The Archetype of Becoming — Girls in Their Twenties, Onscreen
I am sure, by now, nobody needs an explanation of Sylvia Plath’s ‘fig tree’ analogy. The TikTokification of The Bell Jar ensured reams of figs with labels of ‘mother’, ‘lawyer’, ‘travel’, ‘wife’, and ‘artist’ flooded feeds. Our twenties are often marked by this phenomenon. The unshakable fear that a good, meaningful life sits a mere decision away. And that failure to make the right one risks entirely sabotaging it. This notion is thoroughly explored onscreen through the likes of Lena Dunham’s Girls, Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha, and Rachel Sennott’s recent triumph, I Love LA (just to name a few). One of contemporary culture’s most enduring archetypes is ‘the girl in her twenties who is trying to figure things out’. But why? What can be learned from her? And who gets to be her?
The archetype is ambivalent; self-aware to the point of paralysis. She wants enormously, and she fails regularly. What makes her so compelling is not that she is aspirational but that she is honest. She holds up a mirror to the vertigo of self-authorship, and that particular dread of being entirely responsible for the shape your life takes.
The three onscreen representations that best define her current iteration each illuminate a different facet of this experience, whilst overlapping in some respects. Hannah Horvath in Girls operates through a kind of aggressive, almost delusional self-belief. She is, she insists, “a voice of her generation”. We are not always supposed to like her, but Hannah resonates with many for her raw honesty.
Frances, in Gerwig's black-and-white yet luminous Frances Ha, is perpetually in motion, changing apartments, changing cities, as though this might disguise the fact that she has not yet truly arrived anywhere. Shot in a style that nods to the French Nouvelle Vague, the film's aesthetic performs its heroine's interiority. Everything feels urgent and cool and slightly borrowed, because Frances herself does not yet know what is entirely her own.
I Love LA, Sennott's sharper, more abrasive entry into the canon, pushes this further. Her protagonist, Maia, is more aware of the machinery of aspiration and more honest about how much of 'figuring it out' is performance. However, desire and perhaps an edge of believing they are destined for more runs through all three characters. Together, they map the terrain of change and motion and self-consciousness. Three slightly varied versions of the same archetype.
But here the conversation demands a harder turn. Because the fig tree, as it appears onscreen, has historically been available only to a very particular kind of woman. She is consistently white, educated, and cushioned. Whether that’s financially or socially, just enough that her failures remain romantic rather than completely ruinous. Hannah's overdraft is a crisis of identity, not survival. Frances' directionlessness is charming because, the film implies, New York will catch her. The genre so desperately depends on a safety net, even when it pretends the net is not there. This matters because it quietly encodes a hierarchy of whose chaos deserves to be poeticized. Whose twenties get to be a becoming, and whose are simply a life being lived under pressure, without the luxury of paralysis? The women absent from this genre, working-class women, women of color, women for whom the wrong decision carries genuinely irreversible consequences, are not absent because their twenties lack complexity. They are absent because the archetype was never built to hold them.
Which brings us, finally, to what the archetype teaches us, and what she withholds. She endures because she names something real. The embarrassment of wanting and the strange shame of being a work in progress in public. There is comfort in watching a woman be lost onscreen and survive it. But the archetype also sells a particular story about becoming. That it is temporary, that the self is a project with a resolution, that the mess has a shape. That is a consoling fiction. For most people, the figs do not resolve into a single clean choice. The tree just keeps branching. Perhaps the most honest thing these films do, beneath the romance of their protagonists' chaos, is to admit that becoming does not end; it just becomes less visible. You stop performing the confusion and start living inside it, quietly, for the rest of your life.
