The Miseducation of Cameron Post sets itself an intriguing story challenge in its very concept. The lead character, Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz), is a teenager who gets bundled away to a Christian conversion camp in 1993, after she’s caught kissing another girl. Desiree Akhavan’s film, which won this year’s Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, follows Cameron as she bonds with her fellow campers, largely ignores the edicts of her counselors, and otherwise wastes a formative chunk of her youth stuck in a place that’s actively trying to transform her. Hollywood plot formula is often about just that—watching a character evolve and develop across three acts, a hero’s journey.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a stunning and provocative literary debut that was named to numerous best of the year lists. When Cameron Post’s parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief. Relief they’ll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl.
Cameron’s hero’s journey is that she doesn’t need to change—yet Akhavan still conjures a real sense of growth from her stasis, crafting a narrative about teenage rationality in the face of extremism, and making its pivot point the realization that the grown-ups around Cameron are even less self-assured than her. Much of the movie has a warm, surprisingly gentle summer-camp vibe considering the searing subject matter; it’s less interested in active rebellion and more in Cameron understanding her own emotional well-being. It’s a queer narrative that thrives on its low-key ordinariness, and that casts some of its villains as naive and tragic rather than malevolent.
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The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a 2018 film about a teenage girl's experience at gay conversion therapy. It's based on a book of the same name.
Set in 1993, the story starts with Cameron Post's (Chloë Moretz) prom night. After she's caught in her car with the prom queen, her parents send her to gay conversion therapy at a place in Montana called 'God's Promise'.
This film provide examples of:
- The Beard: Cameron went to the prom with her boyfriend Jamie. He's the one who catches her with prom queen with and freaks out.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: The film is set in 1993 and has a period-typical rural/suburban American viewpoint towards homosexuality.
- Cure Your Gays: God's Promise is a facility that focuses on gay conversion therapy.
- Gayngst-Induced Suicide: Subverted. Initially, it seems like Mark had a breakdown and tried to kill himself, but he was actually trying to mutilatehis genitalia.
- Gender-Blender Name: Cameron has a unisex-leaning-on-masculine name. This gets noted when the head of God's Promise refuses to call her 'Cam' because that's an even more Tomboyish Name and she thinks it'll add onto her 'gender confusion'.
- Groin Attack: In his self-hatred, Mark cut his genitalia several times and poured bleach on the wounds.
- Hypocritical Humor: Erin critiques another girl for being 'too butch' when she's the short-hairedsports fangirl. Helen isn't even butch.
- The '90s: The film is set in the early 1990s. It's recent enough to be 20 Minutes into the Past but it's before the quickly changing attitudes towards LGBT people of the mid-1990s through 2010s. This allows the film to be set during a period where gay people were still largely ostracized and where gay conversion therapy was commonplace.
- Parental Abandonment: Cameron's parents are both dead.
- The Runaway: The film ends with Cameron and her two friends riding a truck away from God's Promise.
- Trans Equals Gay: The teachings at the gay conversion camp God's Promise believe that the teens are 'gender confused'. Adam, on the other hand, is a Lakota Two-Spirit, which they conflate with being gay on the same basis.