In Defence Of Guilty Pleasures

Starring: Melissa Joan Hart, Adrien Grenier, Stephen Collins, Mark Webber, Ali Larter Director: John Schultz Year Of Release: 1999 Plot: Nicole Maris is a popular girl in high school, who thinks she got things sorted and that it’s all set for her dream date, Brad, to ask her to the Centennial Prom. However a month before the celebrations he falls for a girl from another school. Not put off, Nicole hatches a plan – she’ll enlist the help of her grungy next door neighbour Chase, clean him up and pretend they’re going steady. She hopes to make Brad jealous, while Chase wants to get his girlfriend Dulcie to take notice of him. However neither of them expect to start falling for each other.

Of all the films on the Movie-A-Day list, this was the one that I most thought about cheating and leaving off the list of films I own. There is virtually no other movie I feel as guilty about liking, simply because I know I ought to hate it.

I’ve written before about the fact that I’m an eight-year-old girl trapped in a grown man’s body (indeed it's the most view pages in Movie Muser history), and it was with Drive Me Crazy that I first realised this is exactly what I was. I was 21-years-old when I first watched it, and went to see the film on the first weekend it came out (in my defence, at the time I was going to watch pretty much every movie released). While I’d always liked teen films, I suddenly realised that everyone in the cinema was a lot younger than me, and yet I seemed to be the one who was enjoying it the most.

And I really don’t know what it is about the film that I respond to. The plot is basically a reverse She’s All That or Never Been Kissed (although admittedly with more thought and heart than that films) and ticks all the generic boxes, from teen cliques bumping up against one another to ending with a high school prom. Melissa Joan Hart can’t act, a pre-Entourage Adrien Grenier just looks vaguely embarrassed and Ali Larter is lucky Final Destination and Varsity Blues came out shortly afterwards, or she’d have probably never got another job again. It’s silly, not particularly funny or dramatic, and it should tell you a lot that it’s based on a book with the hideous title, How I Created My Perfect Prom Date.

It’s probably best known now as the film the Britney Spears song You Drive Me Crazy came from (with Grenier and Joan Hart appearing in the video), however while it might appear that the song was named after the film, it’s was actually the other way around. Yes, this is a movie which the studio behind it had so little confidence in, that they thought the best way to make it popular was to name it after a song on the soundtrack.

Yet I love it. It warms the cockles of my heart, even while I’m aware of just how stupid it is. But then that’s the thing with guilty pleasures, they wouldn’t be guilty if we weren’t aware we shouldn’t really like them. However a lot of the guilt is down to social conditioning, as we’re brought up we’re also told what we’re supposed to like at different ages, and more often than not, this is completely arbitrary rather than making logical sense.

One of the most obvious examples of social conditioning is the idea of the colour blue being for boys and pink being for girls. It’s a completely random decision which colour should be associated with which sex (and until about a century, pink was for boy and blue for girls), but from the earliest age children are taught that’s how things are and they believe it wholeheartedly, with boys in particular loath to be near anything pink.

Then as we get older, we told that we should gradually put away childish, with a graded curve of what we’re meant to like and when. And when we reach adulthood we’re suddenly supposed to no longer like the certain things we enjoyed before. But why? There’s nothing genuinely intrinsic about our age that determines what we like and when, with the risk that we’ll shut ourselves off from many things we might love, just because society tells us it’s for kids, or it’s a lesser piece of art or entertainment. It like back in the 1950s, when sci-fi was seen as the poor brother of the literary world, and no matter the thought or intelligence of the writing, society immediately wrote it off as rubbish for kids. Since then it’s gone through a complete change, taking over popular culture (although some poncey people still insist this is evidence of the infantilising of society) and now seen as the equal of any other genre, at least if done well.

Similarly there are plenty of people who feel it’s pathetic for adults to read Harry Potter, because the books are ostensibly aimed at children. However the only reasoning I’ve been able to get out of people who think like this, isn’t based on the actual content of the books (largely because they haven’t read them), but that purely because it’s been shoved into the kid’s book bracket, it’s embarrassing for adults to read it. But this attitude is utterly arbitrary, because if exactly the same book had been released but right from the start been put into the adult’s section of the bookshop, presumably those who look down on it would have no problem with it. That’s especially true when you consider how much more intelligent and well told Harry Potter is, compared to a lot of the tat that fills the adult shelves. Why can’t we like both things for adults and things for kid, especially as in many circumstance the societal ideas over what is for whom is utterly arbitrary.

Yes, our tastes mature and we may like different things as adults from we what liked as children, but it’s seems a shame to me that societal conventions and pressure, rather just our changing circumstances, education and life experience should try to dictate what we should and shouldn’t like.

In reality there should be no such thing as a guilty pleasure, because the guilt only comes from the fact that social mores tell us we shouldn’t enjoy it, rather than because there’s anything intrinsic about most forms of entertainment that make them unsuitable for being enjoyed by anyone who can take pleasure from it.

Admittedly with something like Drive Me Crazy, it’s tough not to feel that even by the standards of the teen comedy, objectively it isn’t a very good one. However I love it, and while I’m more than prepared to argue with anyone about it based on its merits as a movie, those who want to look down on it purely because of its happy-go-lucky teen movie origins can get stuffed.

TIM ISAAC

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