Sorry to sound like a horny 12-year-old boy, but Superbad is my favorite comedy of all time. I can recall every joke and detail from the movie, including my theater-going experience (I sat in the second row and my neck hurt the next day from craning to look up Jonah Hill’s nostrils). In Superbad, Seth (Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) were absolutely clueless about girls and sex, which struck a chord with teenage me, a girl who was curious also about sex, confused about friendship, and terrified of a romantic future.
That being said, I’ve also re-watched the movies numerous times in the last year and come to terms with how problematic it is; how many times it punches down at people of color, women, and queer people (Seth calling his best friend Fogel “Faggle” whenever he’s mad at him is proof enough of the movie’s underlying homophobic worldview.)
Twelve years after my favorite comedy’s release, Jonah Hill’s younger sister, Beanie Feldstein, stars in a movie reminiscent of the best parts of Superbad. Actually, Booksmart is better than Superbad, because it’s funny and led by two female characters, one of which is gay.
There have been a few loss-of-virginity comedies with a queer lead—I was wowed by Blockers last year, which featured Gideon Adlon as a closeted lesbian who enters a pact with her best friends to lose their virginity on prom night. Jamie Babbit’s But I’m A Cheerleader was a teen sex comedy, to be sure, but it was no blockbuster—in its opening weekend in 1999, the satirical indie about conversion therapy played in four theaters. Booksmart, which opens in 2000 theaters across the United States this weekend, takes a classic mainstream film format and completely reforms it. The teenage sex comedy has officially been queered.
In Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, the movie follows best friends Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Feldstein) on their last night of high school. Molly has the gutting realization that she and Amy wasted their high school years just studying, while everyone else studied and partied. So on the night before graduation, they agree to go to a house party and prove to their classmates that they are fun. One of the tenets of the agreement is that Amy has to hook up with a girl, something she hasn’t done before.
I’ve never seen a movie so bullheaded in its depictions of that cumbersome, awkward fumble through a teenage girl’s first encounter with lesbian sex. I was raised on a series of trash movies about sex and virginity; raunchy sex comedies of the aughts like the American Pie franchise, which defined an era of movies for teenagers. Movies like Not Another Teen Movie, Eurotrip, and a few years later, Superbad. The kind that begins with “This is our last chance to party as high school kids!” and end with a cringe-worthy tumble through sex firsts. It’s no wonder I was so deeply closeted and repressed until my twenties—everything I knew about sex and sexuality, I learned from movies that were openly chauvinistic and grotesquely anti-gay.
Homophobia was one of the hallmarks of Steve Stifler’s personality, one of the more memorable characters in the series of American Pie films. With all his gay jokes, which were mostly aimed at men, but also at Jessica (played by Natasha Lyonne), the message was clear to teenagers in the ’90s and 2000s: Gay men shouldn’t enjoy sex or the pursuit of such, but rather, they should be shamed for it. And women? Well, women wouldn’t pursue sex with another woman according to these movies—lesbianism was either wholly invisible or treated as an invalid, emotional ID. In American Pie 2, Stifler and his friends posit that two female neighbors are lesbians because they live together, and he tries to get them to kiss while he and his friends watch, and a group of men listen in on walkie talkies. The women were not lesbians, simply roommates who make it clear they’ve never been intimate before but find the scenario humorous and fun, not unlike most lesbian porn made by men. In “American Pie 2,” lesbianism is only kosher if Stifler and co. get to witness it in a moment of hypersexual comedy.
