Why 10 Things I Hate About You is a teen movie for our times

“You’re just too good to be true…” Heath Ledger said it him­self as he ser­e­nad­ed Julia Stiles with the Frankie Val­li hit, ​‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’, from the bleach­ers in direc­tor Gil Junger’s 1999 Shake­speare spin-off 10 Things I Hate About You. His char­ac­ter, Patrick Verona, is a tor­tured, brood­ing bad boy with curled locks and a cig­a­rette per­ma­nent­ly perched between his lips. He is Pad­ua High School’s rebel with­out a cause, too good to be true and yet eter­nal­ly cement­ed in our hearts as the ulti­mate teen crush. The movie is a cel­e­bra­tion of the swoon­ing, juve­nile glo­ry of sim­ply being young.

The twist­ed sis­ter dynam­ic of 1996’s The Craft, about a cam­pus coven of witch­es and their pro­cure­ment of the curi­ous new girl, and the mur­der­ous high school of hor­rors in anoth­er ​’96 offer­ing, Scream, gave the impres­sion that the decade for Amer­i­can ado­les­cents was mere­ly an end­less, bloody cas­cade of near-death expe­ri­ences. 10 Things I Hate About You brought us back safe­ly to the famil­iar com­forts of the pre­ced­ing era’s cin­e­mat­ic hero, John Hugh­es, and his 1985 film The Break­fast Club, with its lov­able band of stereo­types embrac­ing their dif­fer­ences in Sat­ur­day morn­ing detention.

Cru­cial­ly, those films stood up and showed their respec­tive brat packs mak­ing pro­gres­sive choic­es, against the grain of triv­i­al­i­ty that too often sur­rounds notions of youth­ful tor­ment and with added pangs of first love and anti-par­ent activism. 10 Things I Hate About You, just like The Break­fast Club before it, places a stronger empha­sis on a truth­ful and admirable por­tray­al of ado­les­cence for view­ers to angst-along to, steer­ing well away from demon­ic, blood-soaked trauma.

The film marked the tran­si­tion from small to big screen for a young Joseph Gor­don-Levitt, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly estab­lished him­self in the extrater­res­tri­al com­e­dy series 3^rd Rock from the Sun. Heath Ledger also grad­u­at­ed from TV, pay­ing his Aussie act­ing dues in soap opera peren­ni­al Home and Away. Gordon-Levitt’s char­ac­ter Cameron pines for Bian­ca Strat­ford (Lar­isa Oleynik), the dain­ty dar­ling, while Ledger’s Verona chas­es her old­er, grungi­er sis­ter Kat (Julia Stiles) for Cameron’s ben­e­fit and to bypass the strict dat­ing rules of the girls’ father.

The film’s intro­duc­tion of these young stars shows its fresh take on rep­re­sen­ta­tions teenage life on screen and its will­ing­ness to fuse con­tem­po­rary and clas­si­cal ideas. Just as a cast of new­com­ers was favoured over a clutch of well-known stars, the punchy fem­i­nist char­ac­ters they por­tray high­light a clever reimag­in­ing of Shakespeare’s famed source text ​‘The Tam­ing of the Shrew’.

The play tells the clas­si­cal­ly prob­lem­at­ic tale of Kathe­ri­na, a head­strong and opin­ion­at­ed woman who must be tamed and qui­etened by her prospec­tive hus­band, Petru­chio. The film’s ​“shrew” how­ev­er is Kat, with a list of likes that includes ​“Thai food, fem­i­nist prose and angry girl music of the indie-rock per­sua­sion.” She asks her Eng­lish pro­fes­sor if the class can study Char­lotte Bron­të or Simone de Beau­voir and under­stands that, ​“in this soci­ety, being male and an ass­hole makes you wor­thy of our time”, a sen­ti­ment that rings truer than ever today. Her anguish is not triv­ial; she wants to be chal­lenged and chal­lenge oth­ers and her boy trou­ble revolves around guid­ing Verona away from his reck­less image to become the heart­throb with a copy of Bet­ty Friedan’s The Fem­i­nine Mystique.

None of Kat’s fem­i­nist fire is lost in the process and by the end of the film she is ready for her new life at the lib­er­al arts col­lege, Sarah Lawrence. Her sis­ter Bian­ca devel­ops in her own stride too, emerg­ing as a strong and inde­pen­dent young woman away from the social pres­sures of high school and the strug­gles of choos­ing between her Sketch­ers and Pra­da backpack.

A key ele­ment of the film’s lib­er­al agen­da is Mr Mor­gan (Daryl Mitchell), the black Eng­lish teacher keen to remind Kat of her own priv­i­lege. ​“I know how dif­fi­cult it must be for you to over­come all those years of upper mid­dle-class sub­ur­ban oppres­sion,” he quips. ​“Must be tough.” As Kat cam­paigns for her own caus­es, Mr Mor­gan must teach a com­plete­ly white cur­ricu­lum lack­ing any diver­si­ty. He is deri­sive towards the school’s obtuse jock and Kat’s tor­men­tor, Joey Don­ner (Andrew Kee­gan), but equal­ly can point out the issues in her priorities.

Their rela­tion­ship is an intrigu­ing state­ment made by the film and one that deserves recog­ni­tion for its broad-mind­ed­ness. 10 Things I Hate About You can and should be viewed as the ulti­mate teen movie, burst­ing through the hell­ish decade to say a lit­tle more about the empow­er­ing poten­tial of those defin­ing years. Yet it still man­ages to bring dra­ma back to a play­ful­ly roman­tic tone, ground­ing the film in the essen­tial youth dichoto­my of intense heartache and sheer, unadul­ter­at­ed fun. We could all do with hav­ing Kat Strat­fords and Mr Mor­gans around us, as well as a Patrick Verona or two, and should hope new gen­er­a­tions of teens find them as inspiring.