Twenty years ago as of last week, in this very city, an obscure, bespectacled teenager found out she was the heiress to a small European nation and related to Julie Andrews. She was gobsmacked, literally tripped up, in the swift change of course, of the stratosphere, to her life scootering by what looks like Union Square and rock climbing with her mom, pining for love and sense of self throughout.
What followed was a cinematic masterpiece of confronting societal expectations and pressures while coming of age in a way that was meaningful, and rooted in self-love, not power or conformity. This narrative gave my generation a girl like them, a girl not interested in greatness, yet, as we know, rose to the occasion when it was thrust upon her. This was a girl at the center of a story about choices, respect, and realizing that negging is a trash attempt at coercive flirting. I’m talking, of course, about 2001’s coming-of-age opus, The Princess Diaries.
Her San Francisco is a geographic Frankenstein devoid of just about every part known to me, who grew up in the Mission and Bernal Heights, yet she herself feels like a San Francisco kid.
Now, I am also a San Francisco kid whose name is Amelia, though my dad isn’t from Genovia — just Canada. This movie was always going to appeal to my vanity, which it still does, but it was also fascinating to see how disparate our lives in 49 square miles could be. When it came out, I didn’t understand European geopolitics, inheritance, divine right, or classism, but I understood what it felt like to feel weird in my body, to never feel popular or en vogue, and how others used this vulnerability against me.
If for some reason you’ve seen The Room but not this classic (which I have a baseless theory that Tommy Wiseau was inspired by), let me run through it quickly. Amelia referred to most often as Mia, Thermopolis is a 15-year-old living with her artsy mother in a renovated firehouse in the Excelsior, and can somehow motor scooter to her downtown prep school with ease.
Her San Francisco is a geographic Frankenstein devoid of just about every part known to me, who grew up in the Mission and Bernal Heights, yet she herself feels like a San Francisco kid. Her father was estranged from her, living abroad in the fictional country of Genovia (which is located between Spain and France); he has died in an accident prior to the start of the film.
Despite the tropes and constraints of the era, Princess Amelia Mignonette Thermopolis Renaldi — whose nickname is Mia in the film—was a girl of the people who answered the royal call for, as her BFF Lily phrases it, “Wanting to rock the world but having zip power… that’s a nightmare. ‘Wow’ is the power to affect change.”
Mia has also never met her grandmother, Clarisse (Dame Julie Andrews) who is coming to visit for tea. Mia doesn’t seem fazed by the fact the meeting for tea is at the Genovian consulate and trudges right into the discovery that she is a minor royal and, because of archaic inheritance laws, heiress to a small nation.
“Shut up!” she exclaims, in 2001 disbelief. Mia, in her own words, had plans to remain “invisible” until graduation.
There are so many other amazing moments I could discuss: Sandra Oh’s scene-stealing Principal role, the green ice cream brain freeze at a diplomatic dinner, Julie Andrews playing with the machines at Musee Mecanique, a Shaft reference.
This interaction reveals the film’s central tension. Both her parents and grandmother lied to her and/or ignored her existence until political pressure, compounded by conservative tradition, forced her into responsibilities she had no knowledge of or preparation for. Having two parents myself, I know they have tried to act with my best interest at heart my whole life. But they have, admittedly, fucked up a few times. When Mia confronts her mother and grandmother about this, declaring: I don’t have a family with either one of you because you ignored me for 15 years, and you lied to me. Families don’t do that stuff to one another.
Those two sentences echo in my chest. It’s a cutting remark, but in no way did I — as a kid and now a young lady — think that Mia’s family didn’t love her, or that anyone was beyond forgiveness. They wanted to protect her. There is no clear deceit or malignancy at play; they, far removed from adolescence, simply didn’t think of her feelings. Who hasn’t felt like that in the throes of puberty?
And from there, Mia begins to change. Her first assertion and stand against her female family members lead to the era’s favorite trope, the makeover montage. But unlike Grease, She’s All That, and Maid in Manhattan, Mia’s beautification isn’t accepted as an objective elevation of her looks and character.
This is, like many other films of the era, and innumerable predecessors beforehand, centered on the transformation trope, in which a female protagonist has many good qualities and an internal sense of self, but no supposed external beauty.
Mia wears glasses, has “frizzy” hair and a retainer, and hates public speaking. By plucking her eyebrows, forcibly breaking her glasses, and Brazilian blowout-ing her hair, Mia finally presents conventional beauty and is thus worthy of her royal status and the attention she receives from her fellow classmates, be it romantic, cloying, or self-serving. Compared to the films I mentioned earlier, this frames the girl’s transformation as being in her best interest, Mia’s beauty comes as a challenge to her values, and a recommitment to her compassion.
Her best friend Lily, the Y2K version of a barrette-clad social justice warrior, vehemently rejects her makeover as a ploy to get popular, to abandon their (very SF kids) values of anticonformity and self-expression. One of the most meaningful conversations between the two is on the basketball court when Lily admits her jealousy for Mia’s newfound influence and how power, even just its possibility, corrupts us. Mia is constantly at odds with the pressure of ruling and who it may turn her into as she approaches adulthood.
It makes me so happy to be a girl from San Francisco and a young woman who was, like Mia, supported in her decisions, whatever they might be, who was allowed to explore herself and her aspirations.
Her cumulative decision at the Genovia Independence Ball to accept her princess status is done in her Docs, a hoodie, and wet hair because her looks were never what she had a problem with. Mia didn’t believe her virtues were worthy of attention or recognition, and thanks to reconnecting with her family and trusting in her friends, she is finally ready for the events of the second film, which I shan’t be discussing here, but involve Chris Pine and a mattress slide.
There are so many other amazing moments I could discuss: Sandra Oh’s scene-stealing Principal role, the green ice cream brain freeze at a diplomatic dinner, Julie Andrews playing with the machines at Musee Mecanique, a Shaft reference! And of course, the outfits, so many outfits.
Some parts of the film are expected: the rhyming-named mean girls, the dreamboat who’s actually a tool, and the guy friend harboring a secret love, lack of diversity, but this was their prime time! There’s also some weird media fascination with getting pictures of teenage Mia naked, but that’s neither here nor there … not all movies age 20 years and come out unscathed. But these details are more dressing, and some, of course, I hope you come upon naturally in the film and laugh at because this essay has compelled you to watch it.
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I was re-watching it in anticipation of this piece, and it still makes me smile. My father even wandered in and watched some of it with me, as I made him do many moons ago. It makes me so happy to be a girl from San Francisco and a young woman who was, like Mia, supported in her decisions, whatever they might be, who was allowed to explore herself and her aspirations. Who cares that they would have us believe you could drive on the Golden Gate Bridge going to Marin but end up at the Cliff House? As the soundtrack goes, “I’m Super Girl, and I’m here to save the world.”
