seek the city’s cheapest pleasures: a game at the arcade, sweet buns from the Chinese bakery. But after Autumn’s first appointment with Planned Parenthood where she has to spend the rest of their money on a two-day-long late-term abortion procedure – the sonogram she obtained in Pennsylvania, which is currently a battleground regarding funding for reproductive healthcare, incorrectly (or intentionally) informed her that she was ten rather than 18 weeks pregnant – will you blame her for the petty cash spent on dessert and a game? Hittman wants to know. The audience’s evaluation of the girls’ resources and where they should be allocated harmonises bitterly with America’s evaluation of the same. Can we judge Skylar for leaving Autumn sitting on her suitcase alone after an invasive surgery to ply a pallid boy for money for their bus ticket back to Pennsylvania? Autumn won’t: in one of the most validating scenes of the film, she finds Skylar being pushed up against a pole and kissed by the kid, and stands on the other side to hold Skylar’s hand through the de facto transaction. The camera holds on Autumn’s fingers making their way along Skylar’s sleeve until they find her hand. “I know,” says a squeeze. And “I know,” says Hittman’s refusal to explicate the circumstances of Autumn’s pregnancy.
The only indication we receive as to the conditions of conception is in a brutal talking-head interview conducted by the Planned Parenthood nurse. This is the titular moment – Autumn must only answer “never, rarely, sometimes, or always” to the nurse’s questions. Have past sexual partners forced her to have sex? Refused to wear a condom? Does she want to talk about it? If we want her to, why? Narrative payoff is a flimsy answer. Justice is also dubious. Painful explanations do not work in our bureaucracy, irrespective of political party. Tara Reade’s assault accusations against Joe Biden, whom then Democratic National Committee has pitted against Donald Trump, never got off the ground because the PR firm managing the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund for victims of sexual harassment is headed by the top adviser to Biden’s campaign. In the words of Biden himself, “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.” When words are void of value, perhaps subtlety is the only currency: Hittman’s, Autumn’s, Skylar’s, and mine. Hittman expends her narrative energy on shots of women’s thumbs stroking each other’s hands, Autumn clutching Skylar’s against the pole, or the hand of a Planned Parenthood worker holding hers during her procedure, which have a different kind of credibility altogether. Comfort is what women have to offer each other when we’re set up for trauma, something this film not only asks us to believe, but to take for granted. It took me a second watch to realise that the only man in the film who doesn’t leer at the girls is the MTA ticket agent. I suppose I didn’t notice the first time around because I, too, grew up in rural Pennsylvania. I have since moved to New York and know, like Hittman, that misogyny does not rely on poverty, or a rural versus urban divide (though of course better education means better conditions for women) but rather drips down on us like water torture, every day, from above: caveats to our autonomy from the ‘well meaning’, the jeers that meet both frustrated silence and bursts of expression, the hostile architecture of American healthcare. Always, these drops sound like as they hit our foreheads, shocking in their regularity. Always, always, always.
i Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013), p. 88.
Bessie Rubinstein is a writer based in New York City.
