Not Another Teen Movie is a f**king masterpiece | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Not Anoth­er Teen Movie is a f**king masterpiece

28 Apr 2015

Words by David Ehrlich

Man in a black and red jacket standing in front of a framed image on the wall.
Man in a black and red jacket standing in front of a framed image on the wall.
Would Chris Evans have been cast as Cap­tain Amer­i­ca had he not starred in this maligned teen classic?

The last 10 years have seen Chris Evans become one of the most famous movie stars in the world, but the ungod­ly box office suc­cess he’s enjoyed as a cog in the Mar­vel machine amounts to lit­tle more than a gild­ed con­so­la­tion prize for a career that peaked as it soon as it began. For­tu­nate­ly for Evans, he doesn’t seem to know that.

In a recent inter­view with the Wrap, Evans was asked to reflect on Not Anoth­er Teen Movie, the 2001 com­e­dy that pro­vid­ed his big break. Self-dep­re­cat­ing but care­ful not to sound ungrate­ful, Evans laughed at the thought of his first lead­ing role: The movie had me stick a banana in my ass, it wasn’t exact­ly some high­brow art.”

Both parts of that state­ment are at least par­tial­ly false. In the scene to which he refers, a gen­der-swapped par­o­dy of Ali Larter’s icon­ic whipped cream biki­ni” from Var­si­ty Blues, the banana appears to be affixed to his ass, not lodged in it. Also — and more impor­tant­ly — Not Anoth­er Teen Movie may not be high­brow, but it is most def­i­nite­ly art.

Stop lying to us, Chris. Stop lying… to yourself.

Not Anoth­er Teen Movie is a fuck­ing masterpiece.

Spoofs, by their very nature, are always look­ing at the past over their shoul­der. Their humour appeals to audi­ences of the present by trac­ing an iron­ic dis­tance between them and the absur­di­ties that they used to accept at face val­ue. Satire has always been how cul­ture sheds its skin, and par­o­dies are an inte­gral part of film his­to­ry thanks to their unique abil­i­ty to help us for­give our­selves for the silli­ness that we once took seriously.

An indul­gent­ly sharp send-up of the hor­mon­al epics that helped shape the 90s (and the John Hugh­es clas­sics that helped shape them), Joel Gallen’s Not Anoth­er Teen Movie was shot in the ear­ly days of 2001 but not unleashed into the­atres until Decem­ber of that year. The con­tent of the film may not have been affect­ed by 911, but the grim tim­ing of its release helps to clar­i­fy what makes it spe­cial, and near­ly the last of its kind (Gallen’s next direc­to­r­i­al effort would be a TV spe­cial called Amer­i­ca: A Trib­ute to Heroes).

Work­ing from a blithe­ly solip­sis­tic premise that seemed like an echo from a more insu­lar time, and approach­ing it with a degree of iron­ic detach­ment that wouldn’t become com­mon­place until a few years lat­er, Not Anoth­er Teen Movie doesn’t just mock the tropes that made the 90s such a gold­en age of teen rom-coms, it also exhibits a very real inter­est in under­stand­ing their val­ue. As with so many oth­er great things, it begins with 1999’s She’s All That, the Pla­ton­ic Ide­al of high school caste comedies.

Chris Evans is only Cap­tain Amer­i­ca because he was so charm­ing­ly sar­don­ic as John­ny Storm, and Chris Evans was only John­ny Storm because he was so charm­ing­ly sar­don­ic as Jake Wyler. A less slack-jawed pho­to­copy of Prinze’s Zack Siler, Jake is the most pop­u­lar boy in school, and the scene in the wealthy white jock is first intro­duced uses a bril­liant visu­al gag to locate the film some­where between David Zuck­er and Abbas Kiarosta­mi. Saun­ter­ing down the hall­way amidst a sym­pho­ny of ador­ing ADR (“He’s so pop­u­lar,” one girl coos from off-screen), Jake stops to admire a framed pho­to­graph of him­self, only to walk clos­er to his lock­er where he finds a framed pho­to­graph of him­self admir­ing a framed pho­to­graph of himself.

If spoofs tend to embrace self-reflex­iv­i­ty, Not Anoth­er Teen Movie slop­pi­ly tongue kiss­es it from the very begin­ning: the film’s first scene par­o­dies the web­cam bit from Amer­i­can Pie, catch­ing the repul­sive Janey Brig­gs (“She’s got paint on her over­alls! What is that!?”) as her dad walks in on her mas­tur­bat­ing to an impec­ca­bly recre­at­ed ver­sion of a scene from She’s All That.

Not Anoth­er Teen Movie leans into the fact that the films it’s mock­ing are already absurd, that aware­ness allow­ing its best gags to land with the sil­ly dimen­sions of an inbred MC Esch­er draw­ing. Not since the rewind scene in Space­balls has a spoof so glee­ful­ly called atten­tion to its tan­gled rela­tion­ship with the tar­get of its jokes.

That meta streak colours every inch of the film, from the foot­ball jer­seys labeled Extra,” to the face­tious blasts of gener­ic rock music that fill even the briefest tran­si­tions between scenes. But it’s Gallen’s cast­ing that stares deep­est into the look­ing glass: Mol­ly Ringwald’s late-game cameo as a wise flight atten­dant is just the tip of the ice­berg in a film that also includes the late Paul Glea­son step­ping back into his dis­ci­pli­nar­i­an role from The Break­fast Club, and – most piv­otal­ly – Ron Lester repris­ing his part as Var­si­ty Blues’ tragi­com­ic Bil­ly Bob, his Reg­gie Ray vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal to the obese, con­cus­sion-prone foot­ball play­er he played in that po-faced teen drama.

Not Anoth­er Teen Movie is fetishis­ti­cal­ly dense with hilar­i­ous details, and one of its best is the school’s sta­di­um score­board, in which a counter has been installed to keep track of the con­cus­sions Reg­gie has left before he dies. It’s one of four dif­fer­ent jokes that can be found in the same cut­away shot, and it’s a gag that sets up this immor­tal exchange between the head coach (Ed Lauter) and his assis­tant (H Jon Ben­jamin) fol­low­ing Reggie’s lat­est injury:

Coach: Can he play?

Assis­tant: He’s in a coma.

Coach: Answer my ques­tion! Can. He. Play?

Assis­tant: I don’t even think he can breathe!

Mike Ben­der, Adam Jay Epstein, Andrew Jacob­son, Phil Beau­man, and Bud­dy Johnson’s script (whew!) loves to make sub­text text, and text into giant signs. The invis­i­ble truths that back­bone high school life are fore­ground­ed until they become the stuff at the sur­face. This is not your typ­i­cal high school,” the ori­en­ta­tion guide (Josh Rad­nor, in his finest per­for­mance) tells a crop of new stu­dents as he leads them around the cam­pus on the first day of class. Here at John Hugh­es… you’re accept­ed for who you are, not for who you hang out with.”

In the back­ground, a ban­ner on the out­side of the build­ing reads: Wel­come, prospec­tive cliques.” It’s a throw­away joke in a film that’s stitched togeth­er from throw­away jokes, but as the beefi­er boys of the group fall into for­ma­tion (their let­ter­man jack­ets spelling out J‑O-C-K‑S), Not Anoth­er Teen Movie effec­tive­ly con­flates the short­hand of high school social groups with the com­forts and lim­i­ta­tions of nar­ra­tive genres.

The char­ac­ters are con­stant­ly iden­ti­fy­ing them­selves (“I’m just the token black guy”), but the world is so lucid­ly cod­i­fied that their pro­nounce­ments are redun­dant. We know who these peo­ple are before they have the chance to tell us, in part because the immac­u­late cast always lets you know that they’re in on the joke.

Evans dis­plays the kind of com­ic tim­ing that mon­ey can’t buy, a les­son that Mar­vel had to learn the hard way (Joss Whe­don had two whole movies to catch that kind of light­ning in a bot­tle, and he still couldn’t match the genius of Jake Wyler’s aside about a Mex­i­can fin­ger painter). He’s the ulti­mate WASP in a place so full of them that the high school has adopt­ed the insect as its mas­cot (their winged logo adorned with a sweater tied around its fibrous lit­tle neck).

Else­where, Eric Chris­t­ian Olsen nails the vac­u­ous arro­gance that made Paul Walker’s ear­ly char­ac­ters into such win­some­ly harm­less jerks (“Whoa, I didn’t say any­thing about a bet”), Mia Kir­sh­n­er slight­ly adjusts the vol­ume on Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Cru­el Inten­tions sex­pot until she becomes the ghoul­ish dis­tor­tion of a male teen fan­ta­sy, and Randy Quaid – play­ing Janey’s father as an alco­holic Viet­nam vet with PTSD – almost cer­tain­ly didn’t know he was in this movie until he start­ed receiv­ing his SAG resid­u­als a few years later.

Gallen got his actors to com­mit to their parts with an inten­si­ty that would make Daniel Day-Lewis blush (or it would, had Day-Lewis not played the plas­tic bag that stars in the unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly con­trived Amer­i­can Beau­ty joke). Thanks to the imme­di­a­cy of the per­for­mances, a movie spoof­ing a sto­ry about the upward mobil­i­ty of a dis­gust­ing teenage wilde­beest (“She’s got glass­es and a pony­tail!”) becomes a bit­ing satire about the rigid­i­ty of social roles. Even Jake’s des­per­ate last-minute dash to stop Janey at the air­port is locked into a script­ed social pro­to­col that no one has the pow­er to break. Here’s how Jake explains things to Ricky Lip­man, the best friend who’s been in front of Janey’s face the whole time:

Ricky: I’m the best friend, and I have been in front of her face the whole time, and she just… hasn’t real­ly realised it yet, but she will.

Jake: Well, I’m the reformed cool guy, who’s learned the error of his ways. She’s gonna for­give me for my mis­takes, and realise that I real­ly love her.

Ricky Lip­man: …Dammit, that’s true.

It’s enough to evoke the bit in Robin Hood: Men in Tights when every­one has to con­sult their scripts dur­ing the archery con­test to con­firm that Robin gets anoth­er shot. In Roger Ebert’s oth­er­wise unfor­tu­nate review of Not Anoth­er Teen Movie, he wrote that the film was like, The soup that heats itself.” That’s exact­ly what spoofs were all about before the Fried­berg and Seltzer night­mare fac­to­ry turned them into a ran­dom assem­bly line of decom­pos­ing pop cul­ture ref­er­ences. Not Anoth­er Teen Movie recog­nis­es what Meet the Spar­tans, Vam­pires Suck, and all the rest did not: its mere exis­tence is the only pop cul­ture ref­er­ence that it needs.

An effec­tive par­o­dy will put a mora­to­ri­um on a form of film­mak­ing, and the best of them will find a way to lov­ing­ly eulo­gise the same tropes that once brought their audi­ence some joy. Not Anoth­er Teen Movie may have been titled in order to sound like a threat, but it lingers like a promise. After Gallen’s film, there couldn’t be anoth­er teen movie. Yes, there would be many more movies about teens, and most of them would adopt some of the same tropes that Gallen had already lam­pooned and laid to rest.

But Mean Girls, Easy A, The Duff, and the rest of their mil­len­ni­al ilk would be irrev­o­ca­bly dis­tanced from the films that paved their way, pick­ing at the scraps that Not Anoth­er Teen Movie had left behind. What­ev­er their oth­er virtues, all of those come­dies were left with no choice but to explic­it­ly address the anthro­pol­o­gy of high school, cor­nered into run­ning down the clock on a gen­er­a­tion that had seen itself in the mir­ror and could nev­er for­get the sight of its own reflection.

And now the moment every pop­u­lar guy who’s made a bet to turn a rebel­lious girl into prom queen has been wait­ing for:

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