Interesting that one of the first things we learn about Shauna is that she listens to Liz Phair; "Supernova" playing as Shauna writes in her journal outside of Jackie's house, frowns at Jeff, and watches Jackie descend to the car like a prom date coming down the stairs in a teen movie.
"I have looked all over the place
But you have got my favorite face
Your eyelashes sparkle like gilded grass
And your lips are sweet and slippery
Like a cherub's bare wet ass."
Something distinctive about (especially 90s) Liz Phair, compared to a number of her contemporary alt-rock singer-songwriter women, the way she mixes her sincere, explicit longing with anger, rather than settling on one or the other for a given song. She's a "cool" woman with a guitar, and certainly presented on album covers and promotional material as desirable, but there's a simmering violence there, and a sexual forwardness that men might find off-putting. Many of her songs are about men, and the position of both loathing and desiring them, wanting to fuck them and wanting to kill them at the same time. She's often funny and self-deprecating, but in a way that never comes off as an apology, and the songs often feel like journal entries or private thoughts, rather than statements to the world. From the original Girly-Sound version of one of her most notoriously horny/intimidating/relatable songs, "Flower":
Every time I see your face (Every time I see your face)
I think of things not pure and chaste
I want to fuck you like a dog (I get all wet between my legs)
I'll take you home and make you like it
Everything you ever wanted (Every time you pass me by)
Everything you ever thought of is
Everything I'll do to you (I heave a sigh of pain)
I'll fuck you and your girlfriend too.
(Tragically, in the later album version, this last line is rewritten as "I'll fuck you and your minions too.")
We know Shauna has a rich, complicated interior life, most obviously expressed through her journals, but also visible in her paranoia and moments of rage - there's a sense every time that she's finally saying things she's spent a lot of time stewing over. For Shauna, sexual desire (even love) and anger are practically inseparable: with Jackie, of course, and with Jeff, but also with Adam (Shauna is furious when they meet, and of course we know how it ends) and with Melissa (essentially the same story there, beginning with rage, moving to sex, and ending - for the time being - with violence).
Jackie, smirking in Shauna's car, turns off "Supernova" right after the line And you fuck like a volcano and right before And you're everything to me; that's to say, right before it gets too sincere to handle. Make of that what you will.
And when I asked for a separate room
It was late at night, and we'd been driving since noon
But if I'd known how that would sound to you
I would have stayed in your bed for the rest of my life
Just to prove I was right
That it's harder to be friends than lovers
And you shouldn't try to mix the two
'Cause if you do it and you're still unhappy
Then you know that the problem is you.
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