Janet Planet (2024)

directed by Annie Baker

Jade Sham

In my favorite movie of 2024, Annie Baker’s directorial debut Janet Planet, Lacy—one of two protagonists and the daughter of the titular Janet (Juliette Nicholson)—constantly plays with a homemade dollhouse. She lords over this small world like a god, tucking the dolls into bed and endlessly arranging their tiny lives.

Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) is a strange girl. She has few friends, and a quietly painful relationship with her mom, who constantly upends their lives in pursuit of unreliable men, but in the scenes with the dollhouse Lacy seems at peace. Here, in her interior world, she is powerful—and that power doesn’t seem to dissipate entirely when she is pulled back into the real world. Instead, that power, that interior world, seems to keep her safe throughout the film. Interiority is a powerful thing. It can be a peace we carry out into the world with us.

*

When I was a kid—in fact, long into adolescence—I too had a vivid interior world. I played with dolls until it was absolutely socially necessary not to. I drew pictures and told myself stories while I sketched out characters. I had piles and piles of books wherein little girls put on plays or solved mysteries or wrote novels. Like Lacy, I was a god in this world. Every object could be fashioned into a piece of my little universe: pillows became people, old shoe boxes became houses, tissue paper became dresses and hats.

Reality rarely, if ever, encroached on my world. In the larger world, I was awkward and chubby. In my interior world, that didn’t matter. In the larger world, my parents argued over money. In my interior world, abundance was the law. Nothing was impossible, and nobody needed to desire anything they didn’t have.

Most importantly, in my interior world, I went unwatched. I had no need for self-consciousness. At school, much like Lacy, I was teased for the things that made me different. For wearing the boys uniform. For talking too loudly. For my unruly hair and my hairy arms. Here, I could be completely and utterly myself. I didn’t need to perform or preen or apologize. That—I think—was the most peaceful part.

*

In the film, Janet seems to be out of touch with herself. Her own interior world. Lacy is odd and uncouth. She smears her hair into abstract shapes on the shower wall. She asks uncomfortable questions. She lets herself be strange and unlikable. More than once, while watching the movie, I cringed at something she did. Some part of me—the part that grew from judgment—wanted her to fall in line. She could have friends. It could be easy. Yet, Lacy never changes.

Janet is the opposite. She arranges her world around the men who float in and out of their lives. She makes herself smaller so they can have more space. In a central scene in the film, she rushes around the house to soothe her boyfriend, Wayne’s, migraine, despite having had a headache herself the day before. Even after Wayne charges at Lacy, Janet is only able to kick him out of her house at Lacy’s behest.

She is a kind woman. She is a caring mother. But she seems unable to trust herself to make her own decisions. It feels at times that she is completely outside of herself, adrift in a sea of others’ opinions.

*

I do not think people outgrow their interior worlds, but I do think the larger world intrudes more and more. We sacrifice imagination for reality. There are practical demands. There are jobs and relationships.

Slowly, too, that unwatched quality becomes harder and harder to maintain. We internalize the world's judgments of ourselves. We carry shame into our interior world. We carry embarrassment. We do not let ourselves desire things that we think are silly or strange. Suddenly, there are eyes watching. And for women, there are men.

When I was a teenager, a quote from Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride surfaced and resurfaced on Tumblr and Instagram: 

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

Here, I think Atwood describes the great tragedy of womanhood, the great loss of girlhood. There is almost no way you can make it to adulthood as a woman without internalizing the men around you. Perhaps, it is not as dramatic as Atwood describes, but he is there. He is watching.

*

In the scene that has most stayed with me since I saw the film, Janet and Lacy are lying in bed together. Despite being a few years too old for it, Lacy has not yet outgrown the comfort of crawling into her mother’s bed. Or, perhaps, she has not let shame steal it from her.

In the soft lamplight, Janet admits, “I’ve always had this knowledge that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried, and I think maybe it’s ruined my life.”

She stares up into the ceiling. There is a brief moment of agonizing silence. Nicholson perfectly captures a look of regret, of despair. I wonder if every woman in the theater felt as affected as I did.

“What if you stopped?” Lacy asks.

“Stopped what?”

“Stopped trying.”

*

The man in my head tells me not to eat that dessert. Tells me to wear the dress that shows my boobs. No, not to wear the dress that shows my boobs. What? Do I want to look like a slut? Men don’t like sluts.

I hear him when I get ready in the morning. When I post to Instagram. When I post to Twitter. When I almost dye my hair blonde, but then wonder if the guy I’m talking to likes blondes. When I spend my lunch break stalking the guy I like on Spotify instead of reading. When I think about bleaching my eyebrows. When I order a burger at dinner. When I take a selfie. When I take a picture with my friends. When I’m dancing at a concert. When I’m reading on the train. When I’m walking late at night. When I’m alone, when nobody at all can see me.

The man in my head tells me to shave my legs. Tells me to learn to cook. Tells me to read Sartre. Tells me to read King. Tells me to read Hemmingway. The man in my head tells me I won’t get them like he does. The man in my head likes girls who like Tarantino movies. Who like beer. Who like Radiohead. Who don’t post on Instagram too much. Who don’t wear too much makeup.

No, the man in my head likes real women. Women in sundresses. Women with soft hands. Women with kind words. Women who remind him of his mother. The man in my head tells me I have to be there for him. That women are more emotionally adept. That women are better with children. That’s what they—what we—are built for. Women have patience, limitless patience, the man in my head says. So, keep listening.

*

Janet has little backstory. Lacy’s father is never discussed. An old friend, Regina, comes to stay with the two, and hints at Janet’s previous mistakes. In a certain way, this distances the viewer from her. It makes her behavior frustrating and irrational. I found myself judging her harshly for giving so much of her time to men who were obviously not worth it. Then, in the midst of judgment, I would remember the man in my own head. I would feel ashamed and repentant.

At the same time, the white space of Janet’s past also makes space for questions. It forces you to interrogate how this cloying and compliant behavior formed. You wonder what Lacy’s father was like. You wonder who else she has given so much time to. You wonder if she had dreams beyond mediocre boyfriends, motherhood, and her acupuncture business. You imagine another Janet, a freer one. Regina tells Janet she has bad judgment. Janet bristles and then admits it may be true. She doesn’t trust herself, she says, that’s where her bad decisions come from. She cannot listen to herself. You begin to wonder if something unnamable broke inside of Janet long ago or if she has always been this way.

Still, there is Lacy. Her foil. A girl untouched by all the voices that beg her to be smaller, to sacrifice herself, to mistrust herself. You wonder if Janet was ever this way. She must’ve been, surely. How else could her own flesh possess such nonchalance, such self-knowledge?

*

I can’t tell you when the man in my head sprung up. I think he was built slowly. When my father let my mother do the dishes after she had already cooked dinner. When the boys in my class were embarrassed to like girls who didn’t do ballet or have straight hair or wear skirts. When the priest read the letter from Paul at mass that tells wives to be submissive to their husbands. When a girl was made fun of for being fat. When a girl was made fun of for being loud. When a girl was made fun of. When my parents pointed at a woman on TV and said her dress was too short. When the normal-looking girls were voted off American Idol, and Simon made some snide remark. When the nerdy girl in a rom-com got a movie makeover and suddenly all of her interesting parts—her big hair, her overalls, her thick-framed glasses—were erased. The man in my head was taking notes.

Women built the man too. It was girls who taught me how to shave my legs, how to shave my armpits, how to shave everywhere so I looked hairless and new, like a little girl. It was women who told me to cross my legs, to straighten my hair, to censor my jokes. Women wrote the articles in Seventeen and Cosmo. They taught me about the three kinds of girl you could be, and how they dressed, and flirted, and gave head. It was my own mother who once pinched back the fat on my hips before my homecoming date, and told me I would be perfect if I could just lose that.

*

In a scene near the end of the movie, Janet is out on a date with the leader of the commune Regina left. In the theater, I was willing her to leave. If she could just get up, and stop this cycle, if she could get away from this man maybe everything could change. She could stop letting men walk in and out of her life. She could just stop trying. She could be her own person.

*

And what is the antidote to the man in your head? Maybe Atwood includes it in The Robber Bride, but that part of the book never made its way around Tumblr. How does someone stop shrinking? How does a woman stop contorting herself into an idea?

I am twenty-four, and I spend more time thinking about men than I ever did at fourteen. It is a dizzying feeling, disorienting. I can see myself from the outside—everything appealing about me, everything wrong with me, every fragile part of myself. And it is rewarding, too. Janet is right. If you listen closely enough to what people want, you can make anyone fall in love with you—at least for a little while. But what good is that when you are rendered a museum object in return? What is good is it to be beautiful and without any agency?

Perhaps thinking about the man—how he got there, how to end him—only gives him more space. Perhaps, it is better to look back to Lacy. To the dollhouse. To the little world.

I have taken to carrying a notebook around. It reminds me that there is some private place I can exist. I make lists, and I doodle, and I write terrible poetry I will never read to anyone. I am making room for myself. If I cannot make him any quieter, I can learn to speak louder.

*

Janet and the man sit in the field. They are having a picnic. In another movie, it would be perfect and romantic—the beginning of a love story.

And then, almost magically, he disappears mid-sentence. You wonder if he was even there at all. The field is quiet, and peaceful. Janet has no sun to orbit. She drives off, alone.

Jade Sham (she/her) is a writer originally from Plano, TX, now residing in Brooklyn, NY. She has had writing published in Pithead Chapel and under the gum tree, and is forthcoming in Trampoline. You can find her on Instagram @jadesaraa, on Substack at jadesham.substack or (of course) on Letterboxd as Jadesara.