After conducting extensive market research I now know that my reviews are too long, and also technically not reviews. But I ask you, how many of the greats allowed finicky details like the fact that the thing that they were selling was not actually the thing that it was supposed to be stop them from achieving the impossible dream? Budweiser is just the juice that comes out of frogs when they get run over on the highway; Nickelback’s music is a recording played backwards of a bunch of people in a room slowly filling with blood, Saw-style, begging for help; Kesha’s music is that same recording played forward; Nicholas Cage died in 1996; Ben Affleck is a collective societal hallucination over what it would look like if the only good part of the id, charisma, was absent – and yet heroes all, and legends of capitalism. But I will try, I guess, to achieve things like “basic coherence” and “sentences that end eventually” in this upcoming post, but only this one: if the results are anything less than spectacular then my next post is going to be a deep dive into that studio-mandated hell-bird intended to squawk the audience awake in Citizen Kane – the post will be written in Aramaic, and I will never stop updating it so technically it will be infinity pages long. I am worse than a hipster, I am a spiteful old man. This is already the longest intro I’ve ever written. God dammit.

I Did Not Expect That Basic Bitch to Be the One the Legend Spoke of: Subversiveness in Ten Things I Hate About You

Rebellion is a funny thing, and creativity stranger still, because they invoke images of a stallion galloping free across the Great Plains, being guided only by the winds, doing that amazing thing that horses do where they shit without having to stop moving, simply following instinct and achieving the fullest extent of their strength in the process. But you can’t really live like that in the real world because you’ll lose all of your money and then die, which is bad. So instead these images of Unbridled Living must take the form of picking your spots against various considerations – basic survival instinct, the comforts of the familiar, the fact that a corporation probably somehow owns the rights to whatever it is you’re making even though you’ve never actually signed anything before, fear of failure, even greater fear of success because if you overthrow the system then you just denied a lot of people their meal ticket and they’re looking to you now for the daily sandwich, buddy – that collectively are pretty much the Eye of Sauron, staring at you from across the infinite distance, planning your destruction, sending out the Nazgûl, etc. It’s a lot. So when you do encounter someone or something that has managed to carve out some little form of rebellion realize and appreciate that it’s not so little after all, and only appears that way, dwarfed in size as it is by this motherfucker called entropy that we’re all basically flies on the windshield of.

That uplifting sentiment brings us – I’m serious, it really does – to Ten Things I Hate About You, the towering victor of the 90’s Teen Comedy Wars, whose success on that surreal battlefield of even lighting and Barenaked Ladies songs was only appreciated retroactively, like the Battle of Thermopylae, if the Battle of Thermopylae had Larry Miller and pregnancy suits. Ten Things is a perfect case study in the humble-but-large form of rebellion – that magical way in which you can carve out some little sovereign space against The Man while still somberly acknowledging that you will always be forced to live on His property and pay Him His rent, outrageous though the rates may be. Gil Junger’s film carves said space through what at first appears to be acquiescence to The System, but in reality is an eschewing of the panderingly sleazy forms of studio-approved non-conformity (think late 90’s “punk” rock, with its focus-group-tested haircuts) and replacing that hokey type of corporate art with its own genuine, infinitely-more-clever form of subversion.

So what is this better kind of subversion? See, this is the smart part, and probably the reason why Ten Thing’s critical adoration came by way of a slow burn, not achieving cult status until well into the 2000’s: Ten Things I Hate About You marches to its own beat by not even pretending to throw off the yoke of studio control; it embraces its identity as a corporate product, and dutifully moves from plot-point to plot-point as the piece of disposable popcorn entertainment it was always designed to be. And this is actually brilliant! No movie is getting made without at least a little corporate ass-pampering (hey, remember that Kane reference in the intro?) and Ten Things simply acknowledges that, and then, after being mailed by a relieved studio a giant box labeled “Dumb Things That Incompetent Studio Executives Are Mandating Be In This Movie Because The Last Film They Saw Was Produced By The Fucking Lumière Brothers,” asks itself how it could have fun with that box. Instead of insulting our intelligence with some insufferably performative form of rebellion – like, taking some outfit from the aforementioned box and putting it on wrong with such impish irreverence, glossing over the fact that the outfit has “costume to be worn incorrectly by ironic character so that film may achieve hipster cred” written on it – the film takes its studio-mandated dumbness and weaves a beautiful tapestry out of the lameness and garbage. It is practically spite-fucking the studio with deliberately-overshot obsequiousness, a magical decision that finds the tools and methods of insurgency hiding in plain sight.

A Castle Immaculate, Built Entirely From Trash

Alright, we need some examples, but to appreciate the examples we need to ground this movie in a certain time and place so that we might understand what the studio was almost certainly asking of it. So, some context: the wacky aesthetic was all the rage in the 90’s. By the time Ten Things came out The Simpsons had already completed its own pivot into the surreal with ground-breaking success, Austin Powers – after a meek initial theatrical showing – was slowly gathering steam into a franchise, the country hadn’t been in a large-scale war in a while, the darkest scandal in politics was just the President getting laid, and nobody realized yet that the housing market was basically one of those Bob-ombs from Super Mario with “THIS IS BAD” written on it. People were, at least relative to today, feelin’ fine. So of course studios were hellbent on capitalizing on this aesthetic and mood, leading to an almost weaponized form of bubblegum innocence. Think the Spice Girls, the endless deluge of Saved By The Bell knockoffs, etc. This craven obsession with the wacky did not escape teen comedies, either – it was practically the æther from which they were wrought – and Ten Things I Hate About You pretty much had “make it more 90’s! The decade is almost over, you should know exactly what that entails” plastered on its fucking forehead. But instead of providing a few meager sops to this mandate the film leans into it with almost sarcastic glee and turns the constraints of the parent studio’s complete lack of creativity into good world-building.

In one of the opening scenes, for instance, when Michael is taking Cameron on a tour of the school, we can see this concept in action. A few things are happening during this walkthrough sequence: we’re getting basic exposition out of the way, we’re learning that Michael and now basically by extension Cameron are not popular (got to have that down-on-his-luck protagonist!) and we’re also getting an overview of the school’s various cliques. And this is where the movie carves an identity for itself through the very beats you’d think it’d have to avoid in order to have a voice. The screenwriters (Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith) give the studio their desired “this is a teen comedy movie, look at all of those teens!” moment, showing us all of the different social groups and castes in the school, but then they just kind of keep going with it, quietly piling on the weirdness until we’ve reached a point where Michael is introducing the fucking cowboy clique. The slow, Kids in the Hall-esque descent into unblinking weirdness is butter-smooth and maintained throughout the movie – later on in that very scene the camera does a nice 360° pan during which the cowboys can be seen again, completely irrelevant to the moment but now part of the movie’s logic and therefore required to be there, just kind of existing against all odds and co-mingled with the school’s more, uh, explicable students.

And these weird little middle fingers to the studio’s expectations for a teen comedy are constantly looped back into the story, showing a movie building its own internal logic entirely from sarcastic hyper-dedication to a dumb aesthetic. Oh, the movie needs that scene, the one where there’s a Large Party at a character’s house and Important Revelations are had? Fine, studio, we’ll do that, but it’ll be held at the house of the young professionals clique (introduced during the film’s earlier clever walkthrough segment) and you know who’s going to show up? The fucking cowboy clique, because they are a thing that exists in this universe. And maybe a cameo by the white Rastas, too.

Or how about the gym teacher that gets shot in the ass halfway through the movie during archery class, and then later on in the film goes to sit down without thinking only to spasm from his seat in pain when he remembers “oh, right, I have an arrow wound there”? In a world where George Lucas can’t be bothered to remember if the Jedi have been the guardians of peace in the galaxy for a thousand years or a thousand generations this qualifies as quality world building. The gym teacher even steals weed from a stoner kid during that same sequence, from which it can be implied he is going to choom the pain away. That is a delight! A man whose entire function in the film is borne from abject stupidity is allowed to treat said stupidity with such consistency and seriousness that he somehow morphs into a bizarrely well-realized character in the process. This is more than just fishing for a gag: the movie treats its dumb, throwaway ass-humor with more TLC than epic franchises treat their plot continuity, creating this weird and delightful Simpsons-esque parallel narrative in the process, and it deserves endless respect for that.

All of these details make for a movie that exists in its best parts primarily on the margins – spiraling off every expected and basic comedy vein into something so viable in its fully-realized weirdness that it almost becomes its own little autonomous country against the larger space of the movie proper. This yields for the audience a bevy of delightful, completely unnecessary and yet somehow totally essential supporting characters (Allison Janney as the horny guidance counselor eternally searching for a meatier word for “penis,” Larry Miller’s as the Stratford patriarch so gripped with the fear of his daughters getting pregnant he is driven nearly to madness) whose collective existence practically subordinates the beats of the story to their own delightful internal weirdness. The movie can take entire moments off from the plot (though it rarely does; it’s a surprisingly lean and focused script in spite of all this delightful irreverence) and simply coast on the strangeness of its world. It even uses the Homer Simpson sliding scale of intelligence to make sure that a character will be shrewd enough when they need to be in order to advance the plot, but then settle back down into borderline-labradoodle levels of intelligence otherwise, like when Joey is calculating and craven during his interactions with Michael and Patrick but then struggles to understand the difference between the words pensive and thoughtful (there is none). In fact, the movie is probably at its worst during the obligatory low-point end-of-the-second-act-beginning-of-the-third, when all of the weirdness is swept away and the movie forces every character to become normal in a mostly bland attempt to court catharsis. While this is understandable (even Homer comes back to earth during the moralizing sections of a Simpsons episode) it also hinders the movie’s bizarre and charming form of on-the-margins-based momentum. But it also proves a point! So much storytelling is derived from Ten Things’ brilliant decision to lean into its own studio blandness that when that earnestness-to-the-point-of-being-surreal is taken away the film actually falters a little bit on a basic narrative level, showing how essential its pet subversiveness is and how integral it has become by that point into the basic functioning of the plot.

The End

Ultimately, it is not any one characteristic of a movie but rather the sincerity with which it is – fuck I’m over 2,000 words! Pretend I wrote something snarky but vaguely wistful here!