It’s not that I hate every ’90s teen sex comedy. Believe me, as a teen who was not having sex in the ’90s, I needed them to live. I just think a lot of them are bad, and have bad morals, and did bad things to boys’ and girls’ brains, but that doesn’t mean I can’t like them. I was a Can’t Hardly Wait girl myself, and that shit is absolutely radioactive with incel energy. This tension is the stuff of life.
American Pie was the big one, though, and I never got it. I just always thought it was the least charming of the bunch, Eugene Levy and Natasha Lyonne notwithstanding.1 That said, this franchise has made a collective $1 billion. So change my mind, rewatch!!! (Spoiler: it won’t!)
American Pie is about a group of high school boys who make a pact to lose their virginities before they graduate.
Jason Biggs is our main guy, whose problem is that he cannot stop masturbating in front of his parents, which is weird because if there’s one thing I know about teenagers, it’s that they are masters of secrecy! When I was in high school, if I was going to steal an extra Dorito after my mom told me I couldn’t have any more Doritos, I would memorize the exact topography of the Doritos in the bag and the bag’s placement in the snack drawer and I would SILENTLY Jenga a single Dorito out of there and snap the chip clip back in the exact right position to the millimeter and then backflip out of the kitchen like motherfucking Sydney Bristow! Yet Biggs “accidentally” masturbates in front of his parents…three? Four times in this movie? And god knows how many more times later in the franchise! I haven’t watched any of those, but it would be bad storytelling to have your protagonist overcome the defining struggle of his life at the very beginning of his hero’s journey, and for Jason Biggs, that’s masturbating in front of his parents. One might argue that masturbating in front of his parents is Jason Biggs’s entire personality. And one would be almost right, except that he is also 1 percent ruthless objectification of women and 4 percent battery. Jason Biggs looks like a battery.
Chris Klein is a lacrosse jock with a tender heart who is constantly being harassed by Stifler (class clown/bully/sexual success) about how he needs to be pulling chicks the old-fashioned way: by insulting and tricking them.
Kevin(?) has a beautiful girlfriend, Tara Reid, who is not ready to have sex because she wants it to be “perfect” and because Kevin(?) won’t say I love you back. Who even remembered that Kevin, one of the four main characters in this movie, was even a character in this movie? Not me! Is his name actually Kevin? I will not look it up!
Finch is the old soul of the pack, which you can tell because he has fine tastes such as “mochaccinos,”2 lying, and hiding.
Did you realize that only twenty years ago, it was still socially acceptable to make ensemble comedies of all white men who look exactly alike even though one of them is a battery?
Stifler is having a party tonight, and the four pals are sitting around wondering if this will be the night they finally coerce a girl into intercoursing them. Biggs asks what “third base” feels like, and Chris Klein tells him it’s “like warm apple pie.” Is it, though???? Oh yeah, you know, crusty and mushy!
Klein isn’t going to the party because he has a date with a college chick, and he’s been practicing his lines for sex-convincing.
Kevin(?) wonders if tonight is the night that Tara Reid will finally let him break through her flaky crust.
The fourth guy, I forget what he does.
The party opens with a truly virtuosic full-minute-long take of Stifler walking around being a dirtbag, exactly like the car chase in Children of Men but with more Barenaked Ladies. Biggs and Kevin(?) can’t believe it when Sherman, a guy they think is worse than they are, tells them he’s had sex before. The Shermanator is supposedly worse because he is an unappealing chauvinist nerd who wears ugly big jeans, whereas our heroes are…different from that. Biggs tries talking to his crush, Nadia, but beefs it. Meanwhile, on his date with the college girl, Chris Klein tries out the sex line he prepared for 100 percent guaranteed sex: “Suck me, beautiful.” (Jesus, who’s your dating coach—Castor Troy?) The college girl laughs in his face and tells him she’s majoring in “postmodern feminist thought,” which, in the ’90s, was a punch line. Haha! Thinking about feminism! Postmodern—does that word even have a meaning?? She suggests that if he wants to have sex with a woman, he should try being less like a Ying Yang Twin and more like a human being who is normal, nice, and enjoys talking about shared interests or the news of the day. Yeah, right! Nice try, Lorena Bobbitt.
At the party, Tara Reid and Kevin(?) go up to one of the bedrooms where she sucks his dick and then he jizzes into a beer. Stifler kicks them out so he can try to have disrespectful sex with a girl named Sarah in there (“I don’t know if I want to be doing this”—Sarah, hilariously!), but then just when he’s about to successfully badger her into accepting his penis, Stifler accidentally glugs the jizz beer! Guk guk guk right down! And then
