What is Flower about, really?
Blowjobs, for one. Its protagonist, Erica Vandross, is, by age 17, an expert in the field, proffering her services at readily as you or I might a credit card at the grocery store. Need some money to bail your deadbeat dad out of jail? Extort the schlubby local cop for accepting head from an underage girl. Require some roofies for a half-baked revenge plot? Blow the lumpy drug dealer playing basketball in the gym bathroom. Want to help your new step-brother relax? Try sucking his dick on the curb outside a local steakhouse. After all, a penis is just “a thumb without a fingernail,” an appendage, disconnected from the man himself, through which Erica can achieve power and control, however contingent. It’s a way for her to get what she wants. It’s feminism—or so she tells herself.
Fellatio has long been considered the de facto sex act of the pejoratively labeled “slut.” If the handjob is an innocent symbol of clumsy adolescent longing—desire riding an imperfect vessel—the blowjob is often a dirty indicator of paradise lost. Somewhere in the transition from hand to mouth there enters into the equation a kind of workmanlike skill, which threatens to cleave the desire to do the thing from the thing itself. It’s no surprise that boys are generally intimidated by girls like Erica, who, contrary to everything they may've been told, does not attach sex to emotion (or even pleasure) like “normal” girls should.
In Zoey Deutch’s capable hands, Erica becomes a character you can feel in the room with you. She rolls around in bed with her mother, Laurie (Kathryn Hahn), cuddling and wrestling in a display of physical intimacy not typically shown on screen; after, she sketches dicks in her dick journal, reclaimed here from Superbad as something to be proud, not ashamed of. Wearing wife beaters and secondhand clothing, with unwashed hair and a proclivity for Cheetos, she feels tactilely unclean—especially as she fastidiously brushes her teeth and scrapes her tongue after fellating this person or that. The word “scuzzy” comes to mind; I felt as if I could smell her. Harnessing those teacup eyes, Erica is like Puss in Boots come to life as a teenage girl, wielding sexuality as her sword.
No wonder, then, that Erica has scared off every man Laurie has brought home—with the exception of her endearingly kind current beau, Bob (Tim Heidecker), who, despite having a modicum of personal dignity, is visibly ill-equipped to deal with his quick-witted new step-daughter. When Bob brings home his obese, depressive, 18-year-old son, Luke (Joey Morgan), from rehab, he too is initially repelled by Erica’s aggressive intimacy, and her casual offer to blow him after he suffers a panic attack.
I admit to feeling somewhat repelled watching Erica on screen as well, particularly when she and her friends hatch a plot to blow/extort the hot old guy at the bowling alley, Will (Adam Scott), who Luke somewhat dubiously claims to have molested him in middle school (the veracity of these claims remain unclear until the end of the film).
Erica first tracks down Will at the grocery store, where she bumps her cart into his and cajoles him into escorting her to the "Cocoa Puffs" aisle. Later, she visits him at the bowling alley. He's practicing alone, just before close. She flirtatiously requests a lesson; after some equivocating, he accepts. That I could empathize with Will (his attraction to Erica, not his maybe-child molesting), who is both charmed by, yet wary of, Erica's advances, induced in me a queasiness the likes of which I haven't experienced at the movies in quite some time. But then he makes a move on her in his car, and when he grabs her thigh she recoils, collecting herself by—you guessed it—attempting to give him head. It’s a shaky reminder that she’s just a teenager; while she may have become proficient at using blowjobs to get what she wants, she’s still unsure of how to handle her own sexuality. For Erica, hummers are weapons she deploys to avoid having to come to terms with real desire.
As truthful as this scene may be, Flower is generally pretty glib in its treatment of Erica’s habit. The blowjobs serve as a highly ironic form of extortion, with a slight vigilante twist, the profits from which Erica hopes to use to bail her father out of jail; if they’re not exactly glorified, they are sublimated. In the final act—a ridiculous, flailing attempt to tie a messy movie neatly together—Erica finally shares an experience of genuine sexual intimacy; she falls in love; her litany of extortion-BJs is all but forgotten, disposed of. Rather than worry about their deeper psychological ramifications, they are used in the film (directed by Max Winkler) the way they were used by Erica: as a tool, this time to show their protagonist’s evolution from cold and guarded to tender and loving.
Perhaps this is a lack of imagination on the part of the film's writers. Or perhaps it’s a lack of imagination on the part of this particular viewer. Perhaps, as a straight male, it’s still unsettling to see a young female character so crass about and unbothered by her sexual promiscuity, however jarring and uncouth: perhaps Flower is profound both because and in spite of its off-putting-ness; like its protagonist, it reaches out to touch you in ways you might not want it to. Erica has the capacity to put me ill at ease. But why? Her moral code may be repugnant, her attitude recalcitrant, but were Erica Eric, would I really care? After all, it’s just a blowjob—right?
