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Ultimately, Go Fish is a film about lesbians telling lesbian stories and creating lesbian images without regard for-but without hostility toward-the sensibilities of a universalized understanding of sexuality and subjectivity. Go Fish is a minoritizing critical commentary by lesbians on specific facets of lesbian life, rituals, and sexuality, from pot luck dinners to haircuts to fingernail trimming. By contrast, Two Girls is a universalizing romantic comedy, partly because it more closely follows the conventions of the genre. Like Go Fish, the film is framed by the main character's voice over; unlike the experimental stream-of-consciousness prose of Max's journal, however, Two Girls is narrated in direct address by Randy Dean-a young lesbian in high school whose coming of age story coincides with her first love. The immediacy of Randy's experiences is aided by the glorious color cinematography and appealingly pristine production values-factors which make evident the film school training of the film's director and the production's generous budget.
Whereas Go Fish's aesthetic is urban, hip, and streetwise-most apparent in scenes where Daria walks home from her friend's house and Ely makes her lovestruck trek home the morning after she and Max have sex-Two Girls is decidedly small-town, its politics universalizing. Continual references in the dialogue to the Range Rover that Evie, Randy's love interest, drives ("Nice car") underscore its visual and narrative importance to the film. Evie and Randy meet because Evie fears a tire is low on air and pulls into the gas station where Randy works. In the scene where the girls first hold hands, Evie's car is positioned between them, visible through the window of the coffee shop. Evie and Randy listen to music in the car during their courtship and, finally, they run away from Evie's mother in the Range Rover. The (ironically, British) automobile functions as an "American" institution, instantly recognizable and accessible to anyone who has participated in U.S. youth culture in the suburbs or a small town. The automobile's significance for celluloid romance is under scored by a reference to lesbian icon James Dean, whom Randy jokingly claims as her uncle. As a universalizing trope, the car draws parallels between straight and gay teenagers in love and conjures up the specter of the back seat of the automobile at the drive-in movie as the favored-if nostalgic-site of heterosexual coupling.
Like Go Fish, Two Girls's narrative revolves around a character who is a member of a lesbian household-Randy lives with her Aunt Rebecca, her Aunt's lover Vicky and Rebecca's former lover, Lena. Like Max, Randy lives in a lesbian community with women who represent another generation; also, her best friend-Frank-is gay. Yet, unlike Max, Randy must function in straight and lesbian worlds; at high school she overhears whispered homophobic comments of other students and responds angrily to the shouted insults of people driving by in a car. Director Maggenti writes of her wish to avoid focusing on lesbian subculture in favor of presenting a healthy young lesbian, yet this choice glosses over the difficult questions lesbian identity raises in a homophobic culture, questions Go Fish faces head on in a scene where Evy is thrown out of her mother's house. Maggenti states: "I don't at all really deal with marginalization because I wanted to be more subtle. Randy does get harassed as an out gay girl in her school but she's well adjusted and thinks other people have the problem not her" ("Conference" 5). Furthermore, Evie's disavowal of a lesbian identity underscores Maggenti's desire to represent "well adjusted" teenagers whose fierce devotion is to love, not politics. Evie tells friends who reject her because she has fallen in love with Randy: "I didn't say I was gay, I said I was in love."
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