The 2000s were weird, y’all. Really weird. If, like me, you’ve taken a strange trip down the road of 2000s romantic and (teen/college) sex comedies, you’ll have noticed the curious similarities between so many of them. The 2000s trend probably began with the release of American Pie in 1999, a film that I actually quite enjoy mostly because, unlike most sex comedies of the long-noughties, it actually bothers with the (admittedly incomplete) effort to rehabilitate its immature male protagonists. 1999 was, after all, a transitional year, and sex comedies in the teen/college bracket are, naturally, transitional narratives. In almost all cases, that transition is into some form of adulthood, even when the characters are well into their adult years anyway. Unlike American Pie, though, Road Trip (2000) contains numerous false starts, owing that failure to its inability to grapple with its underlying ethical quandary: what does a man do if he’s the one who has cheated on his girlfriend? But let’s step backwards through time for a hot minute…
Sex comedies go back to the 50s and 60s with notable films like Some Like It Hot (1959) and Lover Come Back (1961), a period in which some of the overt sexuality we see today in basically anything would not have been acceptable. Indeed, the earliest sex comedies likely challenged the Motion Picture Production Code (MPPC), a set of guidelines that was rigidly enforced by U.S. studios to avoid the possibility of government censorship and maintain an assumed moral standard. During the 1930s to 1950s (the Breen era), Joseph I. Breen had the authority to change scripts and scenes, notably changing a cartoon character’s clothing, removing nude scenes (even non-sexual ones), preventing references to romantic relationships outside of marriage, and so on. The MPPC could also prevent a film from theater distribution (as the NC-17 rating today frequently does). Effectively, these early sex comedies popped up in a rather opportune time. In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that motion pictures had the same 1st Amendment protections as the rest of us (Joseph Burstyn, Inc. vs. Wilson), ushering in a period of films like Some Like It Hot and Psycho, which were comparatively more graphic or explicit for the time — often to the lament of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Some Like It Hot — not the template, but certainly a trendsetter — never received a seal of approval from the MPAA, but its success at the box office helped contribute to the decline of power for the MPAA and the MPPC, and by the late 60s, enforcement became nearly impossible and the Production Code was abandoned. Today, we have the alternative — and often nonsensical — MPAA film rating system, which has the benefit of lacking the power of the MPPC while still allowing for the de facto censorship of film (see This Film is Not Yet Rated to understand why).
Our subject today — teen or college sex comedies — traces back to the infamous and arguably classic Animal House (1978), which influenced a veritable wall of similar comedies in the 80s (most notably, Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds). American Pie revived this tradition in 1999, launching a wave of similar-ish films (including its own sequels). Road Trip (2000), of course, chief among them. Indeed, it’s weird that American Pie spawned numerous sequels and direct-to-video films while Road Trip, successful in its own right, only spawned the DTV Road Trip: Beer Pong (2009). We might blame DreamWorks’ financial troubles in the 2000s, though, again, why they didn’t capitalize on a “sure thing” remains a mystery.
All of this is to preface the focus of this particular post: Road Trip. As a teen/college sex comedy, so much of Road Trip is a testament to its roots: it is invariably obsessed with its women objects (Some Like It Hot), dudes being dudes (Animal House), and, well, sex (American Pie). The essential premise of the film is thus: Barry Manilow (Tom Green) leads a tour through the fictional University of Ithaca and tells the tale of several of his now-graduated classmates, who went on a cross country journey to retrieve a VHS tape believed to contain Josh’s (Breckin Meyer) late-night tryst with Beth (Amy Smart), which has been accidentally mailed to Josh’s long distance girlfriend, Tiffany (Rachel Blanchard). While Josh, E.L. (Seann William Scott), Rubin (Paulo Costanzo), and an unwitting participant who happens to have a car, Kyle (DJ Qualls), race across country, Beth’s creepy stalker and philosophy graduate assistant Jacob (Anthony Rapp) attempts to sabotage Josh’s academic career to get him kicked out of Ithaca, all so he can magically win Beth’s favor (despite her numerous and quite clear declarations otherwise). High jinks ensue.
Like the modern incarnations of its subgenre, Road Trip is also rather enamored with conceptions of masculinity that are surprisingly varied and unsurprisingly caricatured. E.L. is essentially American Pie‘s Stifler, an abrasive, womanizing, and crass boy who says what he thinks even if he probably shouldn’t. You will not convince me that Road Trip isn’t just American Pie: Stifler’s College Diaries. Meanwhile, Kyle is your typical skinny nerdboy virgin who never stands up for himself (AP’s Jim), Rubin is your brilliant young man stuck in a society that doesn’t understand him (AP’s Finch), and Josh is your committed relationship man who makes a terrible mistake (AP’s Kevin). Combined, these varied incarnations of immature manboys (they are that, so shush) make for a narrative that is as obsessed with its subgenre content (getting the sex) as it is with its conception of manhood.
Here, the story is precisely a road trip of strange adventures involving sex, unusual circumstances, and unusual solutions, but it is also a crass examination of the American male experience in a time of transition — both for the characters and the country they reside in. Among their trials, they must deal with moral failings (Josh, who must grapple with cheating on a woman he loves while also recognizing that his long distance relationship is not the one he really wants), opening one’s sexuality to other options (E.L., who discovers butt play in a sperm donation clinic), recognizing one’s place in society and the pressures therein (Rubin, who openly discusses his deep anxiety about life and remains the film’s most ardent proponent of legalizing marijuana), and learning to be your own man (Kyle, who both discovers “love” of a kind in Rhonda (Mia Amber Davis) and eventually grows the courage to tell off his imposing and aggressive father (Fred Ward)). These men are all fragile in a sense, weak in conscience, in manhood, or in disposition; yet, the film’s conclusion would have us accept that they are changed men, albeit in ways that are shocking and, I admit, rather funny. After all, it is hard not to find the humor in Kyle’s reunion with his bitter father on Christmas, in which he presents his girlfriend and first love, Rhonda, who he met after his friends faked their way into a black fraternity. Though the film only grapples with the racial dynamics of 21st century America in jokes, it at least acknowledges that these are still things that America contends with. Road Trip offers a more hopeful vision than the reality, with Kyle and his friends accepted into the black fraternity and his girlfriend presumably accepted by his surprised father (his reaction being more surprise than hatred or anger).
These character growths are, of course incomplete, but they are stark contrasts to the two other major male figures in the film. Both Jacob and Barry resolve themselves to the men they are at that moment. For Barry, this means doing literally nothing but remaining stagnant: a perpetual manboy who mysteriously never graduates for no justifiable reason and who seems incapable of discarding the odd caricature given by heyday Tom Green. For Jacob, this means amplifying his most inappropriate tendencies; he eventually creates a cult and dies in one of the film’s last self-aware jokes: he leads his followers to a Koolaid death but drinks first and dies; his followers wander off into the sunset.
For our main cast, the real quandary is that the film never deals with its central dilemma: Josh did, in fact, cheat on his girlfriend, make a sex tape, and abscond to hide that fact from her. His punishment, presumably, is having to cram for a test he probably should fail on an all night drive in a stolen bus. Yet, he passes and “gets the girl” in the end — she pulls a fire alarm to delay the test to give him a chance to succeed. Road Trip is so enamored with its comedic forays into American masculinity — its fragilities and varieties — that it forgets the moral dimensions of its story; more damning, I’d argue: it outright discards them, something its raunchier predecessor does not do. Indeed, at no point does Road Trip bother to deal with any of its moral implications, from destroying Kyle’s car as part of a grand lie to tricking a blind woman into giving them a small school bus for transportation to lying their way into a black fraternity and so on. For me, this makes the film’s funnier moments harder to enjoy, even if I was rather amused by its willingness to give passing reference to consent in one of the more bizarre sequences in which E.L. sells “dates” with college women, reminding us that a date does not guarantee sexual activity — yes, I laughed.
Mind you, Road Trip is a sex comedy, and that both means that its motivations are not exactly wholesome. We do not expect it to be. Indeed, what we expect is largely what we get: a ridiculous movie about a group of friends who get into trouble while on a mission that is ultimately not that important. It’s a narrative you can find in many teen/college sex comedies, and that certainly means you’re meant to let yourself “get into it.” But I think this ultimately leads to a sex comedy that does not stand the test of time in the way that others of its ilk have.
Offensive though many of these films are, those with greater emphasis on dealing with the absurdity of its central premises and masculinity have far more to tell us — through comedy — about manhood in long-noughties America. If we look back across the tradition of sex comedies, from the 50s to the 70s and 80s and beyond, it’s clear to see which films leave their mark most, and we can see the cycling of this filmic tradition across the decades — a new one might have started with the subversive but lackluster Blockers (2018). Though Road Trip remains a film I rather enjoyed as a younger man, it will be the others of its kind that I will turn to again and again for amusement, not because I think pie fucking is particularly meaningful but because I can see and critique more of my own youth in the twisted sexcapades of American Pie than I can in the less self-aware varieties that followed.
