I know I’ve mentioned before that I had a pretty serious Bring It On phase. In junior high, my three best friends and I were so into it that we decided we wanted to be cheerleaders, and funnily enough I was the only one of us that decided not to actually do that once we got into high school. We also wrote (meaning we all collectively brainstormed and I actually wrote) a very stupid movie that was initially a parody-amalgam of teen movies and ended up being a parody-amalgam of every movie we’d watched in the last several years (I’ll have to tell you this whole gory story someday, it was pretty hilariously dumb), and rival cheerleading squads were one of the central plot points.
But I’m pretty sure none of them loved this movie in the way I did. In a gay way.
Of course, I didn’t realize that at the time. I first saw Bring It On when I was like ten. It was one of the first big-girl (read: PG-13) movies I rented from Blockbuster. I owned it on VHS and I owned the soundtrack on CD. I would watch it with my friends, on VHS, in what I still called “the playroom” because it had once housed my Barbie Dream House and Hot Wheels tracks and Lego table. I would listen to the soundtrack on my Walkman. I didn’t get all of the sex jokes, or I figured them out along the way but definitely missed them initially.
But while all of my friends seemed like they wanted to be Kirsten Dunst’s Torrance, or someone like her (the popular but still good-hearted typical cheerleader type), I wanted to be Eliza Dushku’s Missy. I had no illusions that I would ever be able to perform gymnastic stunts like her (I could not, and still cannot, even do a handstand) but while I was hypothetically interested in the group activity of cheerleading I also inherently came with a healthy dose of sarcasm.
And, of course, I was incredibly unbelievably gay for Eliza Dushku. I’m fairly certain she, in this movie, is my first solid distinct crush ever (except a boy I knew in kindergarten that I remember nothing about except for that I thought his last name was Glasses, which I am positive it was not). I wanted to hang out with her (I didn’t do well with Popular types, but snarky assholes with affinities for doodling on themselves were my speed) and, though I didn’t realize it, I thought she was very attractive.
I also, in retrospect, read her character very queer-coded. When Missy joins the squad, she’s the sarcastic quasi-punk girl who wants fuck-all to do with the politics of cheerleading (“I transferred from Los Angeles, your school has no gymnastics team, this is a last resort”). She quickly becomes friends with Torrance, the kind of friends who have one-on-one sleepovers (in my experience, this was something you only did with really close friends), and she’s sort of accidentally instrumental in Torrance’s learning to be a better person or whatever while Torrance gets her to be a little bit less of an asshole.
Torrance also, unfortunately, develops a crush on/relationship with Missy’s brother Cliff (Jesse Bradford) and it’s stupid and heterosexual.
But look. Missy is the alternative one. I’ve known many heterosexual alternative kids, but I’ve also known many queer alternative kids, and a disproportionate amount of cinematic queer girls are alternative. Missy also, at no point in the movie, flirts with a boy, expresses any interest in doing so, expresses any jealousy over another girl doing so, or is characterized as being too innocent to want to do so. There are a lot of background characters in this movie who don’t have visible romance plots, but Missy is the second female lead! In most high school movies, she’d be shoehorned into a relationship for optics or at least have more of a lovingly jealous opinion of Torrance’s relationship. (Hypothetically. Not literally, since it’s with her brother. Twin brother? I was never clear, since they were in the same year at school but also Cliff looks like he got held back at least two grades not for stupidity but just for refusing to put in any effort.) ALSO, Torrance ends up with Missy’s brother. Narratively the boy version of Missy. That always struck me as really odd in a way I couldn’t articulate.
I can now. It’s transference, plain and simple. It’s “well, the nice normal cute one can’t end up with the punk girl because that would be gay, but that makes narrative sense so, uh, here’s a boy who can fill the same function.” It’s like how ASOIAF fandom will cheerfully marry Sansa off to Willas Tyrell not because he’s a character they know and love (or in fact have ever met, since he’s only been mentioned thus far) but because they know they like Sansa and Margaery together but they don’t want to be gay. (Which is ridiculous. Sansa and Margaery are freaking lesbians. But I digress.)
Also, there are definitely some interactions between Torrance and Missy that I found not weird but odd at the time, and I realize now this is because they were weirdly flirtatious. Sometimes they’re just talking like buddies, but sometimes they’re still friendly but talking in ways I didn’t associate with how I talked to my friends or how other friends in things I consumed talked to each other. It was best marked by a certain funny feeling in my chest, unscientific as that is, and the way I can tell that this is a Gay Feeling is that I also got it in my chest while watching my first should-have-been-Sapphic movie, All I Wanna Do. (The fact that both of these instances involved Kirsten Dunst is actually a coincidence, given that by herself and in other roles she doesn’t particularly set off my Sapphic alarms like, say, Eliza Dushku does. [And that, in turn, is not meant to speculate about the woman’s personal life, just that she plays characters that vibe that way like who. And also I, a Sapphic person, am attracted to her.])
Imagine: it’s exactly the same movie. I mean, shit, Torrance can even still use Cliff’s shitty rock song he wrote for her in the cheerleading competition finale. But instead of her kissing him at the end, she kisses Missy. I feel like that would ring much truer.
(I can see how one might, incidentally, also frenemies-ship Torrance and Isis [Gabrielle Union], the rival cheerleading captain. I don’t, particularly, and there’s less solid evidence, which is why I didn’t really get into it. But it could be done. I just know it’s not the gay that I always subconsciously needed from this movie.)
–your fangirl heroine.
partlydrawn 