By way of a disclaimer, Destroy All Girls is an almost clandestine slogan used by Senate, a skate brand that was popular in the 1990s. The slogan was discreetly printed on the labels of certain items of clothing. It began as a joke… a joke that was neither necessarily funny nor innocent.
In this context, the slogan serves the intentions of director Erin Vassilopoulos and screenwriter/actrice Ani Mesa-Perez well, although it may create the wrong impression. This is neither a portrait of a serial killer nor exactly a feminist manifesto. Nevertheless, the slogan is symptomatic of a structural machismo reflected within an environment from which one might expect nothing but freedom of movement and spirit.
Destroy All Girls is a feel-good movie with a pebble in its shoe. It unfolds at the breakneck pace of a continuous music video in which everything is in motion. The skate world’s obsession with filming itself is incorporated into the filmmaking, creating multiple layers of imagery and ways of seeing.
If the most eagerly awaited moments in movie musicals are the tap-dance numbers, here the high points lie in the skating itself: the tricks, the acrobatics, the rhythm and the adrenaline. It is as if a new cinematic subgenre were being invented before our eyes. Any skating enthusiast will be thrilled by the film.
But Destroy All Girls is much more than that. The film glides effortlessly for any viewer. There is genuine pleasure in this illusion of freedom and untamed living, embodied by a kind of new age hippie community reinvented on wheels, whose life is defined by improvisation, joie de vivre and adrenaline.
Looking from the outside in and from the inside out, Alex discovers a possible means of escape in the wheels of her skates, extended into the wheels of Cameron’s van. This is a film in flight: from a mother who destroys girls, a paraplegic brother, a monotonous job, a programmed life and ordinary people.
Amid this movement of escape, a love story is almost celebrated. It is an overwhelming passion, as only the passion of those who live constantly on a knife-edge can be. Alex is a woman in a male world that restrains its structural hostility towards her presence. She fits in partly because she does not conform to a conventional idea of femininity. Her name is Alexia, but she prefers to be called Alex, and her mother constantly tells her that she looks like a boy.
Destroy All Girls portrays an almost unconscious struggle for freedom by a young woman socially oppressed by her mother. It is the symbolic killing of a mother who is already dead. Yet the liberating paths offered by the skaters’ world prove equally incoherent, carrying a toxicity that remains unquestioned. This constant movement is also a space of transgression, despite its apparent emotional layer and romantic appeal. Alex does not find herself through escape, but she needs to lose herself before she can be found. Following the trauma of her heroic brother’s paralysis, she suffers, grows and becomes stronger. She discovers her own particular way of asserting her freedom and her identity as a woman.
Sweeter than it is bitter, Destroy All Girls is a flash of lightning, a film attuned to the speed of skates, like an immense Sonic Youth music video that we want to watch and listen to all over again. The soundtrack is, in fact, one of its greatest strengths. Destroy All Girls can be watched in a single breath, offering a rare sense of pleasure comparable, for instance, to that found in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021).
