All hail the king of teen dramas, John Green. The Youtuber Novelist (explaining this to Jane Austen would have been incredible) has this very specific manner of speech that finds its way into the hearts of teens everywhere, especially ones who are dealing with all sorts of inner and outer turmoil. Turtles All the Way Down is his latest adaptation, continues in his lineage of normal people overcoming crippling issues, demanding your heart and your tears along the way.
Poor Aza Holmes (Isabela Merced). After losing her father years earlier, Aza develops a crippling OCD addition, become a germaphobe convinced she’s going to get C. Diff. Her mental state makes it hard to maintain a relationship with her mom (Judy Reyes) let alone friendships, though she has a ride or die Daisy (Cree) who writes Star Wars fanfic and Mychal (Maliq Johnson) who’s an aspiring artist. One night, Aza and Daisy see there’s a 100,000 reward to locate the whereabouts of Russell Pickett, a local billionaire who went missing. Aza has an in to get that $100K: she was camp friends with Russell’s son Davis (Felix Mallard) which the pair can use to their advantage.
Novel’s inner monologues are so hard to translate into movie language. But director Hannah Marks translates Aza’s plight perfectly. The OCD manifests as a thought spiral, plunging Aza further and further into her head, with all sorts of quick cutting pictures and images quasi related to one another distract her from the place she’s sitting in at the moment. This device is used just enough to get the point across effectively, and explains why everyone in Aza’s life ends up at least a little frustrated with her. I mean, how would you deal with a friend who’s never fully there in every conversation you’re having? Wisely, Aza knows this too, but has no great coping method to stop the spiral, though she’s working on it. As such, we feel all her self-hatred, knowing she’s constantly a burden on others. So when issues bubble to the surface between her and Daisy, or her mom, they hit a little harder than most, because not only does Aza know she’s at least partly to blame, but she has so few true friends that potentially losing one forces her back into her own mind, which manifests as pure torture. I had only scientific understanding of what OCD was, but Turtles All the Way Down humanizes it, helping everyone understand just how difficult it is to live with at its worst.
But this is a John Green novel, so all those sad moments are usually juxtaposed with some sort of mystical happiness. A murder investigation seems like a weird entrypoint, but it leads Aza to Davis nonetheless. He’s less a character and more a plot driver, doing all the right things to help our heroine grow as a person during some dark times. The scenes between them might as well be conjured in Ava’s mind too, a happiness response to the despondence she feels during those OCD shame spirals. For the story, these scenes are a necessary reprieve, but can basically boil down to the message of trying to get out of your head, and live the life right in front of you, because it’s probably better than you think. Teens in distress definitely need to hear messages like this, and this section of the story leads to much of Aza’s self-discovery on her way to forging her own life and destiny, instead of it being dictated by her OCD, or forces outside of her control.
So for the struggling teens out there, I hope there’s a murder mystery and reward out there where you have to interacting with a romcom god or goddess who will help you through your struggles. But even if that’s not the case, Turtles All the Way down is there to remind you that you can get through this, and find some control and agency in your life again. Just trust in those close to you that you love, and trust that you’re worth it to to them, as Mr. Rogers clearly instilled in John Green.