Road Trip

Year 2000 Trademarks:

• Blockbuster Video jewel cases
• Tom Green (specifically this scene):

When American Pie was released, in 1999, it was hailed as the rebirth of the “post-teenage gross-out genre” of the 1970s and 1980s. The ancestor it was most frequently compared to in particular (by, among others, the New York Times) was Porky’s, the 1982 comedy about horny high-schoolers desperate to sneak into a strip club. And why not? Both featured a pact of teenagers pledging to rid themselves of their virginity with humiliating, terrifyingly sexual results. And both featured a handful of tent-pole hard-R scenes designed to firmly cement the movie as a gross-out classic. (Porky’s had its hole-in-the-girls’-shower scene; Pie its pastry-fucking shot.)

But the comparison isn’t totally correct. Unlike Porky’s, which was a fun-but-nihilistic romp, American Pie had heart. Granted, that heart was interlaced with scenes of girls drinking semen-spiked Coors, but it was there. Just look how the film ends: two of the four friends may engage in wild, eyebrow-raising sex worthy of Lambda Lambda Lambda (Finch hooks up with Stiffler’s mother, while Jim has a kinky one-night stand with band geek Allison Hannigan after she famously informs him where a flute was once inserted). But the remaining two friends, Oz and Kevin, are used by the filmmakers as sermonizing tales on the dangers of rushing into sex, and the benefits of “waiting for the right time” (cue ’90s educational health class video theme). No, American Pie is less like Porky’s and more like rebirth of John Hughes’s mildly-naughty but ultimately heartfelt teenage films – a Sixteen Candles for the American Online set.

Road Trip is, in fact, the film that proudly picks up where Porky’s left off. It is a movie for frat guys who considered American Pie on-par with a Merchant-Ivory picture. Who considered There’s Something About Mary a flick “for pussies.” The film stars Breckin Meyer as Josh, a desperate college student who enlists three  friends (including Sean William Scott, a/k/a American Pie’s “Stiffler,” that movie’s only morally vacant character) to embark on a road… um… venture from Ithaca University in New York to the University of Austin in Texas to recover a personal sex-tape (starring a topless Amy Smart, whispers my 15-year-old self excitedly while grinning a set of silver braces) accidentally mailed to his long-distance girlfriend.

It is here I should stop to focus on this driving plot of Road Trip. Its entire plot, its entire reason for existing is predicated on the act of communicating with a friend by parcel-mailing videocassettes halfway across the country. Much like Scream 3’s gags about cell phone memory, this plot-point places Road Trip at a very specific technological moment. It is not an archaic look at the early days of computers like WarGames, nor does it feature cutting-edge technologies. Instead, it lies somewhere in the Late Cretacious Period of the World Wide Web’s history in America. In 2000 the Internet was alive and well. Even non-technophobes Had Mail. This was, after all, a full two years after Nora Ephron had Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks soft-core cyberfuck each-other through dial-up modems.

What we didn’t have was bandwidth. Or at least not enough for the casual 2000 websurfer to easily share videos. DSL and other broadband services existed, but were by no means ubiquitous. (According to an article in the UK Telegraph, YouTube in 2007 consumed as much digital space as the entire Internet in 2000). If only Road Trip’s Josh had waited two or three years to sleep with Amy Smart, this whole situation could have been avoided with the purchase of a webcam. His crisis, however, wound up being a eerily precient warning about the dangers of leaked sex tapes that would go on to haunt various celebrities, fuled by the Internet, in the decade to come.

We’re treated to another example of the emerging Internet culture (and its dangers) during Road Trip’s climax, as Josh and his compatriots arrive at the University of Austin’s mailroom to demand the sex tape (the one with topless Amy Smart!). As they approach, they’re cut off by an uptight clerk typing frantically away on a laptop computer, reading with pride his online destination: “www dot Episode II, dot spoilers, backslash…” Not only does this hark back to a day when people were still looking forward to new Star Wars movies, it introduces the pop-cultural world to a new villian: the net nerd, prowling for spoilers and scoffing at the real-world problems of the decent folks in front of him. And what happens when the gang gets physical with him? He leaps from his computer and beats the shit out of them.

The message is clear, and we should have seen it coming: the Internet larkers are coming. And they are stronger and more violent than they look.