by Lindy West
Andy is feeling sassy in the aftermath of Shirt-Bird’s death. So, one day, he barricades the bathroom door while his guard is shooting some brown bullets into the porcelain yard, and commandeers the prison loudspeaker to play a Mozart song. Every single one of the downtrodden, defeated inmates turns his face to the sun, soaking up, with his full body, this fleeting scrap of the achingly brilliant human audacity so long denied him by cold prison walls—as though humans do not need art as surely as we need oxygen, as though we do not bleed beauty as freely as blood.
“I have no idea, to this day, what those two Italian ladies were singing about,” Morgan Freeman intones.
Meatballs, probably.
Andy starts laundering money for the warden’s nefarious extortion schemes, which is a pretty cool prison job. It also brings him ever deeper into the warden’s inner circle, which is not that cool because the warden is a big turd.
Case in point: One day, Billy from Ally McBeal shows up in prison and reveals that—mega small world—he used to be cellmates with the guy who actually murdered Andy’s wife! When Andy takes that hot goss to the warden, hoping to get a new trial, the warden throws him in the hole for two months AND THEN MURDERS BILLY FROM ALLY MCBEAL. (Not sure why Andy expected the murderous warden for whom he’s been laundering millions of dollars to be like, “Yes, I’ll totally help you get out of prison so you can go tell everyone about my mad felonies!” but yeah. You’re totally the smartest guy in prison, Andy.)
At this point, Andy is officially FED UP with this shit. He tells Morgan Freeman that he plans to move to Mexico one of these days, and that if Morgan Freeman ever gets out of prison, he should just go to Buxton and look under the special volcano rock and then he can come live with Andy in his Mexican she-shed. And Morgan Freeman is like, “Oooooooookay. Go lie down, kookaburra.”
Now everyone’s freaked out because Andy’s been “talkin’ funny” and it seems like he’s planning to self-harm out of grief over the death of Billy from Ally McBeal (I know the feeling). AND THEN HE DOES. Only he does it with like a laser or some shit because when the guards open his cell in the morning, dude is STRAIGHT VAPORIZED.
What actually happened is that Andy spent nineteen years tunneling out of the cookie castle with his rock hammer, concealing the tunnel hole behind Raquel Welch’s boobs, and when it was finally done, he yoinked the warden’s outfit and shoes (which seems dubious because the warden appears to be a small little pocket-pal and Tim Robbins is a ten-foot ’squatch, but okay), and crawled through a half mile of poopoo to get out. Then he tattled on the warden to the newspaper and headed to Mexico with $375,000. WHO’S KOOKABURRA NOW, MORGAN?
Cops show up at Shawshank and take Clancy Brown away, and he’s all a-bloo-bloo-bloo-bloo-bloooooo and then the warden shoots himself and then Morgan Freeman is like, “Some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice.” (Hollyweird Fun Fact: that line wasn’t in the script—it’s just something Morgan Freeman said to his assistant when she brought him a salami sandwich in the voice-over booth.)
Then Morgan Freeman has his parole meeting and he NAAAAAILS IT! He gets out of prison and goes to work at the grocery store where Shirt-Bird worked and lives in the same dumb apartment where Shirt-Bird lived and the same shitty white ladies are all, “Um, DOUBLE BAGS,” and his boss is like, “STOP TELLING ME ABOUT YOUR URINE,” and he just doesn’t know how to fit in in this non-prison world. “All I do anymore,” he says, “is think of ways to break my parole so maybe they’d send me back.”
Until, one day, Morgan Freeman remembers that Andy left him a present under some fucking rock in Buxton! And do you know what the present is? IT’S LITERALLY A TON OF BUX!
So Morgan Freeman takes a bus to Mexico and finds Andy on a beach and he’s so excited that he doesn’t even care that his only hat falls in the ocean and the two of them scrub boats together forever. And that’s why Sharktank Rondonald is the first great American bromance. Eleven out of ten. Your mom was right.
RATING: 11/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Know Your Enemy
I know that gen Z has it tough—they’re losing their proms and graduations to the quarantine, they’re on deck to bear the full brunt of climate catastrophe, and they’re inheriting a carcass of a society that’s been fattened up and picked clean by the billionaire class, leaving them with virtually no shot at a life without crushing financial and existential anxiety, let alone any fantasy of retiring from their thankless toil or leaving anything of value to their own children. That’s bad. BUT, counterpoint! Millennials have to deal with a bunch of that same stuff, kind of, PLUS we had to be teenagers when American Pie came out! Fuck/marry/kill: Rudolph Giuliani, Stephen Miller, the guy behind you in chemistry saying, “This one time? At band camp?” nine thousand fucking times per hour for FOUR YEARS MINIMUM. You know you would fuck Stephen and marry Rudy if it meant you got to murder that motherfucker!
What I’m saying is that suffering IS a contest and I DO stand by that and straight teenage boys losing their virginities IS worse than not having breathable air. Okay??????
American Pie absolutely captivated a generation because my generation is tacky as hell. “I have a hot girlfriend but she doesn’t want to have sex” was an entire genre of movies in the ’90s. In the ’90s, people loved it when things were “raunchy” (ew!). Every guy at my high school wanted to be Stifler! Can you imagine what that kind of an environment does to a person? To be of the demographic that has a Ron Burgundy quote for every occasion, without the understanding that Ron Burgundy is a satire? This is why we have Jenny McCarthy, I’m pretty sure, and, by extension, the great whooping cough revival of 2014. Thanks a lot, jocks!
It’s not that I hate every ’90s teen sex comedy. Believe me, as a teen who was not having sex in the ’90s, I needed them to live. I just think a lot of them are bad, and have bad morals, and did bad things to boys’ and girls’ brains, but that doesn’t mean I can’t like them. I was a Can’t Hardly Wait girl myself, and that shit is absolutely radioactive with incel energy. This tension is the stuff of life.
American Pie was the big one, though, and I never got it. I just always thought it was the least charming of the bunch, Eugene Levy and Natasha Lyonne notwithstanding.1 That said, this franchise has made a collective $1 billion. So change my mind, rewatch!!! (Spoiler: it won’t!)
American Pie is about a group of high school boys who make a pact to lose their virginities before they graduate.
Jason Biggs is our main guy, whose problem is that he cannot stop masturbating in front of his parents, which is weird because if there’s one thing I know about teenagers, it’s that they are masters of secrecy! When I was in high school, if I was going to steal an extra Dorito after my mom told me I couldn’t have any more Doritos, I would memorize the exact topography of the Doritos in the bag and the bag’s placement in the snack drawer and I would SILENTLY Jenga a single Dorito out of there and snap the chip clip back in the exact right position to the millimeter and then backflip out of the kitchen like motherfucking Sydney Bristow! Yet Biggs “accidentally” masturbates in front of his parents…three? Four times in this movie? And god knows how many more times later in the franchise! I haven’t watched any of those, but it would be bad storytelling to have your protagonist overcome the defining struggle of his life at the very beginning of his hero’s journey, and for Jason Biggs, that’s masturbating in front of his parents. One might argue that masturbating in front of his parents is Jason Biggs’s entire personality. And one would be almost right, except that he is also 1 percent ruthless objectification of women and 4 percent battery. Jason Biggs looks like a battery.
Chris Klein is a lacrosse jock with a tender heart who is constantly being harassed by Stifler (class clown/bully/sexual success) about how he needs to be pulling chicks the old-fashioned way: by insulting and tricking them.
Kevin(?) has a beautiful girlfriend, Tara
Reid, who is not ready to have sex because she wants it to be “perfect” and because Kevin(?) won’t say I love you back. Who even remembered that Kevin, one of the four main characters in this movie, was even a character in this movie? Not me! Is his name actually Kevin? I will not look it up!
Finch is the old soul of the pack, which you can tell because he has fine tastes such as “mochaccinos,”2 lying, and hiding.
Did you realize that only twenty years ago, it was still socially acceptable to make ensemble comedies of all white men who look exactly alike even though one of them is a battery?
Stifler is having a party tonight, and the four pals are sitting around wondering if this will be the night they finally coerce a girl into intercoursing them. Biggs asks what “third base” feels like, and Chris Klein tells him it’s “like warm apple pie.” Is it, though???? Oh yeah, you know, crusty and mushy!
Klein isn’t going to the party because he has a date with a college chick, and he’s been practicing his lines for sex-convincing.
Kevin(?) wonders if tonight is the night that Tara Reid will finally let him break through her flaky crust.
The fourth guy, I forget what he does.
The party opens with a truly virtuosic full-minute-long take of Stifler walking around being a dirtbag, exactly like the car chase in Children of Men but with more Barenaked Ladies. Biggs and Kevin(?) can’t believe it when Sherman, a guy they think is worse than they are, tells them he’s had sex before. The Shermanator is supposedly worse because he is an unappealing chauvinist nerd who wears ugly big jeans, whereas our heroes are…different from that. Biggs tries talking to his crush, Nadia, but beefs it. Meanwhile, on his date with the college girl, Chris Klein tries out the sex line he prepared for 100 percent guaranteed sex: “Suck me, beautiful.” (Jesus, who’s your dating coach—Castor Troy?) The college girl laughs in his face and tells him she’s majoring in “postmodern feminist thought,” which, in the ’90s, was a punch line. Haha! Thinking about feminism! Postmodern—does that word even have a meaning?? She suggests that if he wants to have sex with a woman, he should try being less like a Ying Yang Twin and more like a human being who is normal, nice, and enjoys talking about shared interests or the news of the day. Yeah, right! Nice try, Lorena Bobbitt.
At the party, Tara Reid and Kevin(?) go up to one of the bedrooms where she sucks his dick and then he jizzes into a beer. Stifler kicks them out so he can try to have disrespectful sex with a girl named Sarah in there (“I don’t know if I want to be doing this”—Sarah, hilariously!), but then just when he’s about to successfully badger her into accepting his penis, Stifler accidentally glugs the jizz beer! Guk guk guk right down! And then he realizes that it was jizz beer because it tastes like the inside of Kevin(?)’s balls, so then he supersoaks Sarah with a fire hose of vomit that is also jizz. I’m sorry, I don’t like it either, but it’s all we had for entertainment in the ’90s!!!
I forgot that American Pie popularized the term MILF, and that they made John Cho do it, which is a microaggression. Also, later, Stifler calls the guys cucks! Did American Pie really mainstream both MILF and cuck? Can you put a movie in jail?
The guys wake up, hungover, in Stifler’s living room the next morning and ratify the terms of their four-boy sex pact (god, straight guys are SO GAY):
“Here’s the deal. We all get laid before we graduate.”
“Together, we are the masters of our sexual destiny.”
“This is our very manhood at stake.”
“No longer will our penises remain flaccid and unused! We will fight for every man out there who isn’t getting laid and should be!”
“We will make a stand! We will succeed! We will get laid!”
“Prom is our last chance.”
“All the parties afterwards? Chicks are gonna want to do it!”
That’s the vibe that killed us all, by the way! Buncha white boys sitting around like, “We will fight for every man out there who isn’t getting laid and should be!” Oops, that’s it for the species. Not to get all “postmodern feminist thought” major on you, but the idea that straight white men “deserve” some degree of unfettered access to other people’s bodies and if they don’t get it, they are being robbed of something that intrinsically belongs to them is white supremacist patriarchal capitalist imperialism, dog! People have inherent value regardless of their usefulness to you, sorry! Being able to squeeze as much pleasure or profit as you want out of somebody else’s life or body or labor (or out of any weaker party, any nation, any system, any natural resource), regardless of their security or consent, is not a right, sorry! My bad, but kill every billionaire, metaphorically, I swear! Sorryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!
Alas, the horny-boy sex quest continues. They buy SO MANY CONDOMS. Biggs makes an online dating profile, gets no hits. Klein wonders, “How the hell am I supposed to become this Mr. Sensitive Man?” and then joins jazz choir. Kevin(?) seeks advice from Natasha Lyonne, who tells him, “If you want to get her in the sack, just tell her you love her. That’s how I got duped.” She also says he should try to cause Tara Reid to have an orgasm, and we, as a society, should probably pause and think about how wild it is that men need that info delivered to them as sex advice. Hahaha, Ed Harris, please neurotoxify us ASAP!
Turns out, Chris Klein is actually really into vocal jazz—understandably because singing in a choir teaches you how to connect with others on a profound level, to subsume your ego and truly listen, to create something beautiful out of a collective using only your bodies and your shared understanding of human emotion and the concept of time. Also, another good point, “This place is an untapped resource. I mean, check it out, these vocal jazz girls are hot!”
Klein tries to pass along his newfound wisdom to Stifler:
“All you gotta do is just ask them questions and just listen to what they have to say and shit.”
“I don’t know, man, that sounds like a lot of work!”
He is a horrible person, but there is something soothing about Stifler’s complete self-actualization. Stifler knows who he is and he knows what he wants and he does not question himself. He lives effortlessly within the contours of the life he has chosen. I admire Stifler in this way. I yearn for the kind of certainty that seems to come so naturally to him. May we all someday find the serenity of Steve Stifler, but with, I don’t know, not so many up-skirt video schemes.
Eugene Levy corners Biggs for a father-son sex chat and gives him some sex magazines to teach him about pussy: “Okay, so, uh, this is the female form, and they have focused primarily on the breasts.” I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts (Harry Potter audiobooks aren’t going to listen to themselves on a ceaseless and frankly worrisome twenty-year loop!!!), but I would pay upward of $7,000 per episode for Eugene Levy Describes Shaved Centerfolds.
Finch pays Natasha Lyonne to start a rumor at school that he’s “equipped” because that’s what teen girls are into—huge cocks! These girls are positively IN HEAT over Finch’s rumored dong!
Kevin(?) calls Casey Affleck to get sex tips, and Casey Affleck bequeaths to him “the bible,” a handwritten book of sex information passed down from senior to senior for generations. “Now it’s full of all kind of stuff guys have added over the years” (jizz). Kevin(?) goes and finds the book in its secret hiding place in the library, and first of all it is SO BIG, WHY IS THAT BOOK SO BIG, but second of all, you guys know there are just books about sex in the regular library, right? And they’re probably better, because they were written by adults who have actually had sex? You absolutely do not need to do any of this.
Chris Klein is not just surviving but thriving in jazz choir. He is wearing a cardigan. He is feelin’ it, and he lets the music take control: “Scooby dooby do bop!”
“That was good!” says the choir teacher.
No, it wasn’t!!!!!
“The state competition’s a few weeks away, so keep on it!” says the choir teacher.
They are not going to win the state competition!!!!!
Uh-oh. Jason Biggs gets home from school and his mother has left a fresh apple pie on the counter. Biggs immediately gets an erection. He pulls down his pants. He clambers up on to the kitchen island and begins making full horizontal love to the hot pie using his penis. In the kitchen. Of his parents’ home! TAKE THE PIE UP TO YOUR ROOM, JASON! This is literally so disrespectful. Do you know how much work it is to make an apple pie from scratch????
Of course, Eugene Levy comes in and finds his only child inseminating a pastry, moaning and twitching and stuff. This is a horror movie. In some weird gesture of male solidarity, Levy’s like, “Well, we’ll just tell your mother that we ate it all.” But, I’m sorry, as a married couple, your first allegiance is to each other. If my husband came home and our son was fucking a pie that I made and he didn’t IMMEDIATELY TELL ME so we could laugh and vomit and call 911 together, divoooooorce!
Mena Suvari asks Chris Klein to prom, but then she sees Stifler doing a sex motion and high-fiving Klein on the lacrosse field, so then she UN-asks him to prom. “I saw you making fun of me with your lacrosse buddies. You are just a jock. No, wait, you’re a jerk.” Nice one.
Kevin(?) gives Tara Reid an orgasm using “the infamous TONGUE TORNADO,” which he learned about in the secret sex bible. (Another entry says, “Know your enemy,” with a picture of a vibrator. Very cool for women!)
