Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #195 Jawbreaker (1999)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

I am of the belief that the more time, energy and passion you put into something, the more you get out of it. That’s the thinking behind The Weird Accordion to Al and Travolta/Cage as well as patron-funded explorations of the films of Rebecca Gayheart, Oliver Stone, Sam Peckinpah and Tawny Kitaen. 

We’re deep into our dazzlingly obscure journey through Kitaen and Gayheart’s film and television careers and good movies that use either woman well are few and far between. Within the context of Kitaen’s career the 1984 sex comedy Bachelor Party stands out as a Citizen Kane-like apogee of cinematic quality.

Gayheart’s filmography is more impressive but so far in our trek through her early career we’ve encountered very few films that use her otherworldly charms well. Scream 2 is the best film of the Gayheart movies I’ve covered for this column so far and Gayheart’s role in it barely amounts to a cameo. 

I vaguely remember giving Jawbreaker a negative review for The A.V Club when it was released in 1999, when I was twenty-three years old, only a few years older than the film’s teen characters. 

I was not alone. It has a paltry 13 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert gave it one star. The masses hated the movie as well: It has a D+ Cinemascore and grossed just over three million dollars. 

Then something kooky yet not entirely unexpected happened. As time went on, a growing number of folks began to look back at Jawbreaker fondly, through the softening prism of nostalgia, and found themselves thinking, “Hey, you know that movie Jawbreaker, that flopped and got bad reviews and everyone said sucked? What if that movie is actually good and we were all wrong?” 

That, friends, is the essence of cult immortality: people taking a step back and saying, “Hey, you know that movie that’s supposed to be terrible? What if it’s actually good?” 

I undoubtedly found Jawbreaker excessively derivative of Heathers and a glib exercise in style as substance. I would not be wrong in either respect but I have softened with age. When it comes to pop culture at least, I’m more generous and empathetic, not to mention a hopeless slave to nostalgia. 

As a young critic I raged impotently against what I saw as shameless knock-offs with a white-hot intensity rooted in youth and inexperience. I see things differently now. From the vantage point of 2021, Jawbreaker seems less like an unapologetic rip-off of Heathers than a giddy tribute to Daniel Waters and Michael Lehman’s hilariously bleak cult comedy. 

I have come to appreciate the art of pastiche, in new art built upon the sturdy bones of the soothingly familiar. I’m no longer obsessed with the curious entity known as “originality” because I'm not sure it really exists in any meaningful way. 

Plot-wise, thematically and tonally Jawbreaker resembles Heathers so closely that it probably could have gotten away with packaging itself as a tardy, late-in-the game sequel, the kind with no returning cast members and a whole new setting and cast of characters. People would have complained that Heathers II: Jawbreaker wasn’t as good as the original (of course) but also that it was way better than it has any right to be.

Writer-director Darren Stein’s candy-colored high school dark comedy of manners and murders is so inextricably rooted in Heathers that it is VERY hard to not refer to its central clique of impossibly beautiful, put-together popular girls as Heathers rather than the queen bee mean girls who rule the school, not unlike the titular characters in Mean Girls, which Jawbreaker bears an unmistakable resemblance to as well. 

We open with a prank gone horribly awry, as Courtney Shayne (Rose McGowan), Marcie "Foxy" Fox (Julie Benz) and Julie Freeman (Rebecca Gayheart) abduct friend Elizabeth "Liz" Purr (Charlotte Ayanna), gag her and toss her in the trunk of a car as part of a seriously misguided birthday tradition. 

Alas, punchily profane bully Courtney had the bright idea to gag the poor girl with a jumbo sized jawbreaker, leading her to die of suffocation. Julie is the only one of the trio who seems at all troubled by her friend’s death and their central role in it.

Courtney seems like the kind of sociopath who was definitely going to kill somebody at some point, intentionally or otherwise, and wants to focus on the upside to the pretty dead girl no longer being a threat to her popularity. 

After doing the dirty deed, then badly covering it up, Courtney tells her sidekicks that for the sake of appearances they must swagger down the hallway as if nothing had happened and nothing and no one can touch them. 

This leads to the film’s most unforgettable and iconic scene, which finds the trio strutting down the hallway in slow motion to the anthemic sounds of Imperial Teen’s pop-punk anthem “Yoo Hoo.” 

It’s Jawbreaker at its best, a mega-watt bubblegum blast of color and style and attitude that is the film’s enduring legacy, having inspired parodies and homages in Mean Girls and Not Another Teen Movie. 

When Fern Mayo (the glorious Judy Greer), an almost impressively unpopular outcast in shapeless clothes and what looks like a homemade hairstyle stumbles upon the murder Courtney offers her a Faustian bargain. 

In return for her silence Courtney will pull a Pygmalion (an old play that inspired the movies My Fair Lady and She’s All That) and transform her into the very image of polished pink perfection, a cool, popular girl worthy of strutting the halls of Reagan High alongside her. 

It doesn’t take much to corrupt Fern. A single montage sequence takes her from wallflower to sex bomb, from someone who dresses like Sissy Spacek’s Carrie to Madonna in Material Girl mode. 

Courtney decides her protege in popularity needs a new name to go along with her radical new image so boring, plain, day-dreaming Fern Mayo becomes sexy, popular Vylette, a new student who manages to be at once the head cheerleader and the star of the school play. 

“Vylette” takes Julie’s place in the clique. While Vylette evolves into a Maxim-ready fashionista Julie devolves into the film’s conception of a normal person, which means sticking Gayheart’s fabulous locks in pig-tails and dressing her in denim. 

Courteney, meanwhile, sets about framing a random dude played by Marilyn Manson (McGowan’s real-life fiancee at the time) for her friend’s murder by positing the death as the result of kinky sex gone tragically awry. 

I was not wrong in writing about Jawbreaker as an exercise in style as substance but I was wrong in seeing that as a flaw rather than a feature. With the help of cinematographer Amy Vincent (who would go on to shoot Black Snake Moan, I Heart Huckabees and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events) Stein gives the film a dreamy un-reality rooted inextricably in decades of disposable pop culture and a rock and roll soul. 

Gayheart is the heart of Jawbreaker as well as its conscience. It’s a role that calls for sweetness and strength as well as astonishing, jaw-dropping beauty and the former Noxzema girl is up to the challenge. 

But Jawbreaker belongs to Greer and to McGowan, whose punk-goth Bettie Page routine has never been more beautifully showcased, with the possible exception of her star-making performance in The Doom Generation. 

As is generally the case, the villain gets all the best, most quotable lines, dialogue liberally peppered with percussive profanity. 

If I might give Jawbreaker some exceedingly modest praise it’s easily one of Gayheart’s best movies, as well as one of her best roles. It’s another movie I dig because it thoroughly embodies the era that created it and a time in my life that I have tremendous fondness towards. 

I end up liking movies I disliked before so often these days that it’s starting not to feel like a surprise at all, but rather a function if time and memory and the curious machinations of the brain. 

That’s good because on the whole I would much rather love something than hate it even if nasty reviews are often more fun to write and more fun to read as well. 

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