Pitch Perfect changed my life

Or: a love letter to Anna Kendrick

In 2012, I developed a crippling addiction to Pitch Perfect.

The film’s September release aligned extremely well with my two-week winter break from high school, so I decided to watch it nonstop. This is not an exaggeration. I would wake up at noon, press play on my laptop, and let Pitch Perfect soundtrack my day until I fell asleep at 4am. Rinse and repeat for 14 days. I was 16, addicted to Tumblr, and desperately seeking purpose in the media I consumed. My Glee fan blog (embarrassing) became a Pitch Perfect fan blog (somehow even more embarrassing), and I spent my days reblogging grainy GIFs of Beca Mitchell/Anna Kendrick.

If you’re one of the three people left on this planet who has yet to see Pitch Perfect:

Beca Mitchell arrives at Barden University for her freshman year and begrudgingly auditions for the Barden Bellas, the once-prestigious all-female a cappella group now in shambles after their leader, Aubrey, projectile vomited on stage at last year’s finals. Desperate for new recruits, they allow a ragtag selection of misfits into the group, including Beca and Fat Amy.

Beca is Not Like Other Girls™—her eyeliner, combat boots, flannel, and leather cuff bracelet make that abundantly clear. She doesn’t immediately gel with the Bellas and instead finds solace interning at the college radio station, where she develops feelings for Jesse, a member of the rival Treblemakers. More than anything, Beca wants to be a music producer, but she’s stuck performing the same tired arrangement of The Sign by Ace of Base under Aubrey’s leadership. When she finally takes matters into her own hands, tensions escalate, and she quits. Everything falls apart.

And then, by some stroke of luck (or plot necessity), the Bellas make it to the finals. They come crawling back to Beca, she fixes them, they win, and she and Jesse fall in love to a perfectly timed “Don’t You (Forget About Me).”

It’s a perfect movie.

I was 16 when I first saw Pitch Perfect. I can’t remember what drew me to the theater—though I imagine it had something to do with my dual crush on Adam Devine from Workaholics and Anna Kendrick from Twilight. At school, I was a full-time choir freak. At home, I was a full-time Glee freak. Pitch Perfect arrived like a divine intervention, tailor-made for me and my obsessive personality.

Like most 16-year-olds, I had no idea who I was. My life revolved around extracurriculars (theater, choir) that kept me at school from 7 AM to 9 PM most nights, leaving little time for self-actualization. Though I was immersed in the performing arts, I was never particularly great at either. I was a team player, and good at it, but I was never the star—I wore a little too much eyeliner and listened a little too much Paramore to be taken seriously.

I grew up loving music more than most, but choir gave me a love that felt like mine. But I was 2 years away from graduation and I had no idea how to turn that love into a career. Then, out of nowhere, I was struck by lightning: Pitch Perfect. I saw Beca—brazen, sarcastic, with an effortless cool I wanted to embody so badly. She had tattoos (I wanted tattoos!), eyeliner (I had so much eyeliner!!), and a self-assuredness that landed her a hot music internship right out of the gate. She was everything I wanted to be, and I didn’t realize it until I saw her on a screen in front of me.

What hit me most wasn’t that Beca sacrificed her “alternativeness” to fit in with the Bellas—it was that she didn’t. Instead, she found new parts of herself that could coexist with them. She softened, but never lost the edge that made her Beca. She let go of her individuality complex just enough to allow her fellow Bellas in to her heart a bit, and she learned how important and special it is to belong to something.

Through 800 viewings of Pitch Perfect (give or take a few, probably), I realized that I could love music and seek out a career in the music industry that might not fit the mold that I’d been pushed toward. I didn’t have to become an opera singer (although I did try, to no avail, because apparently you have to “enjoy” singing in front of people to really succeed in a career in the performing arts, go figure). I didn’t have to become a music teacher. I went off to college a couple years later and studied music business. I did, for a brief moment, think that I’d become the music producer of the century, but I found myself in so many different ways, and found a career path that felt true to me. I wouldn’t have found myself in that way had I not had Beca Mitchell to guide me down the right path.

Do I think Pitch Perfect is the best movie of all time? I mean, absolutely. But even if I’m the only one on the planet who feels that way (though surely I’m not), the impact it had on me was immeasurable, and I’ll hold that in my heart forever. Watching Pitch Perfect now, 13 years after its release, I feel a strange kind of tenderness toward my younger self. It’s like reaching back through time and taking her hand, reassuring her that while she didn’t become the music producer of the century, she did find a path—one that, in no small way, Pitch Perfect helped carve. That obsession, that winter break spent looping the same 113-minute film over and over, eventually led me to a career in the music industry.

(Anna Kendrick, if you’re reading this, I love you.)

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Hey y’all! I’m really happy to see so many of you here, though it’s a little scary to think that a lot of people have read my writing and decided they wanted to read more of it. I’m honored that you’ve pressed the subscribe button, and I hope I don’t disappoint you.

As you can tell by the fact that I just wrote an entire essay about Pitch Perfect, I have spent a lot of my life consuming media. While it doesn’t consume me the way it used to, so much of who I am today is shaped by the things I loved when I was 13. It rules. I’m hoping to write more about this kind of thing—how I try to honor my teenage self through the life I’m living now.

When I’m not pretending to be a writer on Substack, I’m a photographer and I work at a public radio station in Nashville. Letting people read what I’ve written is a really foreign concept to me because for nearly 7 years, my professional life has revolved around visual art—I’ve been taking photos, doing graphic design, and video editing full-time for a while now. So this writing venture is a little new for me, and I’m trying to take it seriously. If you’ve read anything I’ve written, just know that I feel incredibly grateful that you’ve taken the time to do so. Thank you.

Feel free to follow me on Instagram (@ylracbutler) to see my non-writing work or if you’d like to see what I’m up to these days.