Review of But I'm a Cheerleader (2000) by Scott W — 02 Feb 2009

We are introduced to Megan, played by the insatiably sexy Natasha Lyonne, a high school cheerleader who is dating football player boyfriend Jared. The first few minutes of the film are very visually juicy, as without any dialogue we come to quickly understand that she does not enjoy kissing her boyfriend, and prefers looking up the skirts of her cheerleading squad. Her family and friends suspect that she's a lesbian, and with the help of an "ex-gay" played by RuPaul, surprise her with an intervention. They send her to a puke-inducingly suburban reparative therapy camp, run by a terrible suburban witch played with great presence by Cathy Moriarty, which employs a five-step program to "cure" its reluctant campers of their gayness.

This straightforwardly satirical but yawningly conventional romantic comedy is not only about sexuality, but also gender and the crassly propagandized pigeonholing of gender roles. But director Jamie Babbit approaches the material with a sleepy variation of the style Jay Roach gave to the original Austin Powers film and leads it to a very weak and anti-climactic rushed ending.

Despite its light-heartedly satirical approach, there is a peep of true empathy for those who are put through this psychological and emotional terror. Babbit being a lesbian herself, is, I assume, responsible for these occasional undercurrents, as the script itself is merely a lightweight and obvious satire. Babbit herself hardly transcends the plainness of the send- up. For example, one of the ways in which she emboldens the archaic phoniness of gender roles is by saturating her costumes and sets with bold blues and pinks. It's not a bad touch at all, but the satire could have done better with more subtlety.

I disagree with critics who maintained that the categorized portrait of Middle America is over the heads of today's gay teenagers, as I feel the intention was to make a wise jab at the Conservative, 1950s-style "American dream" social dreg is a inferior, tasteless copy of an ideological mindset. The trite lifestyle the film's caricatured adults insensitively impose upon their kids is pretentious and commercially produced.

I love the irony of only realizing you're gay once you're in an anti-gay institution. The way society laughs at this is how kids are sometimes only really confused once they are told they are. When critics of the film have claimed it fails to subvert gay stereotypes by perpetuating them in the effeminate boys in the camp, they are forgetting that the movie is a parody not only of the fanatical religious right but also of the gay community it persecutes. But though the film is misunderstood by some, these stereotypical flaming-queen caricatures do fall flat after awhile, much too two-dimensional.