Youth of tomorrow: Comparing the classes of 1999

From Nostradamus to Arthur C. Clarke, many people have really sucked at predicting the future. It turns out accurately forecasting decades if not centuries ahead is harder than it looks, but what about a mere ten years? Writer/director Mark Lester made the delightfully nasty Canucksploitation flick Class of 1984 in 1982, not so much predicting a wave of sociopathic murder teens as wildly exaggerating existing punk nihilism. But in 1989 he filmed the sequel Class of 1999, looking further ahead and with more expansive ideas of what threats and desires would occupy the high schoolers of the coming millennium. Was he correct? Fortunately, historians are able to draw on a contemporary document about an actual class of 1999, that year’s surprise blockbuster American Pie, to determine the accuracy of Lester’s vision.

Overriding Concerns

As Class of 1999’s opening narration states/predicts, by the late 1990s more than 1.5 million violent incidents were taking place in and around high schools, which had largely fallen under the control of “youth gangs.” The Department of Educational Defense is formed to re-open the schools and control the gangs, which, to repeat, have largely concentrated themselves around high schools. This may be because, for all their firing of Uzis at each other, the gang members still attend school and protagonist Cody, fresh out of jail, is determined to keep his head down and make it through every day without dying in the Seattle Free Fire Zone. While the ratio of teens to adults in the suburban Michigan setting of American Pie could imply an area overrun by youth gangs, there is no visible violence. The film’s four protagonists are far more worried about affairs of the heart and loins: they are all virgins approaching the end of their senior year, and they want to get laid. 

High School Experience

The American Pie lads attend school with the same compulsion as Class of 1999’s gangbangers, but while they appear to be passable students (they all have plans to attend college), they are shown attending fewer classes than their dystopian counterparts. For them, school is a social nexus and potential pool of fellow teens to fuck and its major function is to host prom, where ritualistic coupling is the last and best chance for any popped cherries (if not Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, although further cinematic study may show different results from 1997). In contrast, Cody, his brother and his gang brothers/rivals are shown attending numerous classes: history, science, physical education, et al., but this is in part because their teachers are secretly murderous killbots who, while managing to temper their homicidal programming in the early going, still beat the everloving shit out of sass mouthers and back talkers, secretly killing at least one student. As Cody and Christie (his love interest and the principal’s daughter) uncover the killbot conspiracy, the mechanical educators escalate their attacks, leading to a showdown at the high school itself that leaves the already-gang-damaged building a smoking wreck.

Young Love

Christy is quick to approach Cody — who as played by Bradley Gregg has the sexual magnetism of a surly and tranquilized Christian Slater — and initiate a relationship with the clear desire for some kind of heavy petting on the table. But while Cody is responsive he is ultimately too concerned with the encroaching killbot menace to get laid. Getting laid consumes the male leads of American Pie. Nerdy Finch creates rumors of sexual prowess in the hopes of making fiction fact; Oz the jock takes up glee club in the hopes of landing a choir girl; the frustrated Kevin learns that women like oral sex from his brother Casey Affleck and eats his longterm girlfriend out in hopes of getting her to agree to go all the way; and the desperate Jim engages in most of the shenanigans the movie became known for, in particular fucking a pie in a desperate attempt to find out what a vagina feels like. Jim also is seen jerking off into a sock and, in the movie’s longest setpiece, both watching a foreign exchange student strip via hidden camera and stripping in front of her himself in order to facilitate a potential lay; instead he prematurely ejaculates twice. All of the men eventually find erotic fulfillment by the end of prom (although Oz is content to just writhe around on a dock instead of actually having sex); but much like Christy, the women of American Pie have their own interests and male fulfillment only comes (or at least only comes at the right time) after acknowledgment of female desire.

Technological Complications

As previously noted, Cody and his crew must deal with killbots that not only are willing to slaughter teens but are equipped to do so with flame-throwers and machine guns and other weapons hidden under their synthetic skin. This is because they are former military robots badly reprogrammed to become teachers as a test run for a malicious corporation’s lucrative government contract. The reprogramming, while ineffective, does appear to be sincere, as the killbots initially run through decision trees more appropriate for teachbots (verbal warnings, etc.) before their old code asserts itself. In any case they have only been placed in this new occupation because of the greedy CEO who sees huge profits and ignores egghead concerns about unstable machine learning. Technology is a hindrance early on to Jim, as he attempts to masturbate to the squiggly and largely theoretical breasts of a scrambled porno channel, but the aforementioned striptease sequence is livestreamed over the internet to everyone in town via a shockingly strong connection and powerful webcam. However, Jim and his cronies apparently lack the ability to record the webcam, leading to a bizarre mix of physical and digital hijinks as Jim sets up the recording and must run to his cronies’ house in order to watch it, and then run back to ensure the plan proceeds. Complicating matters, at no time during this scheme are Jim and his friends able to communicate beyond direct speech, as no one in this movie has a cell phone.

Teen Talk

The sex-obsessed teens of American Pie are, at least among themselves, open about their horniness and while they are not particularly foul-mouthed, they are no strangers to profanity. In particular, two random teens starring at a photo of an older woman dub her a MILF — a “Mom I’d Like to Fuck.” The impact of this acronym on the vernacular would be incalculable. Class Of 1999 is also fairly profane and inventively so, although the exchange “You trust him?” “Yeah — like a vampire giving me a blowjob!” appears to be a one-off and not indicative of a larger sexual lexicon (perhaps the abbreviation SOBAD, Sucked Off By A Dracula, failed to catch on).  

Teen Tunes

The rival gang (the Razorheads, to Cody’s Blackhearts) is shown listening to “Head Like A Hole,” credited at the end of the movie to “The Nine Inch Nails,” and Class of 1999’s theme song is performed with much emotive moaning by Midge Ure. American Pie has some diegetic music and a soundtrack packed with the cheery well-scrubbed alt-pop that dominated modern rock radio at this time, with Third Eye Blind, Sugar Ray and Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week” as particularly repulsive tracks.

Drug Problems

In Class of 1999, many of the gang members (as well as Cody’s brother and dissolute mother) are using if not addicted to “Edge,” a drug out of the “swank” school that appears to be poppers mixed with meth — Cody scorns the drug’s use, as it has clearly ravaged the community. American Pie shows consumption of a jizz-filled beer but this is accidental and only leads to vomit ravaging a young woman’s outfit. The teens routinely drink beer without semen in it and occasionally hard liquor, and are shown to have a near-immunity to hangovers that is only present in youth too young to know what they are wasting; however, no hard drugs are consumed and pot is apparently non-existent in school and at the various parties.

Youth Dynamics

The four friends in American Pie have a brief falling out but quickly re-assert their camaraderie, and in general appear to have amicable relationships with most of their classmates. The main exceptions are the weaselly nerd Sherman and the blustery bully Stiffler, who in his boisterous dickishness is the most enjoyable person in the movie (rightfully propelling Seann William Scott to a comfortable career), and whose wealth and propensity for throwing parties makes him an uneasy ally of the main crew. Stiffler orchestrates the movie’s two big gatherings and when his buffoonery shades into cruelty, he is punished, notably by seeing that Finch has fucked his mom. The student interactions in Class of 1999 are far more fraught, with the rivalry between the Razorheads and the Blackhearts leading to multiple assaults and a full-on gun battle after manipulation from the killbots. But the two warring factions are able to put aside their differences to face their common enemy after a rousing speech from Cody on the steps of the high school: “I’m going in there to waste some teachers — are you with me?!”

Adult Supervision

If those teachers are not as prominent as Class of 1999’s students, they still get plenty of action. Patrick Kilpatrick’s cheerily vicious gym coach, Pam Grier’s sultry and literally smoking (via flamethower) chemistry teacher, and John P. Ryan’s manic, pipe-clenching, drill-wielding history professor (“I love to mold young minds!” he exclaims before sending a bolt into a student’s brain) all make the most of their screen time, clearly relishing the chance to murder annoying young people over the objections of Malcolm McDowell’s impotent principal. But the most villainous adult here is Stacey Keach, with eerie blue cat-eye contacts and an even more unnerving bone-white mullet/rattail combo, as the corporate CEO who oversees the killbots’ deployment, and it is ultimately an increasingly destructive killbot who puts him down, not the righteous students. In American Pie, Jennifer Coolidge is vampier than Grier and much more willing to have sex with a teenager, but the only adult who plays a significant role in the film is Eugene Levy as Jim’s father, an awkward but well-meaning man who helps Jim cover up his pie-fucking debacle and is generally supportive if not proud of his stupid, horny son. If Class of 1999’s adults seek control over the young and are ultimately overthrown themselves, Levy understands that he can at best offer advice and assistance to the new generation as it makes the same mistakes he once did.

Life Lessons

It’s rare for a movie involving high schoolers to not include a classroom scene that comments on the story in the film itself. Ryan delivers a lecture on the Trojan War and the importance of knowing your enemy’s weakness, their ”Achilles heel,” and Cody and his compatriots ultimately apply this by turning the killbots’ aggression into overreach. An English class in American Pie briefly discusses Henry V and the young king’s necessary disregard of his lively but uncouth friend Falstaff, this foreshadows the leads’ eventual abandonment of Stiffler as they ascend to higher education.

Conclusion

Ultimately, American Pie’s greatest strength and greatest weakness is how laid-back it is. The boys get what they need, which is mostly what they want, and cruise into a hopeful future — but what they want is delivered in unexpected ways and with a significant emphasis on the needs of others, and losing their virginity turns out to be not that big a deal. The stakes remain low, and if that creates a certain lack of momentum from scene to scene, the movie also doesn’t pretend it’s dealing in earth-shattering events. High school is just a thing you pass through, not a matter of life or death, as opposed to Class of 1999’s fearmongering of vicious gangs jacked up on designer drugs and merciless killbots slaughtering students. Class of 1999 largely fails as a realistic vision of the future — although it is the more entertaining movie, with great practical carnage and gleeful scenery chewing from the villains — but if it doesn’t work as a prediction, it succeeds as fantasy. Some of us high schoolers from 1999 would have rather faced the killbots than another day of “One Week.”