52 pages • 1 hour read
Lynn PainterNothing Like the Movies
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 11-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Wes”
Wes can’t focus at practice. He hears his dad’s voice every time he pitches and keeps remembering him having a heart attack while watching the Cubs/Mets game. Then, he hears Liz’s laugh and notices her and Clark showing up with video equipment. He tries to refocus but starts thinking about the playlists they used to listen to. He’s glad to see Liz but can’t stand seeing her with Clark.
Wes asks his teammates why Liz and Clark are at practice. They explain that they’re doing “a preseason series about the baseball team” (94). Wes is glad that he’ll get to see more of Liz, and lyrics from the songs she showed him years ago play in his mind. Then, everyone starts talking about Liz and how cool she is. Wes is surprised to hear the way they describe her. He then asks how long she’s been seeing Clark, but nobody seems to know. After practice, Wes gets an email from Lilith requesting an interview for the documentary she’s working on with HEFT. Wes doesn’t like the idea of publicizing his comeback story and declines the opportunity.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Liz”
Liz has trouble focusing at the library because she’s worried about working with the baseball team. Lyrics from her favorite songs emerge in her mind when she sees Wes enter the library. She can’t help but notice how attractive he is. However, she still feels hurt by what happened between them and reminds herself that she hates him. Wes approaches, interrupting her thoughts. She gets upset when he asks about her relationship with Clark. Then, Clark appears and invites Liz to join him and their friends at In-N-Out, the restaurant that Liz and Wes frequented when they first started at UCLA together. Clark invites Wes, too, and he comes along. On the way, Wes asks Clark why he doesn’t care about his and Liz’s history. Clark says that he trusts that Wes and Liz are over. Over food, Liz tries to stay calm but feels annoyed with everything Wes says. Their friends start pestering Wes with questions about who Liz was in high school, and she can’t wait for dinner to be over.
That night, Liz tries to focus while working on her new Reel for Lilith. However, because the footage is of Wes, she can’t stop thinking about him.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Wes”
Wes plays poorly at practice and feels self-conscious that Clark and Liz are videotaping him. Afterward, Liz confronts Wes about doing an intro video. He agrees, and they go out to the mound, where Liz records him answering some questions about himself. Wes is pleased when she starts teasing him and flirting. He leaves the stadium feeling hopeful.
Wes’s hopes fade when he doesn’t see Liz throughout the remainder of the week. On Saturday, he calls Ross, asking for extra workout time so that he can regain his focus on the game.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Liz”
Liz has breakfast with her roommates on Monday morning. They ask her more questions about her relationship with Wes, having heard through friends that they’d been in love. They’re surprised because Liz never dates and seems to hate romance. She gives them an abbreviated version of the story, saying that Wes broke up with her when he moved home. They’re shocked that he would leave her.
Liz remembers the breakup two years prior. She and Wes had been keeping in touch via FaceTime since Wes moved home. Then, one night, he called her but wouldn’t use FaceTime, insisting that they needed to talk. He said that it was too hard living far away and that he thought it was better for them to break up and move on. Liz tried protesting, but Wes didn’t want to stay in touch or be friends. He abruptly ended the call.
Liz’s roommates call her back to the present with more questions about her and Wes’s breakup. She insists that after crying over him for a few months, she moved on and hasn’t known anything about his life since.
For the rest of the day, Liz keeps replaying the breakup. In the months afterward, she thought they’d get back together. Then, when she saw Wes on New Year’s, she learned that he’d been seeing someone named Ashley. She berates herself now for thinking about Wes at all. A text from Lilith interrupts her thoughts, and she returns her focus to her Reel.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Wes”
Wes has a better practice after working hard over the weekend. He’s glad that he did well when Liz was there filming him. Then, Ross informs him that he’ll be starting for the exhibition game. Thrilled, he calls Sarah with the news. She congratulates him and promises to attend the game. He calls his mom with the news later in the week, too, and she’s thrilled. He tells himself that he’s done thinking about the past and that everything is going to be different now. He remembers Lilith’s interview proposition. He reassures himself that he made the right decision in declining because he doesn’t want to delve back into that part of his life.
On the day of the exhibition game, Wes’s stress returns. He keeps hearing his dad’s voice telling him that he’s going to fail.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Liz”
At the game, Liz notices that Wes looks nervous on the mound. She realizes that he’s going to play poorly if he doesn’t calm down. She writes him a note and asks Clark to pass it to him. From afar, she sees his face break into a smile when he reads the note. Then, the game starts, and Wes plays well. She cheers for him, realizing that their relationship is in the past and that she can be happy for him now.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Wes”
Wes feels proud of himself after the game. He’s also pleased that Liz wrote him a note to help him. He meets up with Sarah, and they go out for dinner. He doesn’t tell her about Liz’s note, but she pushes him again to talk to Liz and tell her how he feels. Alone later that night, Wes texts Liz, but she doesn’t respond.
On Monday, Wes smells Liz’s perfume in the hall and runs into her outside of his class. She says that she was looking for him because she wanted to ask him about doing the HEFT interview. Wes insists that he’s not going to do it because he doesn’t want to share that part of his story. Liz keeps pushing him until he finally assents. He realizes that Liz wants to impress Lilith and that he wants to help her.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Liz”
Wes says that he’ll only give the interview if Liz asks the questions. Liz protests, afraid that Lilith won’t agree. Wes explains that he trusts Liz with his story. She’s overwhelmed by emotion, thinking of old song lyrics and remembering their time together. She dismisses the thoughts and promises to talk to Lilith about his condition. Later that night, Wes texts and tells Liz when he is available for the interview. They agree on a time.
Chapters 11-18 Analysis
The more time that Liz and Wes are forced to spend together, the more complicated their relationship becomes. Liz’s work filming the baseball team’s preseason with Clark particularly incites the tension between the protagonists. To Liz, Clark is a protective measure. She is using him as a buffer between her and Wes because she’s afraid of Balancing Expectations and Reality. In reality, Liz still has complicated feelings for Wes. However, she doesn’t know if she should expect anything from him and tries to deny her feelings to quash any hope of reigniting their connection. By way of contrast, Wes sees Clark as a threat and an obstacle. To Wes, Clark’s presence at his practices with Liz “fe[els] intrusive.” In Wes’s mind, Liz’s filming work with the team is an opening and feels “like a golden opportunity to make some headway with her. But not with her boyfriend beside her, for God’s sake” (94). Clark is symbolic of the reality that Wes is reluctant to face: Liz is unavailable, and their relationship is over. For Liz, using Clark lets her live in the reality that she wants: She is “lightyears away from being the girl [Wes] once destroyed,” and their history is “so far in [her] past that [she is] genuinely able to cheer for his success” (157). In these ways, the protagonists’ expectations and realities become increasingly divergent. The more time they are forced to spend in one another’s company, the less they can communicate with one another and pursue a healthy and balanced relationship.
The disparities between Liz’s and Wes’s perceptions of each other and their relationship augment the narrative tension while simultaneously complicating romantic comedy tropes and furthering the novel’s thematic explorations. Because the characters are both back in the same social and academic spheres, their storylines run parallel to one another; these narrative alignments suggest a stereotypical resolution to their dynamic. For example, the characters often run into one another on campus. They see one another in the halls, on the street, at the stadium, and in the library and even end up going on the same social outings. These circumstantial details foreshadow that Liz and Wes will find their way back to each other. Narratively, it suggests that their proximity will beget their reconciliation and help them rekindle their relationship. However, because Liz and Wes are still not opening up to one another, their concepts of what they want and who they are as individuals and friends don’t align. This is namely because both of the characters are still on a Journey Toward Healing and Forgiveness. They have not yet reconciled past hurts and addressed their feelings for each other in the present; they have room to grow in this regard.
Despite the couple’s inability to speak openly with one another about their feelings, the novel continues to use music as a motif to represent hope toward their romantic dynamic. For example, Liz can’t focus on her schoolwork because lyrics from her favorite songs flood back into her memory when Wes walks into the library. Similarly, when Wes reflects that he is excited to see more of Liz because she is filming his team’s preseason, lyrics from the songs she showed him while they were dating play in his mind. The author uses music to demonstrate that while the characters have not yet acknowledged their complicated feelings for each other, music is one way these memories of each other linger in their minds.
Because both of the protagonists are desperate to leave their pasts behind, they actively resist confronting what happened between them and reconciling their differences. Just as Liz wants to believe that she is no longer upset about her and Wes’s breakup, Wes wants to believe that he no longer needs to discuss his dad’s death or the other traumatic experiences he’s recently gone through. His emotional response to Lilith’s email illustrates his state of denial and further develops the theme of Personal Growth and Coming-of-Age Journeys. In particular, Wes is tired of everyone trying “to romanticize [his] story, to act like it was this charming story arc that went something like: boy has everything and loses it, boy works hard, boy gets it all back. The end” (100). He therefore tries to ignore what happened and avoids talking about his experiences at all. His avoidance is a self-defense mechanism and proves that, like Liz, Wes is afraid of acknowledging his pain. However, the novel emphasizes that if one does not confront the hurt and trauma that they have lived through, they cannot heal from it. For these reasons, Liz’s and Wes’s fears of opening up to each other again challenge their ability to grow beyond their past mistakes, heal from their breakup, and forgive one another.
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