Words by: Akira Kerr 
Art by: Ava Toon

My cousin turned 13 this year and it was kind of a shock. I thought her know-it-all eight-year-old phase was going to last forever. 

For so many years, I felt like I couldn’t relate to her. A nine-year age gap feels like an entire lifetime. While I was being a serious university student (an endeavour that includes putting fancy transitions on Powerpoint presentations), she was moving from primary school to middle school. It probably didn’t help that we only see each other two times a year on average, but I just felt like I couldn’t and wouldn’t connect with her. 

Until I discovered her love for ‘Mamma Mia!’. 

It was at my grandma’s birthday party when we all decided to go for a stroll, when I heard her start talking about wanting to visit all the Greek Islands where the films were set. Um excuse me? It’s literally my dream to win the lottery and take my besties on a ‘Mamma Mia!’ dream girl holiday. 

I know what you’re thinking; Akira, it’s not rare to like ‘Mamma Mia!’, it’s like totally an iconic chick flick and musical. Yes I know. But, when you discover someone in your family is a girly-girl just like you, when you had previously thought you were alone, it comes as a surprise. 

And it doesn’t stop there – my cousin has watched all the classics. ‘Mean Girls’, ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, ‘Legally Blonde’, ‘Ten Things I Hate About You’, ‘Clueless’, the list goes on. Despite most, if not all, of these films coming out long before she was even born, she’s watched them, loved them and made them her comfort movies. Just like her mum, just like me. Which just goes to show chick flicks have the power to transcend generations and will never lose their cultural relevance. 

Let me explain. Chick flicks are just thought of as frivolous and shallow films where the heroine is only focussed on finding a cute boy to date. The word ‘just’ precedes the genre all too often. But do you really think something that superficial could traverse time as elegantly as chick flicks have? Chick flicks teach us lessons, they offer us new perspectives on girlhood, they empower us, and they allow us to escape into romances that some people *cough* straight men *cough* could not pull off even if they tried. 

‘Legally Blonde’ gave us Elle Woods, a fashion major who had been underestimated because of her hyper-femininity and effervescent personality. She rose to the top at Harvard, and didn’t for a second see her girliness as a weakness. ‘Ten Things I Hate About You’ gave us the original ‘not like other girls’ girl. She reads and talks about feminism, then ends up falling in love with a bad (read: misunderstood) boy. ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ gave us the most incredible trio known to man in Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Queen Meryl Streep, and sent chills down our spines with Miranda Priestly’s cerulean blue monologue. And ‘Mamma Mia!’ gave us a delightful story about motherhood and finding yourself, paired with a star-studded cast (Meryl Streep, again), glorious dance numbers and a bunch of hot men who couldn’t really sing, singing. 

I could talk at length about all the ways these films are underestimated and how I hate that they are seen as lesser than ‘man films’ like ‘Pulp Fiction’ and ‘The Godfather’. But that’s all been said before. What I will say is that these films give us something unique. Something fun. 

Fun is underrated. It’s all we ever really strive to have in life, but when it comes to films, it’s like we are hunting for meaning and figuring out how we can intelligently tell people why we enjoyed it. I’m not saying that chick flicks aren’t clever films, because they are, but they are the ones we choose to watch on a rainy day or when we are at home sick to make things feel better. They are the films that we watch when we have sleepovers with our friends. Chick flicks don’t demand anything from us, we don’t have to read between the lines and find the deeper message, they just want us to have a good time. 

The genre is not without its drawbacks though. There are far too many early 2000s chick flicks where being a size eight is ghastly and should be rectified immediately. All too often we saw female characters body-shamed and pigeonholed as the ‘ugly’ one for not having a stick-thin figure. I just hope that Emily in the rumoured sequel of the ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ has a much healthier relationship with eating than she did in the 2006 film. 

Through watching these films now, I get to relive those times sitting in the lounge room squealing over the kisses characters shared after a long emotional build up, and my cousin has already paved the way for her to do the same when she one day turns 22 just like me. But, for right now, next time I see her (probably at Christmas) we can sneak away to watch ‘Mamma Mia!’ when things get dull, and both swoon over young Dominic Cooper during ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’.