Never Been Kissed (1999)

5 months ago

IF YOU FAIL GYM, YOU’LL NEVER GET INTO COLLEGE

by Katherine Spada

I was twelve years old when Never Been Kissed came out twelve years ago. Even then I think I knew that there was something creepy about the conceit of an adult posing as a high school student and then falling into a love triangle with an actual teenager and a teacher unaware of the disguise. Despite that, I genuinely loved this movie, with its sympathetic loser characters—one even winning the heart of dreamboat Michael Vartan! Over the years, I have never been able to turn it off when it (frequently) comes on cable, and even though it’s nowhere near my top 10 favorite movies, it’s probably near the top of my most-viewed list. Something about Never Been Kissed’s combination of nostalgia and angst always pulls me in, even though it is about a high school experience pretty different from mine.

Young reporter Josie Geller (Drew Barrymore) masquerades as a high school student in order to mine the city’s teenagers for titillating stories about adolescent bacchanalia. What she conveniently forgets when she eagerly signs up for the assignment is how miserable she was in high school, an ugly duckling teased with the nickname “Josie Grossie,” who was never as comfortable with socializing as she was with her studies, and who was viciously spurned by her crush. With the help of her stylish coworker (Molly Shannon) and effortlessly affable brother (David Arquette), she confidently returns to high school only to immediately discover that she is no better at fitting in now than she was ten years prior.

I’m sure a lot of us identified with Josie and her mathlete friend Aldys (Leelee Sobieski). When you’re a teenager, it seems like nothing will keep your hair from looking awful, your skin from breaking out, or the most awkward and inappropriate things from coming out when you talk. But there always manages to be that one cabal of beautiful girls, the “chosen ones” who look just like the girls on dogeared pages of magazines. I went to a small all-girls’ school, where everyone tried to be the best possible version of herself. Girls were privately hated and admired for the same things, and jealousies begat cliques, but there were so few of us that it was almost mandatory to straddle a few social delineations.

We didn’t have boys, so the drama of deciding which grand prom theme would best encapsulate the importance of our young loves didn’t really resonate with me. [Although there was a big brouhaha sophomore year when 9/11 rendered our “60th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor” themed Winter Formal inappropriate, and it was changed to “1940s Hawaii.” True story.] For many of my friends in high school, romances were so few and fleeting that their ghosts haunted us for years while we waited eagerly for another boy to come into our lives. If you don’t believe me, consult my sticker-encrusted diary.

Watching Never Been Kissed at the beginning of my teen years only fueled my romantic expectations of what my first kiss would one day be like. Josie fantasizes about “that moment, when you kiss someone and everything around becomes hazy and the only thing in focus is you and this person,” and as I stared at the magazine cut-outs of waning boy-bander Justin Timberlake and underrated ’90s heartthrob Ethan Embry on my bedroom wall, I was sure that her words would ring true for me. After the first time I held hands with a boy, I would, for months, lace my own fingers together and remember exactly what it had felt like to be liked.

One thing we girls did have was an appropriate sense of distance between students and male teachers. One-on-one meetings always took place outside in a common area, for example. The impropriety of Josie’s teacher Sam continually finding himself in romantic situations with her, complimenting her in ways he admits to be inappropriate, and later admitting his attraction once discovering she was not, in fact, a minor, only gets more unsettling with each viewing. The same goes for the entire storyline of Josie’s older brother masquerading as a high schooler in order to help Josie fit in with the cool kids, and subsequently dating a virginal naïf.

Of course, once Josie comes clean, she is able to endear herself to everyone she’s wronged. Her coworkers and boss are thrilled with the dramatic story she’s given them. Her teenage crush and his gaggle of popular friends eventually accept her as cool. Even the nerds and poor, sweet Aldys decide Josie’s someone they can look up to. Of course, Sam the hottie teacher, who feels so righteously indignant about having been seduced by a (not real) teenager that the onus is on him to forgive her, finds it in his heart to give in to all the emotions he’d been feeling about her now that she has announced her wish for a public first kiss.

And you know, even with all that’s creepy about their relationship, I still find that first kiss on the pitcher’s mound to be incredibly romantic. The music swells, the fans cheer, and the kiss looks like just the kind that Josie was talking about, where “for one moment you get this amazing gift and you want to laugh and you want to cry because you feel so lucky that you found it and so scared that that it will go away all at the same time.”

I didn’t have to wait too many years after seeing this movie to have my first kiss, but I have to think that the magic of Drew Barrymore and Michael Vartan embracing on the baseball field informed my experience. As a boy wearing black nail polish kissed me, in the warm glow of a soda vending machine after a school play, I felt that it was the same glow that engulfs Josie in her big moment. Years have gone by and I’ve had many better kisses than that one (and certainly some worse), but I’ll always remember it as wonderful, and I think that’s what Never Been Kissed tells us about first kisses. Josie initially remembers high school as being much better than it actually was for her, so much so that she’s eager to relive it. And the same nostalgia for the late ’90s keeps me coming back to this movie, loving it despite the seedy elements.

Katherine Spada is a Hollywood assistant, and occasional blogger and contributor to MediaBlvd Magazine. She trains in Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and is now going to go look up that boy with black nail polish on Facebook.