Sierra Burgess is…Complicated

“Who gets to tell a story?”

Does it have to be autobiographical for it to be valid? Or can a writer stretch beyond their own experience to convey someone else’s accurately?

This question stumps me when it comes to Netflix’s newly released film, Sierra Burgess is a Loser. The movie’s plot revolves around Sierra, a smart, funny, intelligent and seemingly confident girl with a loving family. But despite all of these positive attributes, she is treated like an outcast by many of her high school peers because of her weight. Veronica, the most popular girl in school, taunts her, she only has one close friend, Dan (who is arguably the best character in the entire movie?), and has yet to have her first romantic relationship. The narrative arc of the movie follows Sierra falling for the rival high school’s star football quarterback, who is under the impression she is Veronica via a blossoming relationship over the phone.

Putting aside the heartwarming friendship that eventually develops between Sierra and Veronica, the classic trope of high school angst is not new. Honestly, it is quite cliché. But, it is particularly effective for the compelling story that Lindsey Beer, the film’s screenwriter, attempts to convey. Veronica goes out of her way to fat shame Sierra and make her feel uncomfortable in her body. After suggesting Sierra should go on diet pills, Sierra looks down at Veronica and says, “Are you done?” Beer puts a twist on a narrative the viewer expects to see. Instead of Sierra taking these comments to heart, brooding over them, and crying late at night in her bedroom, she shrugs them off and proposes a mutually beneficial scheme to her bully so that she can continue duping the hot football player into a relationship-of-sorts.

I was so pleased to see Sierra confident in her body when I first watched the movie. I kept thinking, ‘Wow, this is so great. I don’t think I’ve seen something like this before.’ But, by the last few scenes, Sierra’s confidence disintegrates. She yells at her parents for “not knowing what it is like to look like this,” with tears streaming down her face after her plan went awry. Why did Beer feel the need to strip away Sierra’s self-confidence? How does this enhance the narrative and what does it tell young girls who can identify with Sierra?

With a newly heightened focus on body positivity and acceptance in the media, Netflix’s decision to release a film that embodied the converse seemed highly unusual and counter-productive. To All the Boys I Loved Before, released not only a couple weeks earlier, had a massive social media presence and was praised for its fitting cast and positive messages within the classic high school romance trope.  There were no archetype characters which exploited the actors. Sierra Burgess is a Loser on the other hand, did not receive the same kind of hype; each character was an archetype of sorts: Veronica bullied others as a means of escaping her own home life, Jamey is a hot and athletic but not the most intelligent, and Sierra is considered an outcast because of her size even though she has a kind soul and is incredibly gifted, academically or otherwise. Sierra Burgess is a Loser did not receive the same kind of hype. Because young teens are highly impressionable and are the focus group for this film, I find it incredibly detrimental to present a narrative which teaches young girls that their self-worth hinges on the appraisal of peers, particularly male peers. I believe Beer’s intentional choice in her screenwriting to take away the one characteristic that makes Sierra’s character more than one dimensional – her self-confidence – to be a major flaw of the movie…maybe even its downfall.

In Roxane Gay’s collection of essays entitled Bad Feminist, she uses Diana Spechler’s novel Skinny to explore what she deems as “getting fat right (or wrong).” She discusses the potential problems of authors producing narratives that stray too far from their own lived experience, arguing that it can result in stories that do not accurately reflect the lives of those being discussed. Gay asserts that people who have not lived with obesity cannot claim to write a true depiction of what being overweight is like. They don’t know what it is like to attend fat camp. They don’t know what it is like to have family members try and change your appearance because they think that you and your personality are not good enough. She finds Spechler’s protagonist, Gray Lachmann, and the letters she secretly writes to “fat people” offensive. The letters written at camp, similar to the camps that Gay attended when she was a young girl herself, harshly depict overweight men and women as people searching for excuses, even going as far as claiming that they look to place blame on others for their appearance. These assertions are frank and seemingly indulgent on Spechler’s part. Gay is left with the impression that Spechler was “imagining only one possible existence for a fat person, [and] that the fat life is somehow markedly different from the skinny life” (118).

With all of this in mind, Sierra Burgess is a Loser seems to fall in line with Gay’s assertion – the movie’s screenwriter projects an assumption of a particular lived experience while living her own experience as a thin, strawberry-blonde woman. Her deliberate choice to strip Sierra of her self-confidence after establishing her character from the onset as a young confident woman who has a bright future ahead contradicts and complicates the supposed purpose of the piece: that size doesn’t matter. The subtext of the film screams that it does. What are we, the viewers, supposed to make of that? I am left confused and uneasy about what I am supposed to take away from the movie. Am I supposed to be thrilled that Jamey, the football jock lover, overlooks Sierra’s size when his declaration of love for her only makes me cringe? Or am I supposed to cheer for Sierra gaining a newfound confidence after his love declaration even though her confidence and self-empowerment already existed at the beginning of the movie?

If anything, this movie provided an entertaining rendition of the biggest scam of our generation – catfishing…and in the most loving and positive way. Lie about who you are because you don’t live up to high societal standards of beauty, hook ‘em, and then reel them in until it’s too late for them to say no to you. What a great message for teenagers.

By Anna Billy

Music snob, over-protective mom-friend, and avocado toast connoisseur.