you ruined that pie
In which we talk about teenage comedies...
My movie brain has been into hotwiring old cars lately, the ones your friends or their parents would drive you to school in, breath steaming out of your mouth on a December morning, or out of your ears on a July afternoon. I’m not normally a nostalgia freak, but I’m going back to the movies I only saw in the theater or as a Blockbuster rental as a teenager, and never returned to. A big thing about cratedigging film to me is approaching them like how detectives will dig through somebody’s trash to figure out what was going on in their brains at the time. Can’t remember if Carol Clover gave me that metaphor, but read her, she blew my brain open with how to approach media.
So the cars I’ve been hotwiring at the moment are mostly 1997-2010, the era when I had the freedom to watch whatever the hell I wanted with my friends, and we were all getting deep into it. But at the same time, we would just see whatever is new, cult or genre be damned. My comfort zone recently has been either teen comedies or horror films that were PG-13 at a time where the MPAA was loosening up on the ratings. Not like it matters, nobody checked our IDs.
One recent rewatch was ‘Legally Blonde’ (2001). I was best friends with this couple in high school, and she had her head on her shoulders, played hoops, smartie sweetie, and her boyfriend was also a smartie and sometimes a sweetie but did not have his head on his or her shoulders as often as he should have. She wanted to go see this movie in the theater, and he was a dick about it, ‘why would I wanna go see some chick flick?!’ So she asked me to go and I said yes, cuz I liked hanging out with her, and I liked seeing any movie in the theater, and she had this badass red 80s sports car. Wish I could remember the model, it really wasn’t something super powerful or expensive but it felt cool to ride in.
(this is not her car I don’t know shit about cars but it was something similar to this that she saved up like $2000 to buy and it was really cool)
It felt like a date. I think we were both kinda into each other, but yanno what can we do. She was happy a boy would go with her to see a ‘girl movie.’ We both loved it! Watching it again, and I didn’t even think about it at the time, it was the ‘Barbie’ of that era, a movie about women that says ‘You can be smart and also hot and also it really fuckin sucks that you have to earn the respect of the men around you.’
On a different note is the movie I rewatched tonight, ‘American Pie’ (1999). That was one I saw in the theater with my dude bros and it was generally a cultural moment. It invented a term that is now one of the most popular searches in pornography, brought along a young cast that was talented but then got relegated to these kinds of movies (the kinds where the DVD release cover is a giant faceless woman covering her titties with a skateboard or whatever UNCUT EDITION), and we got two Christopher Guest actors.
I’m having a hard time how to parse how different it was then and now. There’s a lot of that movie that is about young men maybe figuring out that sex isn’t just about FUCKING which look IT CAN BE if that’s what you’re both looking for BUT USUALLY MAYBE it might not be! I’m pretty sure some of my dumbass dude friends saw that and thought ‘hyuck let’s do the challenge to see if we can all get laid this summer’ and my fellow virgin ass took it as ‘be sensitive to a woman’s needs and feelings.’ American Pie straddles that line in a way that just does not hold up, and once the webcam scene popped up I was like NOPE THIS IS BAD, like some Revenge of the Nerds shit and if you’re still reading this I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, don’t need to go into further detail about how those movies take the idea of consent and say ‘HAHAHAHA YEAH it’s cool to watch a girl naked when they don’t know about it.’
Not trying to conflate teen sex comedies with just comedies meant for teenagers, but maybe that’s just what happened, we freejazz here. This is a larger discussion that I’m sure we will get into. I guess this was a strange Barbenheimer, where we watched two movies that were heavily inclined towards ‘dudes rock/girls rock’ and had very different experiences, and in both cases with those, I ain’t siding with the Kens.