I am twenty-four years old, so I really don’t have any right
to say this, but after watching The DUFF,
I feel unnecessarily old. I remember
when I was a young teenager and I first saw She’s
All That, a film that was supposedly emblematic of teens growing up in the
late nineties and early millennium. And The DUFF hits pretty much all the same
plot beats, right down to the male tutor giving fashion and dating advice to
the awkward nerdy girl only to end up with the two of them in love with each
other. What I don’t remember, though,
was She’s All That being so blatantly
pandering to its target demographic, and thinking that either makes me cynical
or out of touch with those a decade younger than myself. Probably (hopefully) both.
The term DUFF stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, a term
that desperately wants to find its way into teenage lexicon via hashtag. The idea is that in any group of friends, one
person is the most approachable and consequently least interesting, acting as a
safe mechanism to volley conversation between those too nervous to speak with
the more popular, interesting members of the group. Our protagonist, Bianca (Mae Whitman, or to
those who watch Arrested Development,
“Her?”), discovers that she has been an unwitting DUFF to her supermodel
gorgeous friends, and so seeks to rebel against the trends and become
self-sufficiently attractive enough to ask out the boy she likes. Enter the jock who agrees to help her in
exchange for chemistry notes, and you can pretty much figure out where it goes
from there.
I have to say, Whitman really pulls her own as the star of
her own movie, consistently exuding a charisma that many twenty-somethings
playing teenagers never quite manage.
She’s goofy and funny, yet sympathetic in her desire to be more than
just people’s stepping stone to her more popular best friends. (How she is even friends with these girls
when none of them remotely share the same interests, I couldn’t tell you.) What is less than endearing, though, is the
film’s constant attempts at referencing social media in order to appear hip and
cool to teenagers. Yes. We get it.
Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest all exist. But name-dropping social media sites in order
to point out how foreign the concept seems to adults is not only antiquated,
but also doesn’t get funnier with repetition.
Furthermore, the film has some really inconsistent
moralizing, with a finale that seems to simultaneously tell its audience that
it’s okay to be different and strange, yet still follows through on Bianca’s
character arc of self-improvement through beautification. This is a pretty common problem in the teen
comedy genre, and I would love to see a film rise above childish moralizing and
just provide an original story for once, without all the baggage that emulating
teen movies from the nineties entails.
And yet, despite its issues, The DUFF is a pretty decent and mostly inoffensive film. Whitman pretty much carries the film with her
“Hollywood ugly” charm, and there were a few moments that genuinely made me
laugh. I only wish that the plot,
subtext, and pop culture references weren’t so recycled and already dated. In the information age, it only makes sure
the film will be irrelevant to its target demographic by the time the streaming
services pick it up.
Is the teen comedy genre inherently flawed? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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