Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies. Hadley Freeman

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СКАЧАТЬ partly why it has proven to be so much more timeless than any of Hughes’s other eighties teen movies: it is simply more original. Moreover, it is a much more satisfying fantasy for all the loner geeks who, one suspects, made and continue to make up a significant portion of Hughes’s audience.

      The cinematic stereotypes about high school kids and what happens to them after graduation are more well trodden than the taped-up glasses of the class dork beneath the foot of the school bully: popular kids are shallow tyrants whose social success will peak in their school years; dorks are sweet and smart and they will achieve eventual vindication. And, like the previous example about women being universally resistant to men’s charms, this lazy convention almost undoubtedly has some of its roots in the autobiographies of male screenwriters who were, by and large, high school dorks. If Hollywood had an epitaph it would be The Revenge of the Nerds.

      Some cool kids may indeed peak in high school and spend the rest of their lives ‘thinking about Glory Days’, as Bruce Springsteen once put it, a tad gloatingly, and as epitomised by the character of Billy, played by Rob Lowe, in St Elmo’s Fire, doomed after college to a lifetime of wearing a bandana and making nonsensical speeches about the cosmos to Demi Moore (no wonder he gets depressed). But like all generalisations, this one is ridiculous.

      As I’ve already said, I was by no means a popular kid (only in movies do kids with names like Hadley or Ferris attain mass popularity as teens), so this defence of popular kids is not some poorly disguised self-justification. But rather, it’s just to point out that this trope, aimed at geeky, unconfident, oversensitive teenagers like the one I once was, is false consolation and that is worse than no consolation because it is a lie.

      While some kids (and grown-ups, sadly) attain social success through bullying, luck of genetics, generosity with sexual favours and simple sporting prowess, most do it through two factors that are simultaneously far more complicated and far more simple: self-confidence and random chance. As to the first of these, yes, self-confidence in school is probably much easier to come by if you are excellent at sports; it is harder to attain if your only talents are – oh, let’s say, just off the top of my head – not needing to wear a bra until you’re eighteen and knowing all the words to the theme song of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. But it’s the confidence that brings the coolness, not the athletic ability.

      Curtis Sittenfeld’s brilliant first novel, Prep, is the literary equivalent of Ferris Bueller in regard to this subject and also, come to think of it, in giving the characters some truly extraordinary names. So although some of the cool kids in her book are awful, the main ones – the unforgettably monikered Cross Sugarman and Gates Medowski – are simply blessed with preternatural self-confidence. All that holds back Prep’s protagonist, Lee, is her painfully heightened self-consciousness, and the fact that this novel became a bestseller suggests widespread recognition of the nugget of truth in the novel’s narrative.

      Yet for every Prep, there are about a million Mean Girls and these movies, however well intended, reinforce the rigidity of the school caste system because they teach geeky kids that there is no chance of them ever crossing that social barrier, certainly not without the very high risk of mockery and possible physical assault. The best they can hope for is eventual professional success, which smacks oddly of fanatical religious doctrine: suffer now, reap the benefits later. Becoming president of a computer company, enjoying seventy-two virgins in heaven – you say tomayto, I say tomahto.

      These movies also suggest that being an outcast at school endows one with moral superiority as an adult, which explains the cliché of successful actresses and models (Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Aniston …), claiming in interviews that they were geeks in high school, a claim that is usually followed by an insistence that, honestly, they just can’t resist French fries.

      Prep, like Napoleon Dynamite – the other side to the Ferris Bueller coin – was brave enough to point out that, actually, not all dorks are adorable martyrs with encyclopedic knowledge about indie music and inherent academic genius. They are humans. This means some are nice and some are not and some are president of the physics club and some don’t know how to spell physics.

      But again, these are the exceptions. The more common approach is to insinuate that the school outcasts are the ones who will grow up better, richer and happier.¹⁷

      In other words, these movies are saying that, actually, it DOES matter what group you were in at school, and it apparently matters even more than the bitchiest queen bee even realised in her heyday because its importance lasts beyond graduation day.

      To buy into the idea that it matters a jot what social set anyone belonged to in school, and that it has any bearing on what that person was like at school and is like now completely nullifies any success you get in later life that you can flash at your next school reunion: you’ve already let the bullies win.

       3. You have to be the boring woman to get the guy

      Of all the film tropes, this is the one that consistently makes me the saddest. Not because I believe it (any more), but because it has ruined my enjoyment of so many otherwise great movies. I call this trope Tootsie’s Law.

      Now, Tootsie is a movie that is, in a lot of ways, amazing. This 1982 film cheerfully and fearlessly overturned a lot of received Hollywood wisdom such as, most obviously, that audiences would be repulsed by a movie featuring a man dressed as a woman. Even Some Like It Hot went black and white because director Billy Wilder feared that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon’s make-up was just de trop, and this from a movie that ends with Lemmon sailing off into the sunset with a man – IN 1959.

      Far from worrying whether mainstream audiences could cope with the combination of foundation and stubble, Tootsie opens with close-ups of Dustin Hoffman putting on make-up and gleefully carries on from there, peaking perhaps with Hoffman standing in his girdle in one scene and debating with Bill Murray whether a certain dress makes him look ‘hippy’. I love this movie.

      One thing I don’t love about it, though, is Hoffman’s character Michael’s love life. For those who haven’t seen this film, first, I envy the pleasure awaiting you as you lose your Tootsie virginity. Second, I shall explain.

      Relatively early in the movie, Michael sleeps with his long-term friend, Sandy, played by lovely Terri Garr, who is thirty-four, a struggling actress and hilarious, and afterwards he treats her – as he treats all women he sleeps with – like crap.

      Meanwhile, Michael has recently got a job on a soap opera by pretending he is an actress as opposed to an actor and there meets one of the stars of the show, Julie, played by Jessica Lange. Julie is in a relationship with the lecherous director (played, of course, by Dabney Coleman), has an annoying breathy voice, a changeable southern accent and, damningly, is not funny, interesting or smart – in fact, she herself says she is dumb, and she’s right about that (every woman knows you should never get involved with a character played by Dabney Coleman). She is also not the least bit interested in Michael, mainly because she thinks he’s a woman. Needless to say, Michael falls in love with her, treats Sandy even worse and the movie ends (spoiler alert: but you might have already guessed this) with the rather implausible suggestion that gold-digging, breathy-voiced Julie will now have a relationship with the broke and chronically out-of-work Michael who, for the past few months, has been dressing like Mrs Doubtfire.

      I appreciate that questioning the credibility of the ending of a film that is based on the premise of no one in America noticing that a high-profile TV actress is Dustin Hoffman in a dress might seem like protesting that Wizard of Oz is not realistic because monkeys can’t fly. But the point is not the realism but the overall trope, the one that says the boring pretty woman gets the man СКАЧАТЬ