The lad-mag enthusiasm for this special movie moment spelt a final coming out into the mainstream for the male obsession with lesbian sex (or a male-controlled fantasy version of lesbian sex, anyway), and many women seemed to find the scene quite sexy too. So now no TV show is complete without a ‘shocking’ lesbian snog. And it invented Katy Perry. It’s a bit like the karmic cost of doing magic in Buffy. Even good magic has dire consequences.
The ending is kind of a problem, though. Having delighted us with snotty profanities in sophisticated settings, we’re suddenly in Central Park watching a fist-fight and a death by big yellow taxi. In truth, the film hasn’t earned a Romeo And Juliet-type tragedy. It’s too superficial, which is part of its shallow joy. And the humiliation of Kathryn by way of a funeral and Sebastian’s journals is going just fine – SMG is fabulous at shocked tears – until Kumble doubts himself, gets all self-conscious about the teen viewers getting bored or something, and dumps The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ all over the scene. Not that it’s a bad record. But it has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re watching and turns bad karma drama into bad pop video.
The strength of Cruel Intentions lies in its deft balance between retaining the original’s waspish sophistication and gossipy plot while giving today’s kids the swearing, filth, snappy one-liners, glossy sexiness and satire at the expense of high school hierarchies and youth amorality they require. It can’t bring itself to carry the original’s subtext of the end of a corrupt ruling class. But at least it doesn’t embarrass itself by trying.
BUT I’M A CHEERLEADER
1999
Starring: Natasha Lyonne, Clea DuVall, RuPaul Charles, Eddie Cibrian, Bud Cort, Melanie Lynskey, Mink Stole, Cathy Moriarty, Julie Delpy
Dir.: Jamie Babbitt
Plot: The Citizen Kane of lesbian feminist cheerleader comedies.
Key line: ‘It’s so much harder once they’ve been through all that liberal arts brainwashing.’
But I’m A Cheerleader is a movie that simply couldn’t have been made before 1999. Directed by lesbian feminist Jamie Babbitt, who served her cinematic apprenticeship as a crew member on Martin Scorsese’s The Age Of Innocence and David Fincher’s The Game, but scripted by gay male Smallville writer Brian Wayne Peterson, it is a heavily John Waters-influenced satire at the expense of therapy camps that attempt to cure children of homosexuality. It advocates gay rights and mocks the straight world by stealing and subverting the looks and sounds of high school movies, and then turning it up to eleven. It makes its gay characters heroic and its straight characters both dishonest and ridiculous. It takes stereotypes established by John Hughes movies and manipulates them until they are actively promoting homosexuality (and feminism and multiculturalism) to young people. If there’s anything that the Thatcher government’s 1988 Section 28 law banning local authorities from ‘portraying homosexuality in a positive light’ was supposed to stop, it was the funding and showing of things like this movie. Do you really need any more recommendations?
Like Waters, Babbitt’s sense of humour is of the Bad Taste variety, whereby an overdriven form of kitsch is used to mock the self-appointed Moral Majority. Her choice of cast is like a history of subtly transgressive presences in American cinema. Beautifully weird teen stars in Natasha Lyonne (American Pie, kinda frog-faced, booze and drug problems, once arrested for walking into a neighbour’s house and shouting, ‘I’m going to sexually molest your dog!’), Clea DuVall (Queen of Grumpy, see The Faculty, p. 351), Katherine Towne (always plays a bitchy goth – really good at it) and Melanie Lynskey (so scary she’s constantly cast as a murderer; see Heavenly Creatures, here). They are joined by veterans of benign Bad Taste including black drag queen model and pop star RuPaul Charles, Bud Cort (see Harold And Maude, here), Cathy Moriarty (best known for Raging Bull but at her best in soap opera piss-take Soapdish and B-movie celebration Matinee), and Waters regular Mink Stole. Julie Delpy (see Before Sunrise, p. 325) is beamed in from the land of Good Taste to do a cameo simply called ‘Lipstick Lesbian’. The music, largely by underground gay pop groups called things like Go Sailor, Dressy Bessy and Sissy Bar, is a subtle twist on the fresh-faced college pop that dominates mainstream teen movies.
Lyonne plays Megan, an all-American, baton-wielding good girl who is dating the school hunky jock but thinking of cheerleaders in short skirts while she endures his open-mouthed, tongue-lolling snogging technique. This lack of snog enthusiasm, coupled with her ownership of a Melissa Etheridge poster and a fondness for tofu, inspires an intervention as Mom and Dad (Stole and Cort) send the confused hottie off to True Directions; a place where boys’ things are painted day-glo blue, girls’ things are painted day-glo pink, and various outsiders (S&M goth girl, Jewish boy, Hispanic femme-punk with a moustache, boy who likes musical theatre) are forced to confess their homosexuality to the group and learn to be ashamed.
Megan is treated to an introductory video where a victim of ‘recruitment into the homosexual lifestyle’ is presented in the style of a heroin addict. Beaten, bruised and resplendent in punk-biker-ex-con wear and extravagant facial piercings, she chain smokes, sniffs sickly, and recalls that: ‘Even when she’d get high and push me off the back of her bike . . . I’d roll in the gutter, with broken ribs . . . I just kept coming back for more!’ After just two months at True Directions our masochistic Biker Bertha is a beaming ’50s housewife.
The reorientation therapy comes in the shape of a five-step programme, and it is Step 2 – Rediscovering Your Gender Identity – that gives Babbit free rein to indulge both her amused disgust at received notions of masculinity and femininity and her visually flamboyant perviness. The first attempt to make girls be girls involves forcing them to embrace housework. So, in a room that looks like a giant pink and blue Barbie House with walls made of cake dumped on a gay theatre stage in Greenwich Village, Ms Brown teaches the girls to vacuum. As she and her charges – all dressed in the same pink get-up, so kitsch that it immediately looks like fetish wear – get down on their knees and push vibrating implements around, Mary intones ‘In and out! In and out!’, and the girls’ mouths and eyes light up with ironic lust.
Meanwhile, the boys, who are in powder-blue Scout uniforms with unfeasibly tight shorts, are being taught car maintenance by RuPaul’s second-in-command Mike, who is opening and closing his legs and also grunting, ‘In and out! In and out’ before innocently asking the group, ‘So . . . who wants to go down with me?’ The Woodcraft Folk was never like this.
Babbit’s real-life mother ran a therapy group for teens with booze and drug issues called New Directions, so the entire 12-step rehab phenomenon comes in for some good-natured lampooning, too, particularly the obsession with confession. When refusenik Graham (DuVall) is urged to disclose the ‘root’ of her illness, she sighs, looks awkwardly shameful, and reports: ‘My mother got married in pants.’ She gets a supportive round of applause for her courage. Other ‘roots’ of adolescent sexual perversion include ‘I was born in France’ and ‘I like balls.’ The lesson? ‘Women have roles. When you learn that you’ll stop objectifying them.’ Heh.
Camp punishments for such things as the boys looking at Mary’s hot son like a piece of prime pork are harsh. ‘You’ll be watching sports! The whole weekend!’ If you’re beginning to suspect that True Directions is actually heaven on Earth, it inevitably becomes exactly that for Megan and Graham as their initial mutual antipathy inevitably turns into Big Sexy Love.
Even a displaced high school comedy has to end with graduation. And these kids’ graduation ceremony has to involve – by way of a gay bar called Cocksucker, Delpy’s lipstick lesbian and a declaration of guerrilla war on the entire conservative edifice of masculine and feminine – a defiant coming out and a triumph of love over hate that can only be gained through . . . cheerleading. It’s very silly and very, very cute. The parting shot is Megan’s Ma and Pa at a support group for the parents of homosexuals. Because, in a nation where sexual reorientation camps are allowed to exist, i
t’s obviously adult America that is badly in need of therapy.
So by 1999 things had moved on enough to allow But I’m A Cheerleader to be made. That doesn’t mean they get equal rights. In the same year that American Pie featured so much hetero masturbation it occasionally resembled a porn addict watching themselves on webcam, Babbit was forced to cut tiny, pointless bits of wank action in order to get an R rating. Critics mostly hated the movie, damning it both for preaching to the converted and not being angry enough, while seeming to miss the point entirely of the kitsch settings and the deliberate overstatement of teen movie stereotypes. Perhaps it was just too much of a shock that a lesbian feminist has both a sense of humour and a fondness for old-fashioned love stories.
The real comedy comes out of merry things like Cathy Moriarty’s squirming, twitching face and husky voice as she’s trying to get a bewildered Megan to confess her interest in ‘a woman . . . in a tight skirt . . . and her long . . . beautiful legs . . . or perhaps she’s in the bathroom . . . putting lipstick over . . . her full lips . . . or maybe in the locker-room . . . soaping her body . . . rubbing her breasts . . . ’, and the way that Ms Lyonne’s fabulous face slips from confusion, to ‘wait a minute!’ suspicion, to increasingly dreamy lust. It’s the repressive right who see filthy sex in the most innocent and natural human activities to the point where they are actually making the lifestyles they hate seem far more exciting than they are. This is a movie where those of us who are morally better people get to laugh at the cruel and bigoted, because mockery is one hell of an effective way to let someone know they can’t touch you.
To this end, our gay teen heroes and heroines happily parrot the prejudices and stereotypes of their therapists because this crap is even more laughable when it comes out of the mouths of teens so overwhelmingly gay that they look like the winners of the San Francisco Gay Pride Who’s The Gayest Gay? contest.
So, despite making a profit on a tiny budget, Babbit hasn’t been given a mainstream movie since. She’s found a place in low-budget queer cinema and, happily, mainstream American TV, producing and directing shows as diverse as The L Word, Malcolm In The Middle, Ugly Betty and Nip/Tuck, because American television has shot way ahead of Hollywood in its embrace of subversive film-makers in the wake of the success of Buffy, The Sopranos and the Home Box Office channel’s iconic quality TV. Of course, Babbit isn’t the only director of great work in this book who hasn’t gone on to be a major player. But I don’t think you need to be Right-On Ron to see that being a female director is hard enough, so being one with an unashamed lesbian feminist agenda who isn’t interested in making victim films might be close to impossible.
But I’m A Cheerleader ought to be ground down by the strain and struggle of trying to get something so blatantly designed to convince children that alternative lifestyles are not just valid but desirable made at all. But it isn’t. It glides by cheerily, always putting laughs before agitprop, leaving bitterness aside. It’s a perfect double-bill with Bring It On (see here) because it says precisely the same thing but with far more balls. And I like balls.
AMERICAN PIE
1999
Starring: Jason Biggs, Chris Klein, Seann William Scott, Alyson Hannigan, Natasha Lyonne, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Chris Owen, Eugene Levy, Mena Suvari, Eddie Kaye Thomas
Dir.: Paul Weitz
Plot: What you get if you take Where The Boys Are, switch genders, add 40 years of plummeting moral standards and some pastry.
Key line: ‘I did a fair bit of masturbating when I was a little younger. I used to call it stroking the salami . . . pounding the old pud. I never did it with baked goods . . .’
American Pie represents both the end of a teen comedy era, and the launch of a new one. Just like all those appalling gross-out films that took their cue from National Lampoon’s Animal House (see here), the Weitz Brothers’ debut was frat-boy comedy which entirely hinged upon dirty jokes for dirty boys to snigger at. But the film became the biggest teen comedy hit since American Graffiti (see here) because it laughed at its male protagonists and their belief that girls could be manipulated into sex through saying the right lines or striking the right pose. The emphasis swiftly changed in teen sex comedies – at least, teen comedies that wanted to be genuinely successful – from humiliating women to humiliating men. Each time the horny lads of this Michigan high school attempt to bond around the degradation of an unwitting female, they are immediately punished – by drinking a beer-semen cocktail, by premature ejaculation, by girls who are plainly way ahead of them in the sexual knowledge stakes – and publicly exposed as the inadequate boys they are. The only way they can get what they want is by following rules laid down by women and showing the opposite sex a little respect. And, therefore, growing up. This is further hit home by female characters who do rather than are done to, have conversations about orgasms, and are played by genuinely great (and unconventional-looking) actresses like Alyson Hannigan and Mena Suvari.
Eventually this trend would lead to rude movies as multi-layered and girl-friendly as Superbad (see here) and Juno (see here). And, while each sequel in this franchise did a little more damage to the original’s balance of the puerile, the moral and the shamefully funny, the first American Pie, along with the Farrelly Brothers’ 1998 classic There’s Something About Mary, paved the way for adolescent smut that didn’t insist that the only way to lure male bums onto seats was to treat them to the writers’ most enthusiastic misogynist fantasies. Girls could watch and get some karmic revenge for various humiliations they had suffered at the hands of oafish boys. And the boys could laugh at the oafs and reassure themselves that they were never quite this oafish. Major studio teen sex comedies stopped being based on the gender war fixations of male writers and directors from the ’70s fear-and-loathing years and became date movies again.
The movie is framed around two parties at the house of boorish lacrosse player Stifler (Scott). At the first, four friends, the sweet-but-dorky Jim (Biggs), sweet-but-dumb jock Oz (Klein), sweet-but-pretentious Paul (Thomas) and sweet-and-that’s-it-he’s-just-sweet Kevin (Nicholas) prove their ineptitude with women . . . although Kevin would have at least got a fully complete BJ from his cute girlfriend Vicky (Reid) if it wasn’t for that pesky Stifler and his appetite for cum-laced lager. The situation is made more desperate by the apparent sexual success of the impossibly geeky Sherman aka The Sherminator (Owen).
The four make a pact to lose their virginities before the end of the high school year. The big speech from Kevin about their duty to fight the good fight and be men is a loving tribute to the stupidity of Animal House. But when guys get together and plan battle strategies to defeat a resourceful enemy – women, that is – dignity is the first casualty of war.
The main victim of sustained humiliation is Jason Biggs’s Jim, and American Pie is Biggs’s movie. His broad, friendly, none-more-Jewish face – always veering between eagerness to please and bemused panic, and framed by a haircut best described as ‘late Mormon’ – is the image you take away. Objectively, Jim’s comic sexual activities are pretty creepy, yet Biggs successfully remains charming. It’s perhaps why Biggs has never really escaped the role and made the breakthrough into adult cinema, being forced to lampoon his inability to escape being known as ‘the boy who fucked the pie’ in Kevin Smith’s Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back.
Which brings us to the scene where Jason Biggs fucks a pie. Jim has been assured that getting your dick sucked feels like ‘warm apple pie’. So when he comes home to an empty house, and finds a warm apple pie on the kitchen table . . . what else can a po’ boy do? Porn wah-wah guitar kicks in. He fingers the pie first, just to build up the right amount of pleasurable audience disgust. Jim doesn’t simply put penis in pie out of curiosity. He climbs aboard and makes sweet, sweet love to the pie in the missionary position. Only one thing could be worse than Mom catching you. And that’s Dad catching you. ‘It’s not what it looks like,’ says Jim. It is, though. It’s a boy fucking a pie.
Which br
ings us to the other best thing about American Pie (apart from the way Buffy star Hannigan says the words, ‘This one time? In band camp? . . . ’), Eugene Levy as Jim’s dad, Noah Levenstein. After so many Bad Dads, you’ll be pleased to know that Noah is lovely . . . and that’s the joke. He is a man so desperate to empathise with and support his son through his adolescent sexual traumas that he buys him porn, conspires to keep the pie incident quiet, and says and does precisely the most embarrassing thing that a teenage boy can imagine a parent saying at every available opportunity, like ‘Jim . . . I wanna talk to you about masturbation . . . ’. This scene, which goes on to feature the key lines above, is a gem, as Levy’s well-meaning male bonding bounces off Biggs’s skin-crawling embarrassment, and every far-too-late parental sex talk you ever received passes in front of your eyes. Still, when Noah is stuck with a kid who agrees to put his first conquest on webcam and then accidentally sends the link to everyone at school before doing a sexy dance and then popping his load before anything happens – twice – one can only forgive Dad for doing his best.
Everybody eventually gets what they want, though not necessarily with the girl or in the way that they expected. Stifler, being the main sexist tool, gets the ultimate punishment when Paul – who is a neat piss-take of Andrew McCarthy’s teen yuppie in Pretty In Pink (see here) – cops off with his mother. The boys all learn a valuable lesson. Although the owners of the franchise and the stars of the show didn’t. After all those crap sequels and spin-offs, get ready in 2012 for . . . American Pie: Reunion, from the writers of Harold And Kumar Get The Munchies! I wish I was joking.
Stranded at the Drive-In Page 44
