‘Jawbreaker’ at 25: Trying again on the traditional teen comedy’s HBIC

The place my bitches at? No, however significantly – the place the heck are they at? Lengthy an important ingredient within the frothy mocktail of the teenager highschool film, the imply ladies of films like Heathers and the unique Imply Ladies had been an over-the-top celebration of bitchery. (“Boo, you whore,” is one in every of Imply Ladies’ most lasting items to popular culture for a cause.) That unrepentant vibe was as very important to the system’s profitable recipe as its iconic costumes, cute dumb boys, and killer needle drops.

However these remorseless characters appear to have gone extinct as of late. Now not are we allowed to easily fuck a chainsaw gently. Now we have now to have emotions about it. And the ladies must turn out to be pals after all of it. The place’s the enjoyable in that? 

So, in 2024’s musical model of Imply Ladies, our queen bee Regina George (the radiant Reneé Rapp) will get a complete music devoted to her difficult emotions for her ex Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney). Out of the blue, complicated Regina is way extra compelling than sweet-then-salty Cady Heron (an underwhelming Angourie Rice) as Tina Fey sands down the sharp edges of Tina Fey’s unique movie. Tina is perhaps dropping the c-bomb on podcasts, however her characters certain ain’t, maybe fearing laying aside fashionable audiences.

But 25 years in the past at the moment we reached what some could contemplate apex teen bitchiness with author/director Darren Stein’s 1999 pitch-black teen homicide comedy Jawbreaker. Dropping jaws earlier than Regina George was even a twinkle in Fey’s eye, Jawbreaker serves up a technicolor celebration of meanness and not using a trace of regret. 

Stein himself known as the movie “sweet colour goth,” and it is easy to see why. ’90s uber-bitch Rose McGowan – contemporary off honing her catty chops as Amy in The Doom Era and Tatum in Scream – stars as Courtney Shayne, the top harridan of Reagan Excessive. And this function strutted McGowan proper into the she-devil corridor of fame.

Jawbreaker broke the bitch mildew.

Courtney begins the film because the meanest of the imply ladies in her clique, alongside buddies Julie (Rebecca Gayheart), Marcie (Julie Benz), and “the Princess Di of Reagan Excessive,” Liz Purr (Charlotte Ayanna). However Courtney goes from  H.B.I.C. to homicidal when she shoves an enormous jawbreaker down Liz’s throat throughout a prank birthday kidnapping gone horribly, horribly flawed.

Liz is lifeless earlier than this trio of teenage pussycats may even pull her cooling physique out of the automotive trunk for celebratory pancakes. A most bitter improvement certainly, however one which Courtney meets with informal, hilariously eye-rolling indifference. (McGowan has mentioned she drew her inspiration from cinema’s foundational feminine sociopath, Gene Tierney’s femme fatale Ellen Berent within the 1945 Technicolor noir Go away Her To Heaven.) 

With blood on her fingers to match her completely chosen lip colour, Courtney takes the crown because the clique’s queen bee and, unchained by Liz’s do-gooder status, is lastly loosed to be all of the bitch she may be. And her schemes — like her temper swings — are legion. To divert suspicion from herself, she convinces everybody candy Liz was truly their college’s very personal Laura Palmer, with a secret lust for harmful older males that led to her loss of life. 

And simply to make it sing, Courtney frames a neighborhood creep (performed by worldwide real-life creep and McGowan’s then-boyfriend Marilyn Manson) for the crime. Not solely does she have intercourse with the rando in Liz’s mattress to plant the clueless dude’s DNA all throughout the homicide scene, however she additionally tucks Liz’s corpse beneath the mattress as she does the vile deed. (The film initially acquired an NC-17 due to this scene, although as soon as Stein trimmed a number of of the slow-motion thrusts, the MPAA was placated. However don’t fret — its stomach-churning seediness however stays.)

Issues get even extra difficult when wallflower Fern Mayo (Judy Greer) stumbles upon Courtney’s machinations and is drawn into the favored woman’s diabolical net. That is when Courtney lastly commits her most unforgivable crime of all; she weaponizes that almost all holy relic of the teenager film, the makeover, for evil. Courtney agrees to present Fern the complete femme makeover in return for retaining her yap shut. Image if in Clueless Cher and Dionne had pushed Tai down the steps after dying her hair, and you will really feel one thing near the right amount of betrayal. There isn’t any getting back from such blasphemy! 

Not even the Heathers of Heathers ever acquired that nasty. Positive, Heather Chandler fucked with the eagles and flew herself proper into her glass espresso desk. However that was in the end a dude’s doing. Ultimately, Veronica finds some type of redemption by blowing up unhealthy boy J.D. as a substitute of their highschool, saving the day for all of the remaining Heathers and the entire Martha Dumptrucks. 

For her half, Courtney is in the end taken down by the tag workforce of reformed imply ladies Fern and Julie, all due to that cutting-edge ’90s expertise often known as the birthday card with a voice recorder in it. When Courtney’s homicide confession will get blasted for your entire college to listen to as she’s triumphantly topped promenade queen, her chickens come residence to roost within the type of a rain of corsages coming down on her screeching, mascara-smeared head.

Jawbreaker‘s Courtney is a queen amongst cinema bitches.

Earlier than she’s pressured to do the stroll of disgrace and recreate the album cowl of Reside By This (Stein has confessed he did certainly title his protagonist after the lead singer of Gap), there’s one thing so deliciously liberating in Courtney’s defiant embrace of whole and absolute bitchery. She’s our imply woman Prometheus, flying too excessive and too brilliant, her make-up and tiara melting from the extraordinary warmth of her personal damaging energy. Her comeuppance offers the film a contented ending of types, but Courtney gave us a viciousness we may stay by way of vicariously. 

Give us the fireplace of Fairuza Balk as Nancy Downs in The Craft, smashing that sop Robin Tunney right into a wall as she cackles with all of the scrumptious energy that the satan’s put in her. Give us Sarah Michelle Gellar grinding on the crotch of her stepbrother Ryan Phillippe and sniffing cocaine out of her crucifix in Merciless Intentions. 

Or to take it again to the ur-bitch, the sacred textual content from which all fashionable teen film bitches are primarily based, give us Nancy Allen as Chris in Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Blowing Billy Nolan (John Travolta, no much less!) to control him into doing her soiled enterprise; licking her lips as she tugs on the rope tied to the bucket of pig’s blood suspended over poor pink-dressed Sissy Spacek’s head. Her meanness is an aphrodisiac! Now that is a bitch who acquired it performed.

There isn’t any Carrie with out Chris. There isn’t any goody-two-shoes yin with out their equal and reverse unhealthy woman yang. What we make up for with all of those “well-rounded human beings” now we lose in sneering, stomping, diabolically plotting leisure worth. Giving the Maleficents a heart-tugging backstory can solely take us up to now. In some unspecified time in the future you’ve got simply acquired to rework your self right into a dragon and burn the entire rattling fort to the bottom. 

In a lot the identical approach that the queer group has come round to embrace the stereotypical “sissies” and villains that had been the one illustration we had for therefore lengthy, there may be profound energy in accepting and having fun with the retrograde pleasures of watching nasty girls take what they need — and doing so unapologetically. (The vector overlap must be famous right here; we queers carry a century of cinema’s bitches on our shoulders like they’re our soccer heroes.) 

So what if celebrating the bitches won’t be “good” for us? There’s nice good available in giving our badness room to breathe. The flicks are there for it! They’re meant (a minimum of partially) to be our buried ids safely and healthily unleashed. Our greatest and nastiest fantasies sprung out of our brains, given vivid million-dollar technicolor life. 

And for this it is within the Courtneys, gum-snapping and gun-snatching, that I’ll all the time belief. As a result of as that queen mentioned herself: Life is perhaps filled with unhappy, fucked-up issues, however you will stroll into that faculty and strut your shit down the hallway like every little thing is peachy fucking eager.