Emma Stone’s new to DVD film, Easy A is a tribute to 80s classics like Say Anything and Sixteen Candles, but it also contains some interesting overlapping synchronicities and hints at deeper messages. Stone’s character, Olive, laments that the books she reads for high school English seem to parallel her own experience. She takes on the persona of Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter, but instead of being ostracized by a drab Puritan society, she masters the art of the image.  Olive learns to use the gossip system to social climb – the very thing that PR folk in Hollywood do with great expertise (see the Starsuckers documentary).  She wreaks havok by playing a kind of mass psy-op on the rest of the school, exposing them as a bunch of mindless automatons. It also exposes the goofy evangelicals in a humorous way.  However, while it is a clever film, it presents a kind of existentialist approach where life is all a game, where one becomes a deceptive confidence (wo)man (a la Melville) to fool and expose everyone: somewhat like V does in V for Vendetta. However, V is supposed to be Satan, and here in Easy A we have, unfortunately, the promotion of homosexuality. But it’s not just gayness on display, it’s also it appears a kind of subtle hinting at Satanism. And what is radical existentialism, but a form of Satanism?:

A young Olive transitions into puberty through her first kiss under the sign of the inverted pentagram