John Tucker in Girl World- Prompt #1
In her chapter “Girl World” from her novel Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn discusses three popular movies that teeter between romantic comedy and teen pic, showcasing the “liminal time and space between childhood and adulthood where girls rule.” She talks about the films Clueless, The Devil Wears Prada, and Mean Girls. I will relate her Girl World description to another film from the 2006 film John Tucker Must Die. This movie’s male protagonist, John Tucker, becomes the pawn in four middle class high school girls’ love game after three of the women realize that he is dating all of them at the same time. These three women enlist a third girl, Kate, to seduce John, become all that he’s ever wanted in a girlfriend, then break his heart (just like he did to the three women before Kate).
One of Karlyn’s first defining characteristics of Girl World is that it is inherently unruly because “it places female desire at its core, validating its very existence.” Throughout the film, it’s very plain to see that even though these women are setting out to get unruly revenge on John, their desire for revenge stems from the fact that they are all in love with John. They set Kate out to seduce him, yet all become jealous when John does romantic things for Kate that he never did for them. They also “experience close connections with each other through shopping, gossip, and makeovers.” The three women give Kate a makeover so that she can be exactly what they believe John wants, and a majority of all the conversation that takes place between the women is gossip revolving around John and the other women at school.
Karlyn also claims that Girl World’s fantasies are created by the “ideologies of a patriarchal, postfeminist culture.” Even while the women are using Kate as a tool to mess with John, he still manages to have the upper hand and control the outcomes of all the situations. One example is when they put hormones in his drink, he begins to cry during a basketball game, and everyone praises John for being in touch with his feminine side. It also expresses ideologies of postfeminist culture in that these women are working together to take down a man who has taken advantage of them, but at the same time, are subtly fighting each other in an attempt to win over a man. They focus on giving Kate a makeover in order to make her desirable in John’s eyes, yet it ends up that Kate’s endearing personality is what wins him over.
John Tucker Must Die is an intriguing Girl World film that brings women together, and also rips them apart, all for the sake of a beautiful man. The women are all fighting for each other in their quest for power over John Tucker, and ultimately, he breaks out of the situation unharmed. It’s a film that creates new visions of femininity, but is also “a bittersweet recognition that outside it’s still a man’s world.”
