Modern Age - Winter 2018 - 161

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your given name?" "Yes," she answers. "It was given by myself-to
myself." When she runs for class president, Lady Bird's campaign
posters suggest that she can't quite decide whether she's a bird
with a human head or a human with a bird head. Either way, she
doesn't want to be what God or her parents made her.
Gratitude is the proper response to goods given gratis, that is,
freely. In passing her driver's test, an astounded Lady Bird thanks
the DMV worker, who responds that "it's not a thanking situation.
You either pass or you don't." Like everything human, everything
meaningful, gratitude must be learned. Lady Bird isn't so good
at it yet. She bickers with her mother, disrespects her teachers
and the school's Catholicism, ditches her nice friends for the cool
crowd, lies about her family's house, and trash-talks her home
city of Sacramento. She shows gratitude when she shouldn't and
not when she should.
We are obliged, according to Thomas Aquinas, to respond to
gifts in three ways. "The first of these is to recognize the favor
received, the second to express one's appreciation and thanks,
and the third to repay the favor at a suitable place and time according to one's means." We can go wrong in each, but ingratitude
consists primarily in failing to notice the good that we have
received. Such inattention may spring from ignorance, but it may
also result from pride or presumption. That's because gratitude
conflicts with the feeling that one is fully autonomous or has a
right to others' services.
The film's plot revolves around Lady Bird's desire to go to a nonCatholic college on the East Coast, "where culture is." Not only
does the family lack the money to send her away from home but
Lady Bird's mother, Marion (played perfectly by Laurie Metcalf),
accuses her of snobbery and ingratitude. "You wouldn't get into
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Modern Age - Winter 2018

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Contents
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