I Killed The Teen Dream. Deal With it - Jawbreaker (1999)
I wasn’t really expecting multiple posts in a row to be about what could be called “classic” films (I call them that, shut the fuck up.) But Covid-related lock-down sure does trigger a desire to spend your time thinking about old content and, perhaps more importantly, wondering why the fuck you love it so much.
So with that in mind, I decided a couple of weeks ago that it was time to re-watch Jawbreaker and wonder if it’s still as lovably rogue as I remember?
In some ways, it is.
But in many more ways, it isn’t: here is a film that I loved so much as a teenager that I bought the soundtrack, the DVD and watched it multiple times. Pretty sure I would lend both to anyone who would borrow.
Looking at all of this 20 years later, those things are just a bit different; the film doesn’t really stand up to what I remembered (or wanted to remember from it.) But because I’m old and grown up now (well…sort of), I can also see exactly what had drawn me in, and I can see that, in a completely new fashion, I can get my head around what I loved (and yeah, still love about the film.)
Unsurprisingly, as with most of my content and thoughts of late, I’ve looked at things in a very camp and queer perspective; it’s not quite the intention, but sometimes, just ends up coming up, maybe in an attempt to make up for my misunderstood brain and emotions of a guy in his mid-teens in Ireland who hasn’t even began to figure out his sexuality or place in the world.
Cos, y’know, teens don’t and shouldn’t have to figure those things out.
Watching Jawbreaker now, I can’t help but feel like that is sort of the point of this film, that adulting and the associated “responsibilities” don’t blend particularly well with the sex and drugs and rock and roll life that a teenager wants and sees for themselves. That’s a point that I can honestly say I didn’t get when first loving this film, and watching and writing this now through a much older lens, I’m seeing this in a completely different fashion.
Liz Purr (Charlotte Ayanna) is the teen dream, the perfectly popular (and popularly perfect) girl in her high-school who is loved and respected by all. She also doesn’t get any lines in this film, and barely any scenes, given that she’s killed in the opening when friends Courtney (Rose McGowan), Marcie (Julie Benz) and Julie (Rebecca Gayheart) arrive at her house. It’s Liz’s birthday, and in a playful teenage hazing ritual, the girls have decided to tie her up (with a jawbreaker in her mouth) to bring her out for breakfast.
Given my memories of watching this film, this was just a fun, scene-setting moment to create your story; the film is, after all, less than 90 minutes long, so it’s got to get there quickly. So, in some ways, we’re basically looking at Clueless (released 1995) with a bit more sex and violence. And a lot less Paul Rudd (unfortunately.)
But watching these scenes in a different (well, slightly more modern( world, there’s a hugely significant and very uncomfortable threat there; the scenes in which masked and hooded figures attack Liz in her bed, leaving her screaming (or trying to scream) in the boot of a car are made all the more uncomfortable because Liz hasn’t even been introduced. This is the type of scene that introduces villains, threat and monsters in a horror film, not a teen comedy, however dark; with that in mind, it is somewhat appropriate that Liz’s “friends”, the main characters of our film, make their initial appearances as faceless, powerful beings, capable of destruction through the simplest and most meaningless of ways,
Like schoolkids can do. With emotional power and word.
That’s right, kids; things are getting deep.
The girls attend school later that day, where Liz’s absence is noted. As her besties, they are asked to bring homework assignments to Liz, but when they forget, the teacher asks the class nerd Fern (Judy Greer) to bring these to Liz’s house. There, she finds our “heroes” trying to deal with Liz’s dead body and, in attempt to buy Fern’s silence, Corutney offers her a make-over and a path into popularity at the school as Vylette.
On one level this feels like a forced attempt to create drama while getting things moving quickly in the film, establishing a threat political and cultural status quo within the school.
But, again, that’s taken until my mid-30s and writing this very piece to make sense of this: these girls are so vacant and selfish that they are completely capable of forgetting that they have killed their best friend earlier that day, and such a thought turns my then camp, silly viewings of Jawbreaker into some really uncomfortable cultural analysis of shallow popularity, not to mention the film’s take on teenage life, a life that ends up including sex and drugs.
It’s only after adult me has gotten annoyed at the film’s vacant and horrible characters that I started to notice how it’s addressing these in a far more clever and intelligent way than I ever gave it credit for. Jawbreaker goes out of its way to establish its high-school setting, but also to call attention to how very fake that setting is, with all of its main characters played by actors well into their 20s, and putting those characters into a very adult world of sex, sexuality and everything that goes with that.
That behaviour is fitting for any American-based teenage drama; let’s not pretend that these cliches aren’t strongly present in most teenage high-school fiction, especially those with a lean towards horror and comedy and camp. (Sure, some of that might come from the fact that most of us this side of the Atlantic don’t get to drive to or from school, and also have to bring books and bags and do homework.) But it’s also as if the very production of the film film wants its viewers to be aware of this discrepancy, even if only to disregard it a moment later.
As such, it feels like there is some definite intention behind the casting of the film, most notably being Rose McGowan who had appeared in a similar (albeit far more likeable) role in Scream, released 1996, A film that equally wanted its audience to see its teenage characters in very adult-situations.
I’m pretty sure, however, that one of my main reasons that I wanted to watch Jawbreaker was because of Julie Benz, whom I’d been watching play Darla in Buffy The Vampire Slayer (started in 1997). There had been something that drew me to Darla’s character; the teenage me kind of fancied her, while the adult me knows he definitely didn’t, instead seeing her, and the very act of vampirism within the world of Buffy as camp and queer challenges of identity, society and patriarchy. All of that is a very different post for another time, but I choose to believe that at least some of the casting for this film was intentionally directed towards audiences and viewers who maybe didn’t have internet access or the wherewithal to recognise exactly why they were being drawn to this media.
Similarly on that rabbit-hole is Marilyn Manson in something of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo that is super-important to the breathless speed and quality of the plot, with Courtney posing as a sexually active Liz in order to paint Manson as her murderer. It’s a scene that plays with both the headfuckery of age and meta-narrative within the film, with Courtney-as-Liz and the un-named Manson hooking up in a dive-bar, an act that goes out of its way to destroy Liz’s pure and virginal reputation, followed by a somewhat graphic sex scene. There’s no body-parts on show to challenge the film’s rating, but the film makes the point of showing Courtney taking it from behind on top of Liz’s bed, while her corpse lies underneath. My meta-narrative fun, another part that drew me to this film, is the knowledge that McGowan and Manson were in a relationship at the time, and she appears in some of his songs and videos around Mechanical Animals, which still remains one of my favourite EVER albums.
That’s not McGowan’s only sex scene in the film, another featuring Dane (Ethan Erickson, who can also be seen in a couple of episodes of Buffy around the same time.) By their powers combined, Courtney is determined that she and Dane be prom queen and king (especially now that Liz is out of the way), and the viewer is treated to another sex scene featuring both of them with an ice-lolly. McGowan’s costume and the setting of the scene are still somewhat vanilla, relying more on implication and a queer gaze as she (and the viewer) are treated to shirtless Erickson in his boxers, playing with said ice-lolly.
It’s a scene that certainly would have triggered a “fuck, that guy’s hot” response from teenage me. But looking back now, I see both of these sex scenes through a very queer lens and have enough understanding to see that such was the intent from director Darren Stein,by not only playing with his female characters and the power that they have, but also by addressing a power that is normally possessed by the male gaze towards the female body.
Similarly, playing with my aforementioned issues regarding the ages of the characters (and their actors), the film is somewhat lacking and challenging with its senses of authority and power, especially when utilising sex and sexuality. Within this world, there is not greater power than Courtney; while we get brief interactions with some other parents, Courtney is a singular entity, and is not challenged by any other being, whether the school’s authority figure Ms Sherwood (Carol Keane) or our throwaway police detective Vera Cruz, as played by Pam Grier. Since I’ve mentioned time-frames and other appearances for other actors in this film, it seems fitting to point out that Grier’s career had received something of a refresh a few years previously in Jackie Brown. Aside from being introduced as a single authority figure that might be able to challenge Courtney, Cruz is an unimportant character and somewhat irrelevant to the conclusion of our high-school narrative, one that goes out of its way to suggest that such authority is wholly irrelevant in this world.
After all, Courtney can only be taken down by her former sister Julie, working alongside Vylette and randomly introduced and wholle unimportant artsy boyfriend Zack. Within the world of Jawbreaker, Julie is nearly wholly irrelevant; sure, she’s the viewers’ conscience, and an opportunity to show and prove as such the mean girls can’t win. But what parts Julie plays in this narrative are painfully boring in any sort of queer or camp narrative, and she is incredibly uninteresting because of that. As a younger viewer, I saw her as the hero, with a joyous win over the “mean girls” (That’s not out until 2004.) Through camp, middle-aged eyes, I see Julie as a boring waste of space in this narrative, one that might only be there to straighten up a queer narrative and make things more accessible for a wider market.
It is somewhat fitting that Courtney’s demise is not one of arrest or prison, but one in which her social position is challenged as she is crowned prom queen while revealing that she was responsible for Liz’s death; the film derives its finale, not from a place of justice or morality, but in showing the students turning on Courtney and treating her as a social monster rather than, y’know, a fucking killer.
It’s taken twenty fucking years for me to figure why I love this film; it’s more than (just) a good soundtrack, a tongue-in-cheek script and actresses that drew me in in some way, it’s what all of these things mean, both within Jawbreaker and the “normal” world outside of it. They mean that sometimes the pretty girls can be the villain and the hot shirtless guy doesn’t have to be important within the narrative; that the soundtrack can still be fucking amazing two decades later; that Rose McGowan is still fierce as fuck.
And, above all else, sometimes the villains do have all the fun, and there is nothing wrong with enjoying that.