Not the privilege-oblivious white girl you were expecting

On the day I had the occasion to explain the term "Becky" to my older son, I also watched the new film Becky.

The two things were not related. I'd already had the movie rented from iTunes, and was thinking of watching it that night, before the conversation even organically emerged.

It wasn't actually Becky he had asked about originally. It was Charisse.

Cherice? Cherisse? Sharice? The internet can't resolve it for me so I'll go with my original spelling.

We have the BT song "Never Gonna Come Back Down" on a mix of electronic music I made for my nine-year-old. I don't know that that song would make the cut on a mix made in 2020 for an adult, but this is like an electronic music starter pack. And, in fact, it's the second such one I made for him, so I'm going a bit deeper in the catalogue.

As you can't get anything by this one without him asking questions about it, he wanted to know why BT finishes the song talking about "mean English girls named Charisse."

I tried to explain that there was nothing wrong with people named Charisse, but that BT was trying to conjure an image for us of a type of person we might know, and by giving her a specific name it's supposed to help cement the type. Truth be told, I don't get the reference myself because I haven't spent all that much time with English girls, mean or otherwise, named Charisse or otherwise. But I get what BT's going for, only I couldn't really explain it to my son.

To assist, I ended up trying to explain what a Karen was. And that naturally led to trying to explain what a Becky was. I still don't think he got it. But by this point neither of us wanted to keep talking about it anymore and we changed the subject. Though I suspect we could come back to it at some point.

Now, in recent days as Karen has been on the ascent, there has been some question about whether a Karen and a Becky are the same thing. At least, wikipedia states, quoting Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2019, that Becky is "increasingly functioning as an epithet, and being used especially to refer to a white woman who is ignorant of both her privilege and her prejudice." Then wikipedia goes on to add its own comment to the matter: "The term Karen has a similar connotation."

Similar, maybe. The same, no. First of all, I think Becky is younger than Karen. Becky may become Karen someday, but I don't think Becky's path is set in stone. From the way I've heard it used, Becky is a bit more innocuous than Karen, maybe kind of a hippie dippy type rather than a little Phyllis Schlafly waiting to blossom. Karen has embraced her prejudice and doubled down on it, if not consciously then at least in a really demonstrative way. Becky, on the other hand, is just clueless. She probably doesn't realize she's being insensitive, and more than anything, is just not woke. Karen, on the other hand, is anti-woke.

In any case, this doesn't describe the protagonist of Becky.

Oh the character, played by Lulu Wilson, is the right age, or at least approaching the right age. And she's got the right skin color. But she doesn't just float through life on a blithe wave of her own self-satisfied self-interest. 

In fact, the whole protecting her actual family, which includes her dad, and her surrogate family, which includes her dad's African-American fiancee and her son, from the Neo Nazis who are invading her home, suggests quite the opposite. Protecting them, even though she does resent her dad's fiancee for trying to replace her mother, who died of cancer. At the very least, the enemy of enemy is my friend.

This is a delicious little slice of handsomely-crafted exploitation from directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion (Cooties). A terrifically grungy industrial score and some slick editing tricks are just two of the many tools in their bag. Wilson is another. Amanda Brugel, as that potential stepmother, is yet another. But perhaps most surprising of all is Kevin James -- yes, that Kevin James -- as the leader of the Neo Nazis, with a swastika tattooed right into the back of his head.

I won't say too much more, just that this is a must-watch for anyone who likes how any of the above things sound.

I will ask, though, if Milott and Murnion were conscious of the slang usage of the word Becky when they decided to name their character and name their movie. There could be some kind of commentary going on about how this girl is shaken out of her stupor of indifference by the sudden threat to her family, but really, she's mourning the death of her mother from the start. She's not the type of character on whom you'd slap the "Becky" label. I mean, you've got to be more than just white and blonde to be "Becky," and if you're also mourning your mother, well that's just mean.

Maybe they just thought it would be a badass name to call a teenager with a Neo Nazi's blood splattered on her face.