Released in 2007, Jaime Babbitt’s Itty Bitty Titty Committee is a riot-grrl movie that represents the hopeful feminist causes of the 1990s keeping the flame alive in the era of George Bush’s 2nd term full of torture and terror and war and resistance.
In the 1990s, our culture’s hatred of LGBTQ+ people was being met more often with positive representation in culture, and that was being met with more hate. When my family watched the Friends lesbian wedding, I felt my heart swell with pride and glory, even as my evanjelly parents made disgusted ick-sounds.
This same hatred and fear is the background of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee – is the repression the movie’s characters fight against in their group, the C(I)A: Clits In Action.
Itty is a cry of freedom and rebellion from the 1990s echoing, reverberating and influencing the decade beyond, and all the way to our 2024. The plot involves love triangles or quadrilaterals; relationships both stale and new. But what keeps the momentum is the thrill of the rebellion of the C(I)A, and the unfolding political education of the main character Anna, played by Melonie Diaz.
Anna does not start at zero; and at film’s beginning we see she has already begun her own family’s education, while she resents the usual requirements of being her sister’s bridesmaid, her mother telling her, “I read The Lesbian Handbook from cover-to-cover, and it doesn’t say anything about ‘No makeup.'”
Nevertheless, Anna’s workdays are spent in the body-shaming hell of a reception desk at a breast augmentation clinic, with Always Sunny‘s Jimmi Simpson as the plastic surgeon.
Nevertheless, Anna’s background is more square and conventional than the revolutionaries in the C(I)A like Shulamith (played by Carly Pope), whose political education is masterful and whose soul is the uncontainable pursuit of justice, like Aaron Bushnell or Joan of Arc.
This fire is tempered by a few representations in the film of those who work 9-5, like Laurel (played by Jenny Shimizu) who answers Anna’s question about who pays the rent: Laurel does; and Sadie’s girlfriend Courtney (Melanie Mayron) whose non-profit women’s rights budget meeting is rudely interrupted by the unapproving C(I)A.
One of Itty‘s main topics is the struggle to live as free and bold as the C(I)A, while cohering movements into organizations that have resources to assist the revolution and continue into the future.
This paradox is articulated well by a character in Sarah Schulman’s novel Rat Bohemia who speaks to this late-capitalist bind:
“In the fifties, the Beats, those guys were so all-American. They could sit around and ponder aesthetic questions, but a cup of coffee cost a nickel. Nowadays, with the economy the way it is, you can’t drop out or you’ll be homeless. You gotta function to be a boho. You have to meet the system head-on at least once in a while and that meeting, Rita, is very brutal. Nowadays you have to pay a very high price to become a bohemian.”
It’s a bit like those NCAA commercials they show during March Madness that remind us that only a few NCAA athletes will play professionally: if you don’t die young fighting for your cause, you either go to prison, or you work somewhere so you don’t have to live with your parents, and can buy your own smokes.
Anna’s revolutionary education is the heart of the plot, and it is really begun when Sadie (played by Nicole Vicius) spray paints the shopfront of the clinic on a solo C(I)A mission: “A Woman Is More Than Her Parts.” Before long, Anna has pink streaks in her dark hair, and is on indie-book-and-music-store shopping trips with Sadie, picking up a plethora of instant classics like:
Confessions of the Guerilla Girls
How Wal-Mart is Destroying America (and the World): And What You Can Do About It
As well as music like:
PJ Harvey: Rid Of Me
The Queers: Punk Rock Confidential
Sleater Kinney and Le Tigre
and the Kill Rock Stars compilation Otis’ Opuses
(Along with Vicius and Diaz, a few other familiar faces appear, including Melanie Lynskey as a possible breast augmentation client who receives a political education instead of cosmetic surgery advisement from an Anna who now spends more time at work reading feminist Zines than anything else.
And a brief appearance by Clea DuVall as guitarist and singer in a band whose gig is attended by Anna and the star-shining Aggie.)
Aggie is perhaps the most affecting character in the movie, played with exquisite tenderness by Lauren Mollica, and represents this painful USA story clearest.
Aggie was kicked out of the house after telling his parents he, “Wanted to be a dude.” This Trans representation, even in 2007, seems far ahead of the curve (at least since the post-60s backlash), and thrilling to behold as much or more than even Anna’s journey. Aggie’s good-natured defiance feels like a foundation, a fulcrum, a revolution.
[while the movie is not available to stream at this time
DVD copies are on ebay
and you might be able to request a copy through your library]