She’s All That
Robert Iscove (dir.) | film | 1999
Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw | play | 1912
Mary Evans/MIRAMAX FILMS/Ronald Grant/Everett
Traces of Shaw’s Pygmalion trickle through She’s All That. Laney Boggs, a geeky teenager who’s more interested in art and political injustice than being popular, is motherless, as is Eliza Doolittle, who explains, “ain’t got no mother. Her that turned me out was my sixth stepmother.” Laney has been raised by her father, a pool man, his profession the 20th-century Southern California equivalent of Mr. Doolittle’s lowly work as a dustman (trash collector). More social polemics surface when Laney confronts a nasty popular girl, saying, “For a minute there, I forgot why I avoided places like this and people like you.” Her nemesis reminds her that those outside the inner circle barely merit the notice of those within: “Avoided us? Honey, look around you. To everyone here who matters, you’re vapor, you’re spam, a waste of perfectly good yearbook space.”
But this isn’t Shaw, it’s an American high school comedy that includes a gross-out scene in which two teenage bullies sprinkle a pizza with pubic hair. Just think: A century ago the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell put her career at risk when she said, “Not bloody likely” as the first Eliza in the original London staging of Pygmalion.