’90s Teen Party Movies and the Golden Age™ of Feminist Film?
Durga: Cher’s insistence on “maintaining social order,” as Sara puts it, is in some ways the crux of every nineties teen movie party scene. Navigating it and maintaining it both required a few tenets. Namely: “the makeover.” Is “the makeover” feminist? Was it a move backwards? I’ve always loved makeover scenes because transformation is such a power move. I do recognize that in a high school ecosystem, changing yourself in order to be seen by less smart people, to fit in and traffic in whatever’s temporarily cool is probably not the most powerful tactic and can end up disastrously, but I’ve always enjoyed the grand entrance that follows the makeover. Entrances are magical—and yes, often supremely silly.
Like in She’s All That. The party is where Laney Boggs premieres her new look: short hair curled out at the tips so her head mimics a Lego character, paired with a platform-heeled outfit that’s very late-nineties dELiA*s. She looks doll-like, i.e. unsure of herself. She’s been Eliza Doolittled. Of course, Laney trips and falls into Freddie Prinze Jr.’s hands as she walks down the stairs. And of course, at the party the queen bee—a temper tantrum–prone girl named Taylor—drops a drink down Laney’s dress. And of course, Laney trips and falls againwhile running out of the party. While nineties teen movies were the golden age for the anti-cool-girl—or rather, a stage for whip-smart heroines with so-called bad attitudes—they were also rife with makeovers, which I can’t yet decide are an erasure of self or a bettering? Or simply just fun? Or wildly messed up and I’m still embarrassingly blinded by the opening of Sixpence None The Richer’s “Kiss Me.”
Sara: The makeover was definitely a power move. I can’t decide if it’s even an identity change—I always feel like it’s a physical change paired with an attitude change. And there is that familiar trajectory: the nerdy/tomboy girl is now pretty and she gets more attention. Soon, she abandons her crew—the people who accepted her for who she was. But she still feels bad! You can see her cringe when her old friends ignore her or if the popular kids make fun of them. Or she has to force herself to ignore all this. I think in a lot of ways, the girl still identifies with her old friends and that’s because she’s just performing an identity for the popular kids, which emphasizes how vapid and superficial they are.
The thing is, I can’t decide if it’s feminist, but it brings up these points: 1) in order to be popular, all you have to do is comb your hair/ wash out the Tai-red henna; set it; put on some makeup; etc. etc. 2) the things that make you a nerd are your glasses and love of learning. Ultimately, the makeover results in a blowout fight with the girl’s former friends: they tell her she’s changed and ask what’s gotten into her. Who is she? Obviously, this brings up identity, but these girls haven’t really changed drastically on the inside.
The makeover, at least the way it’s crafted, is not supposed to be a good thing. I mean Cher even says that with Tai, she’s created a monster. Also! When Cher decides she herself needs a makeover, the only good one, it seems, is a makeover of her soul, as she puts it. But here’s the thing: is it ultimately not feminist to be smart and pretty? I feel we’re forced to choose between the two, and that the choice is already made for us.
Durga: But maybe it’s okay to create monsters? I think monsters trump the binary of smart and pretty and instead adopt power as the ultimate makeover. Maybe I’m just living in a post Nicki [Minaj] “Monster”-verse era where I think it’s important to fully inhabit all of our many contradictions and missteps, and if doing so, we as women become so-called monsters, why not?
Another thing I wanted to bring up returns to the original question: Were nineties teen party movies the golden age of feminist movies? The problem with talking about nineties teens movies now in 2014 is that at the time, sure, they were awakening for me—but I never fully associated with them or “related” because of one big problem they all shared: they were entirely peopled with white girls. The characters’ problems and personal triumphs were ones that I experienced through a white-girl lens, and so at a deep remove that I wasn’t even aware of. These movies were peopled by typecasting, and even though there was the occasional black best friend or boyfriend, we cannot talk about a golden age of teen feminist movies if those movies were devoid of characters of colour. In that way, for me, these films were simply pure entertainment.
Sara, Anne, and I did a roundtable for Cléo's most recent PARTY! issue
The whole discussion HERE
