Dinner in America follows the unlikely relationship between Simon (Kyle Gallner), a pyromaniac punk singer dodging the police, and Patty (Emily Skeggs) an outcast girl and such an avid fan of Simon’s band that she regularly sends him anonymous explicit photos.
If you turn a blind eye to the infantilisation and the idolisation that rules their power dynamic, the chemistry between the two leads might eventually win you over. But poorly written antagonists and an excessive use of slurs equally prevent the punk politics from having any real resonance. While Rehmeier’s heart is clearly in the right place, it is nonetheless apparent that recent online obsession with the film is symptomatic of wider problems that Dinner in America doesn’t address.
Led by its original song ‘Watermelon’, the film has recently gone viral on TikTok, closely linked to a resurgence of the “weird girl”; a term that has been popping up periodically in mainstream and social media and developing its own “aesthetic”. Yet it remains difficult to pin down exactly what one is, since, essentially, being a “weird girl” is simply being authentically yourself. In a world in which the internet invades and commodifies subcultures before they can fully develop, it’s elusiveness has a perplexing attractiveness.
If every female character from Carrie to Ramona Flowers to Patty has been called a weird girl, I wonder if the term is purely a signifier that girls are tired of performing femininity and wish nothing more than to live authentically, free from male-gaze-infused pressure
With phrases like “I’m never beating the weird girl allegations”, it’s unclear whether being a weird girl is even desirable or not. It’s a confused identity, reflecting both a need to be accepted in society and a longing to express individuality in a media landscape that perpetuates the pressure to perform various brands of femininity through trends. Others have tried to gatekeep the phrase, saying “you’re not a weird girl unless” you've experienced a specific incident of social out-casting, as if “weird” and “normal” are genuine ways of categorising the female population.
Despite being a punk music fan, neither Patty’s personality nor aesthetic appearance fully ascribes her to the punk subculture. She is characterised more by her youthfulness and erratic behaviour, which Simon grows to love (although he doesn’t seem to have a problem with trying to take advantage of her naivety before this point) and it is refreshing to see her become increasingly confident while retaining her indefinable self-expression. But considering Patty is repeatedly called the R-slur and is on five different medications, a problematic grey area arises, where the lines between identifying as a “weird girl” and romanticising the experiences of neurodivergent folk are blurred.
So, four years later Dinner in America has captured the imagination of girls on TikTok who yearn for two seemingly difficult things to find: a communal corner of the Internet outside the clutches of capitalism and a boyfriend who accepts them for themselves. If every female character from Carrie to Ramona Flowers to Patty has been called a weird girl, I wonder if the term is purely a signifier that girls are tired of performing femininity and wish nothing more than to live authentically, free from male-gaze-infused pressure and “weird girl” allegations.