We are all broken and flawed people, seeking healing for the deep cuts our tender hearts have sustained and at times nearly shattered from over the course of our lives. Like me I’m sure you can recall at least one or two people who encountered some kind of shattering which was so obliterating that they were unable to get their bearings again.
Often it seems that high school holds the first round of these casualties. Maybe it is the fact that high school is a place where our need to know ourselves crashes into our need to be accepted by others. In high school, everyone is looking for love, and almost overnight, friends become “somebody that you used to know” because of impenetrable social strata and a limited commodity of cool. This might be the reason why high school is so often used as the setting for various films – it symbolizes our needs for care, love, self-knowledge, and acceptance at their most raw.
In The Perks of Being A Wallflower, an adaptation of the 1999 book of the same name, all the young characters are searching for the intangible elements of life, especially those which are found in love and the context of community. Charlie (Logan Lerman), our narrator, is entering high school filled with slight hope and much in trepidation. He walks into the madness of this space still grieving the loss of his best friend to suicide and trying to keep his own demons at bay.
As many of us know, entering into the madness without community is a cruel and unusual torture, though thankfully one Charlie does not have to bear for long as he soon connects with Patrick (Ezra Miller) a fabulous and bold senior in his freshman shop class. Patrick and his stepsister Sam (Emma Watson) adopt Charlie into their circle of friends, “the island of misfit toys” as Sam calls her group.
Through the love, acceptance, and support this community offers Charlie, he is able to begin to come out of his shell. In the past, Charlie has always stood on the outside looking in. As Patrick puts it to Charlie, “You see things and you understand… you’re a wallflower.” The difference is that the “misfit toys” see Charlie as well and invite him in. He is no longer strictly an observer but a participant as well.
As Charlie enters into the blessing of community, he sees these beautiful and broken people’s search for love. Like so many of us, Sam, Patrick, and the rest of the community, settle for love and lovers who don’t see them. They want so badly to be connected to another person that they are willing to take the scraps being offered instead of waiting for someone who will offer them the love of which they are worthy.
Patrick is involved in a secret relationship with a closeted star football player, Brad (Johnny Simmons). Eventually, Patrick must decided whether or not his relationship with Brad is worth the cost of being “unknown” to his lover in public. Similarly, Sam dates men who are not invested in her. They are men who like the idea of her but don’t see Sam for the beautiful and tender woman she is.
It’s Charlie, the wallflower, who sees and is seen by Sam. Unlike the men she dates, Charlie stands beside Sam, supporting and loving her well. Charlie does this with everyone in their group of friends, not asking for anything but to be apart of the community. Sam asks Charlie at one point, “Why do I and everyone I love pick people who treat us like we’re nothing?” Charlie answers, “We accept the love we think we deserve.”
Like the characters in this film, many of us choose love not worthy of us, because we somehow think that it is the only love we can get, the only love we deserve. This is not true. We all deserve to be loved well.
The Perks of Being A Wallflower reminds us that in the context of community we can encounter love that is deserved. Charlie’s story is our story. We are all broken people looking for a community where we can find love and be ourselves. Loving communities help us to see ourselves as worthy of love, and we learn to accept nothing less than the dynamic love we deserve, love that fights on our behalf, loves us wildly and encourages us to become our truest and best selves. This kind of love is found in the care of and connection with a community which takes everyone as they are, just like the community Charlie finds with Sam and Patrick.
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Jessi Knippel works for Dirty Laundry TV finding lost british bands, shooting photos, and helping things run smoothly. She also assists Malia James (photographer, filmmaker, & bass player for The Dum Dum Girls), is working on a documentary film exploring the relationship between art and faith, seeks out live music, travels on various adventures, helps others on their creative projects while dreaming up her own, takes photographs, and is learning as many marketable skills as possible so that someday art can be the way she pays her bills. Follow along on her own website.