"Sierra Burgess Is A Loser" is another one of Netflix's new romantic comedies.
It follows Sierra, a curvy high school student who is not a part of the popular crowd. She doesn't care about her style or the mean things said to her by the popular girls. She receives a random text from a guy, Jamey who thinks her number is the mean popular girl, Veronica's number. Sierra keeps talking to him and technically cat-fishing him into thinking she is Veronica, but Veronica also helps her. Veronica and Sierra, from two completely different worlds, come together and become best friends. In the end, Jamey finds out that he's been talking to Sierra, not Veronica and like any romantic comedy, Sierra and Jamey end up together.
I was really excited about this movie because of Netflix's recent releases and this movie falls short for many reasons, but in my opinion there two main ones.
First, Sierra is cat-fishing Jamey. Today, it is easy to be cat-fished by someone because of our advanced technology but also our knowledge of how it works. This rom-com is trying to make cat-fishing sexy, but it's not. The ending is totally unrealistic and I'm not saying that rom-coms ever are, but it doesn't give you that "all is okay with the world" feeling. The movie leaves you feeling gross.
Second, Sierra at one point in the movie pretends to be deaf so that Jamey won't hear her voice. Jamey and Sierra talk on the phone all the time and she knows he will recognize her voice, so she says she's deaf. Little does she know that Jamey's brother is deaf. This movie used Jamey's brother's deafness as a way to show that Jamey isn't a stereotypical jock and is a good person. They portrayed his brother's deafness all wrong as well. You would never not make eye contact when signing with someone and you wouldn't talk to them without using your hands at times. Sierra's pretending was also just plain offensive. In saying this, I'm not deaf and I can't speak for the deaf community, but I can say in my years of learning of sign language-- this wasn't good.
The movie slightly redeems itself in the bigger issues: insecurity and success. They showed that no matter how beautiful you looked, the insides matter as well. Being smart and being beautiful can go hand in hand and should. As a college student, I completely resonated with their little arc about success because we live in a world where success is very important to attain, but we need our own version of it not every else's.
In the end, if this movie had some revisions and focused more on the friendship aspects between Sierra and Veronica then it would have been a way better movie. Using someone's deafness and catfishing isn't sexy.
Sheetal Tadiparty
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