The Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants
Pants equal love. Love your sisters and love yourself.
It feels appropriate that this week I'm covering a book-to-film adaptation as I've been impatiently awaiting the premiere of season 2 of The Summer I Turned Pretty, adapted from Jenny Han's novel. A little over a week ago, I attended The Summer I Turned Pretty X Teen Vogue premiere party in New York City with my sister, and we inevitably told Cam Cameron that we're #TeamCamCameron, met @guywithamoviecamera from TikTok (he's very nice btw!), and upon exit, were gifted the best gift bags we have ever received in our lives.
17 years before The Summer I Turned Pretty premiered on Amazon Prime and four years before Jenny Han published the first book in the series, Warner Brothers adapted The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants into a film starring America Ferrera as Carmen, Amber Tamblyn as Tibby, Blake Lively as Bridget, and Alexis Bledel as Lena. For me, the movie feels like a medley of Now and Then, Monte Carlo, and a little bit of Mamma Mia due to Lena's summer trip to Greece.
Like Now and Then, the film follows a group of four friends who, despite their differences, have remained a tight-knit group throughout their lives. After spending every summer together, they're breaking apart for the season, but they're bonded by a pair of jeans they found at a thrift store.
Despite all the characters being different sizes, especially Carmen, whose body shape is a part of her Puerto Rican heritage and plays a role later in the film, the pants fit all the girls. Realistically speaking, this doesn't make any sense, but that's because the pants are a representation of the strength of their friendship, regardless of their differences.
I recently wrote about a screenwriting trick popularized by Alfred Hitchcock. It's called the MacGuffin, and the director defined it as something in a film that drives the plot forward but isn't as important to the audience as the main plot of the movie. For The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the pants are the MacGuffin. They play a huge role in the characters' stories, but despite being a part of the title of the film, they aren't the story. The real story is the bond between four teenage girls finding themselves through their separation and finding their way back to each other in the end.
Bridget, Carmen, Lena, & Tibby
There's an essence of jealousy in the friends' dynamic, but not like anyone wishes bad on each other, just that two of the girls are guaranteed a summer of adventure while the other two have their money on things going badly.
Bridget's athleticism and determination led her to soccer camp in Mexico for the summer, while Lena's traveled across the world to visit her grandparents in Greece. In today's social media-dominated world, where one minute on Instagram can lead you down the rabbit hole of some influencer's vacation photos, it's easy to understand Carmen's disappointment that the farthest she was traveling for the summer was to South Carolina to visit her estranged father and Tibby's even worse dismay that she's spending the summer at home.
Still, no matter where the girls found themselves for the summer, the pants met them there, and they all found adventure and growth, even in the most mundane moments.
Bridget & Eric Vs. Lena & Kostas
There are two Romeo & Juliet-esque forbidden love affairs in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, one more appropriate than the other, in my opinion. While Bridget intends to prove her drive and expertise at soccer camp, she quickly becomes preoccupied with her young coach Eric.
Understandably, coach-teammate relationships are off-limits, and in this case, illegal considering Bridget wasn't even a senior in high school yet, and Eric was in college. However, Eric's attempts to keep things platonic with Bridget fail every time, and the fear of going to jail for dating a minor is apparently not lingering in the back of his head because things do end up working out for the pair.
Bridget, feeling extra confident because it's her turn to wear the pants, meets Eric on the beach, and they kiss. Watching the film, I felt the bond between Bridget and Lena strengthening because they seemed to be facing similar complexities on their summer vacations.
Lena was sketching a boat on the Aegean Sea in Santorini wearing the pants when she fell in the water, catching the ends of the jeans on a hook at the bottom. Kostas Dounas stepped off the boat and dived in to save Lena. The chance encounter resulted in a secret love affair, which Lena had to hide from her grandparents after finding out her grandfather despised the Dounas family.
Vulnerability is a tricky state to embody, as Lena expresses in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Her heart is tough to crack open, and she learns a valuable lesson through her affair with Kostas. She envies Bridget for living life through such an optimistic and adventurous lens despite her hardships, like losing her mother. She feels the same about Kostas, who has endured his own battles in life.
She's forced to face the walls she's built around herself that have held her back from taking risks and truly inhaling the abundance the world has to offer. When she frees herself from her self-made cage, that's when her life really begins. She even faces her grandfather in the end over his silly feud with the Dounas, and he gives her permission to meet Kostas at the dock before he leaves to say goodbye and tell him she loves him like she wasn't able to do earlier in the film when he said it first.
Carmen & Tibby: The Summer Of Conflict Vs. Boredom
As Bridget and Lena seem to grow closer together due to their Summer flings, so do Carmen and Tibby but not by exhilarating love affairs, by unpleasant summer plans. Carmen arrives at her father's new development home with high hopes that they'll reconcile and she'll actually know what it's like to have a strong relationship with her father. She doesn't have to say it. It's written on her face on the car ride there.
No matter how many times he's let her down, this summer, she has plans for things to go differently. Unfortunately, upon arrival, his new family, which he told her nothing about, is waiting to meet her.
The rest of the summer unravels with him choosing his soon-to-be wife Lydia and her children Paul and Krista over his own daughter. As a result, Carmen spends most of her time on the phone with her mother, reporting back on how awful of a time she's having. No matter how bored Tibby may be, Carmen wishes she were in her shoes.
What stood out to me in Carmen's story is that her father and her soon-to-be stepmother are so engulfed in their upper-middle-class lifestyle, meticulously planning every aspect to look like the perfect family on the outside, though everything is so robotic they look like something out of The Stepford Wives. Carmen is bewildered by her father's attempts to be the perfect husband for Lydia, which includes saying Grace at dinner, something he's never cared to do before, and acting like he doesn't understand her when she speaks to him in Spanish.
Meanwhile, his relationship with Carmen is nonexistent, and she soon finds out that Lydia's son Paul is absent one day because he's visiting his own father at a facility for recovering alcoholics. I find a lot in life that the people working the hardest to cover up every crack in their life with a perfect facade are the ones going through the most. I think learning that Lydia's family, who seemingly looks down upon her, isn't as perfect as they seem, is what brings out Carmen's compassionate side and helps her mend things with her father in the end.
“Maybe sometimes it's easier to be mad at the people you trust. Because you know they'll always love you, no matter what.”-Tibby, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Tibby is facing similar neglect as her mother is busy with her younger siblings, who she's also riddled with the responsibility of babysitting. Gen Z calls it FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), but it's exactly what Tibby's experiencing, and it's what I experienced watching her try her best to keep herself entertained in her hometown with just a 12-year-old girl she met while working at Wallmans.
Regardless of the fact that I actually liked being alone and spent most of my time off when I was in school writing in my room, playing The Sims, or teaching myself Taylor Swift songs on the guitar, I remember what it was like to feel like summer was slipping away and I wasn't taking advantage of it the way other people who were on luxurious vacations were. I still feel every summer that I could be doing more and the season is too short, but like Tibby, I've learned to appreciate even the simple moments and take each day as it comes. I found the more present I am, the less the season seems to slip out of my hands.
Tibby meets Bailey when the 12-year-old passes out in the middle of the Wallmans aisle, and she has to call an ambulance to take her to a nearby hospital. While the two initially find each other intolerable, Bailey joins Tibby on her summer documentary project. She's trying her best to make something interesting using the people she knows from the neighborhood, including one of her Wallmans coworkers. She's struggling to find a hook, but when she learns Bailey has leukemia, her entire perspective changes. Her documentary becomes an ode to the 12-year-old girl. She even allows her to try on the pants, hoping their magic will rub off on her even though they don't fit her the way they fit Tibby and her friends.
The Coming Back Together
Carmen comes home first. She runs away from bridesmaid dress shopping when Lydia and the store owner disrespect her for her body shape. When she does return back to her father's house, she finds the family joyously eating dinner in the dining room, unaffected by her disappearance. She throws a rock at the window and flees, returning home to be with her mom soon after.
Bridget is the next to come home, and while her summer seemed more compelling than Carmen's and Libby's, she comes home broken-hearted, realizing she doesn't have her mom to talk to about the difficulties of life. Luckily, she does have her friends.
“Somehow, we would always find our way back to each other.” -Bridget, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Bridget's letter to Lena, included with the pants she shipped to Greece, fell under a table, meaning Lena didn't automatically see it and know that Bridget was going through a rough patch in her summer. When she does find it, she calls her friends to go comfort Bridget and gets on the first flight back home to Maryland.
While the friends spend their summer apart, everything they learned when they were exploring the world on their own led them back to eachother. After cheering up Bridget, they meet Lena at the airport and engulf on their final adventure of the summer, driving Carmen to South Carolina to attend her father's wedding and finally patch things up, wearing, of course, the pants.
The Significance Of The Pants
Aside from bonding the characters together throughout the film, the pants bring magic into their lives, though they don't see it at first. Initially, they all fear the pants are actually cursed. Lena doesn't see that the pants led her to Kostas. She thinks all they did was make her summer more complicated. By her second encounter with the pants, she realizes great things are actually unfolding in her life. Bridget thought the pants brought her a chance to be with Eric, only to learn things were not as simple as she thought they would be.
However, when she returned home, her dog ran off with the pants in her mouth, miraculously stopping on the sidewalk where Eric was waiting for Bridget. Tibby believed the pants contributed nothing to the summer that seemed to drag on until she realized how blessed she was to have gotten to know Bailey, even though it broke her heart to have to say goodbye. Lastly, the pants couldn't save Carmen from her disaster of a summer, but when the friends override the rules of who gets the pants next, allowing her to wear them to her dad's wedding, they bring her the reconciliation with her father she expected to get earlier in the movie.
"It would be easy to say that the pants changed everything that summer, but looking back now, I feel like our lives changed because they had to and that the real magic of the pants was in bearing witness to all of this and in somehow holding us together when it felt like nothing would ever be the same again."-Carmen, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
The pants were a talisman among their friends, something they believed in so definitely that they couldn't help but transform their lives for the summer, even if they had their initial doubts. They could have done it without the pants, but it was more fun to have something they all found together that they could share in their first summer apart, proving no distance is wide enough to ever really keep them apart.