EP #1: Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie

Poo Poo in the Potty vs. Feces Feces in the Toilet.

Maya Mabern: Hi, I’m Maya! Currently, I’m in a movie renaissance and by that I mean I’m watching a lot of movies because I had COVID. So I bought a mini projector and I’ve been going through my watchlist. Most recently, I saw and loved Blood Simple.

Hannah Shearer: Hi! I’m Hannah, I’m watching the second season of Industry, which is a stressful show. I feel almost Puritanical watching it, I feel like I have to chase it with an episode of The Brady Bunch, but it’s very good. I’m also currently obsessed with the 2015 show The Leftovers, which no one is ever addressing enough. 

MM: This is “I Get it Now,” a project in which we try to understand culture and media in a way that we didn't previously, from a non-expert point of view!

HS: It's reflecting on what we’re missing by watching movies and shows past their prime moment in the zeitgeist, and how watching them today changes their meanings.

MM: We’re doing this so I don't have to go to parties and lie about what I've seen.

HS: It’s essentially breaking down the nuances of timing in pop culture. That being said, we picked a very silly first choice.

MM: But no better first choice, I think. This is the perfect piece of text, if you will, that illustrates the sort of cultural gaps that we're missing. We are of course talking about bye-bye, Miss American Pie.

HS: American Pie is a touchstone of culture for two main reasons: the titular pie scene, and the invention of “MILF.” Straight from John Cho’s mouth into the Oxford English dictionary.

MM: And he maybe has, what, two minutes of screen time?

HS: Which he uses well! It’s a powerful moment. I actually do have a question already: do you think Don McLean has seen American Pie? And if so, how do you think he feels about it?

MM: Part of me thinks he might have. Maybe he had to approve the name? In that context, he’s probably at least familiar with it. Does he like it? Probably not. It’s a little after his time.

HS: He’s maybe coming at it from a different perspective. We're watching it from the cultural standpoint of today, and what we grew up with, and the kind of things that are okay to do and say, of, you know, 2022 versus maybe 1999 when the rules were a little looser.

MM: It was a year of looseness, that capped a decade of looseness and raunch and sex and apathy.

HS: And disgusting things like that. 

MM: A lot of important things happened that year. I was born for example.

HS: True! I was turning one.

MM: Happy birthday!

HS: Thanks! What else was going on? There were a lot of teen movies that year. 10 Things I Hate About You came out. 

MM: It really was the era for teen movies, and it makes me sad that I wasn’t sentient at this time because it was such a social event to go see them—these so-bad-they’re-good comedies—and we kind of missed out on that. But I digress. Let’s get into it.

HS: First and foremost, should we address that we don’t know any of the characters’ names? 

MM: Not a single one. Something about American Pie—and maybe just teen boy culture at the time—is that no one is ever referred to by their first name. Apparently, Stifler’s first name is Steve. But to everyone in the film, he's Stifler. I just now learned that Thomas Ian Nicholas’ character is named Kevin Myers. He was probably called "Kev" throughout the film. And Jason Biggs, I swear to God, I never heard this man's name once in the entire film. Do you think you can guess what his name is?

HS: William? 

MM: No, it's Jim Levenstein.

HS: Okay, interesting. I might have heard a Jimbo thrown around. By Eugene Levy, his dad.

MM: Eugene Levy would say that.

HS: He's honestly a good father, a very sex-positive father of an annoying son.

MM: He is! I feel like he was set up to be sort of dunked on, to be laughed at—

HS: Like a dopey dad.

MM: I can imagine him break dancing in an Alien Ant Farm video. But yes, Jimbo’s journey of self-discovery was really interesting, though deeply flawed. 

HS: We'll get to the scene where he needs to be tried at The Hague.

MM: He needs to be put in the slammer, for that hair if nothing else.

HS: Why does his hair look like that? Also, throughout the entire movie—actually, since being in American Pie and up until 2022, Jason Biggs has looked 35.

MM: True, but—hear me out—he's kind of hot. 

HS: Um–

MM: Not in this film.

HS: Well–

MM: However, however, hear me out, hear me out. 

HS: Okay. 

MM: If you look up photos of Jason Biggs with normal hair—not with a greasy, matted dome—he’s not that bad. He has good teeth. He has nice eyes, you know?

HS: Sure. 

MM: But he's no match for Chris Klein, AKA Oz. 

HS: True! He plays lacrosse, and he dates the Jazz Choir Girl, played by Mena Suvari, which is a very common dynamic in so many high school movies and shows. How was it a jazz choir? It was mainly a cappella. It was a Glee Club.

MM: A mediocre Glee Club, in which the songs were not exactly jazzy. That B plot really gets at a big theme for many films to come, which is that music is the moral opposite of sports. And if you think about it, it really sets the tone for the widespread public school budget cuts of the 2000s and early 2010s.

HS: And it's American Pie's fault.

MM: Maybe this is where it all began. Then High School Musical really took off with this whole narrative. And it's like, how do we reign that in? Because I feel like a lot of conflicts could be avoided if we just reconciled sports and music.

HS: I think if we just all admit to ourselves as a society that most sports are just dancing with props, we could really win over a nation. Student-athletes and students in any musical theater adjacent programs are both crazy, and often annoying. And that's okay! But they have more in common than they think.  Another dynamic I don’t get—are the core boys friends with Stifler? He's mean to them and he's not in their little pact but he keeps showing up with them.

MM: He's very much the Lucy Van Pelt of the group. Their dynamic is definitely antagonistic.

HS: He's just a little bit above them in the social hierarchy, but not by that much.

MM: If I had to venture a guess I would say they all grew up together. Stifler was probably friends with them in elementary school. Somewhere around middle school, the hierarchies started to form. Maybe Stifler was the more athletic of the group. So then they sort of have this divide, but they're still on speaking terms. They're still cordial, but their power dynamic comes to a head in American Pie.

HS: I would love to see a prequel to American Pie and see the relationships really develop.

MM: Would the prequel be called American Pie: In the Oven? Let's go with that.

HS: Oh, I did love—who sleeps with Jennifer Coolidge? They do a little The Graduate parody.

MM: The iconic Paul Finch, AKA Finch.

HS: Right. Paul Finch, who is the MENSA genius of the group. A key dynamic in all of these movies is to have one friend who doesn't like anyone else and is smarter than everyone.

MM: And you're kind of like, why is he there?

HS: In the beginning, to show that he’s above all this high school nonsense, they show him wearing a thin scarf, speaking Latin, and drinking a “mochaccino.” It’s crazy to think that a mocha was the peak intellectual drink.

MM: In a corduroy blazer on top of all that. 

HS: He's a breath of fresh air because ultimately, no one is very likable except for him. And Natasha Lyonne’s character, Jessica. In general, the women are likable.

MM: I loved her, but she’s sort of left high and dry at the end of the film. But Alyson Hannigan’s character, Michelle, played such a pivotal role in the film, and really, the series as a whole. “This one time at band camp…” was heard ‘round the world. I won't spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, but she doesn't do what you think she does at band camp!

HS: Jason Biggs gets to hear all this and more! Speaking of, Jason Biggs shouldn’t be the focal point of the movie. I didn’t care what happened to him!

MM: I firmly believe that if they cut Jason Biggs out of this movie entirely, it would be so much better. The only caveat is that Eugene Levy wouldn't be in it. But he could have been someone else's dad. He could have been Chris Klein/Oz's dad.

HS: I think he should have been. 

MM: But speaking of Jason Biggs belonging in The Hague, and entirely cutting out his character…

HS: The key scene that solidifies this movie as Of Its Time—even though it was not okay in 1999!—is where Jason Biggs secretly films a female exchange student named Nadia changing in his room and broadcasts this feed on a secret link that he emails to his friends. This scene has been denounced by almost all of the cast. It lasted maybe 30 minutes and felt like it would never end.

MM: I felt glued to my seat, like I was being forced to watch. And what she didn't know—well, she didn't know anyone was watching—but what neither she nor Jim knew, was that Blink-182 was watching! Tom DeLonge was watching, Travis Barker was watching, the other one was watching—the monkey was there! Stifler’s little brother was there, somewhere in that montage.

HS: And Jason Biggs accidentally sent it to the whole school—has that ever genuinely happened?

MM: That scene was sort of like D.A.R.E. but for the Internet.

HS: The consequence of Jason Biggs’ creepy recording of Nadia, and his inability to use email, is that Nadia gets her green card taken away! The fact that she was the only person in that scenario who faced consequences makes no sense. Not everyone who was watching the secret video? Or Jason Biggs himself?

MM: That was a crime! To me, that scene really illustrates one of the biggest cultural differences between then and now, because a lot of the humor was about shock value that sacrifices any and all moral code. 

HS: There was a quote from Seann William Scott who plays Stifler—

MM: Pull it! Pull it!

HS: Who said in a ScreenRant article on whether American Pie would work today: “...people are, it feels like, myself included, appreciating more of a witty, smart humor and good writing as opposed to just something kind of over-the-top.” Which I feel is true. The edgy movies today that everyone talks about are edgy in different ways. Even with the classic gross-out, slapstick comedies today, where American Pie was more Pee Pee Poo Poo in the Potty, today it’s Feces Feces in the Toilet.

MM: That's so true. Every decade perceives teenagers’ intelligence differently, and that era was the peak of assuming teenagers were not as smart as they are. Gen X’s whole deal was like, oh they’re slackers, they’re apathetic, and then you have a whole slew of media that was slacker, stoner humor, and then gross-out, over-the-top physical gags.

HS: Yeah, that kind of slapstick, goofy, pie on the countertop, stuff. I don’t know if American Pie represents the peak of this style of humor at the time, but it never really went away, it just got slightly more interesting. With sex comedies today, à la Judd Apatow’s filmography, at least there’s some semblance of heart and depth, even mildly. 

MM: Right. American Pie was just flimsy plot construction, misogyny and vibes. All set to the sultry sounds of Blink-182 (and Hole, in that one scene where Kev uses the riot grrl-eqsue guidebook on sex to learn how to go down on Vicky).

HS: Speaking of music, I feel like 1999 approaches the second surge of overtly sexual music, media, and celebrity culture. Teen movies were on the uptick, and they occasionally brought more sexualization of teenagers—which continued well into the 2000s—into the general media. I’m specifically thinking back to Britney Spears' Rolling Stone cover story, where she was maybe 17 years old, and she posed with a Teletubby toy. It was, I think, more upsetting to adults then, and is now just upsetting in general. On the other side of that recoiling, teenagers were semi-supporting this movement of self-expression and embracing the fact that teenagers obviously do have sex, and the pressure to do so is pretty big in the movie. Thinking back to when we were in high school, at least to a degree, that idea had shifted a little more towards a capitalistic view, in a way, as actually having fun and making mistakes and actually enjoying yourself was replaced by college and money and jobs. 

MM: Yeah, getting into college definitely took priority over having sex in high school. Obviously, this is a silly representation of 90s teen culture, but there were other films and TV shows with a similar view of what that generation was like, but with drastically different execution, like Kids from 1995. It gets at how teens were thought of back then: doing things with reckless abandon, and that is sort of the same depiction in American Pie to a much lesser degree, and fewer real-world consequences, than in Kids, but the same thought process.

HS: Right. It's hard to imagine American Pie being the same movie if there was social media. We were a little too young for Facebook’s true peak I think, but we came up as Instagram was becoming bigger, and we were in college when Twitter was doing the same. That definitely emphasized from a young age this pressure to prematurely create this perfectly executed specific personal brand, where you feel like you’re always being watched, so there’s less room for error. And with American Pie—(laughs) I just remembered we’re talking about American Pie.

MM: Extracting these really big concepts from this film.

HS: The sociopolitical stakes of American Pie are actually very high and far-reaching! But anyway, a lot of movies of this era have the lesser stakes of, “you can mess up in high school and it's fine,” and base core themes around that. And then today, I mean—do you remember anything that anyone in high school did? I absolutely do not. But despite that, everything now feels more like life or death, nothing feels quite as private. A couple of years later you realize it didn’t matter, but at the moment it’s hard not to immediately imagine some level of consequence.

MM: That’s why these 90s teen movies—10 Things I Hate About You, She’s All That, whatever— make us nostalgic for something we never really experienced, which is the freedom to do things without feeling observed. We’re conditioned to be hyper-aware of our digital footprint, and it’s harder for us, as you said. We can’t really fuck up and be messy in the same way that kids in those movies can. It makes me think if we didn't have social media, would we be like that? 

HS: Maybe we would, but also, I mean, we were both kind of anxious wrecks in high school, so we're probably not the best people to ask about this reckless feeling. Maybe we’re the girls in Booksmart.

MM: We’re definitely the Booksmart girls, that's our movie.

HS: We couldn't be in American Pie, we were too busy being in Booksmart!

MM: If anything, we’re extras in American Pie.

HS: We’re non-speaking extras in the background of the jazz choir.

MM: I'm the one girl in the jazz choir in the middle of Chris Klein and Mena Suvari’s eye contact.

HS: I think there’s still a sense of social apathy today to a degree. But also, you're probably just posting on social media anyway. Like, you're smoking weed or whatever in high school, and then maybe, inevitably someone posts it on social media. Are you not going to college because of it? Probably not! But that anxiety is there. 

MM: We’ll never truly connect to the American Pie ethos. But I’m glad we at least sort of understand it now.

HS: And isn't that the point of the whole project?

MM: Exactly. Just yearning for understanding. 

HS: And we achieve that by watching movies and TV.

MM: Especially American Pie. Come on this journey with us, and maybe you’ll get it too.

HS: I hope you enjoyed our little ramblings. We are only our shared experiences. Maybe next time we’ll be more hard-hitting and poignant. But for right now, this is all you get. Thanks for reading!