Smooth Talk Movie Analysis

Where are you going, Where have you been? by Joyce Carol Oates is a story about a teenage girl who wants to grow up too fast. It shows how the growing gap between a parent and their teenage child. The movie Smooth Talk shows a different but interesting perspective to Oates’s story. In this essay the similarities and differences between the movie and the story will be evaluated and explained to see if the movie is accurate to the stories main points.

The movie Smooth Talk is similar to Where are you going, Where have you been? Because the setting of the story takes place outside of a big city. The story says that she lived in an asbestos ranch house which is a new house that has just finished being built, and in the movie the house seems to

and Smooth Talk share, is that Connie and her mom are in a very bad state where they do not understand each other and that wish to not be apart of each other. In the book The mother is always saying “Stop gawking at yourself “ or “You think you're so pretty?" (online 1st paragraph). This is obviously not something a mother should say to her teenage daughter, and it definitively a way for teenage to feel like she is being attacked. The movie shows this hatred for one another through an argument that Connie and her mother get into. In the the mother slaps Connie across the face and leaves the room. This was not just any slap, this slap was meant as way of saying “I hate you”, but just strengthens the feeling for hate in the

The first difference between the two was that Arnold in the story was way more of a dangerous man than he was in the movie. In the movie the only thing he really does is that tells Connie where her family has go to. And that he is watching her. In the story he is very much more aggressive and makes Connie do things in a very rude and awful way. In the story he threatens the family when Connie picks up the phone to call the cops, but in the movie all he does it talks her out of calling instead of threatening. Another difference in the movie and the story was that the car in the story was very ratty old car, and in the movie the car that Arnold drives in the coolest and newest looking one the diner parking lot. Why they changed this doesn't really make a difference or matters, but it is important to know the car that he driving in the story was an “old jalopy” was that it was an old car the he had refurbished, but in the movie. The car that Arnold drives doesn't look like car with just paint job, it actually looks like a newer