The films were also buoyed by feminism’s increasing profile in the decade’s popular culture. In an era that saw the improbable mainstream success of transgressive female musicians like Courtney Love and Liz Phair, examination of women’s emotions that were once taboo was now seen as reasonable and empowering—and even profitable.
But were the films actually empowering? On paper, movies about sexy teenage girl murderers sound like a sexist mess. But in execution (pun intended), the best of these films were about subverting preconceptions. Many of these films, says Bender, “wink at the fact that teen girls have always been simultaneously hated on and lusted after by the mainstream viewer, who is by and large presumed to be the typical heterosexual white man. So in many cases, these films play to this desire to see ‘hot’ ‘bad’ teen girls, but they subvert it by showing they are capable of violence.” And when it comes to teen female viewers, notes Bender, “I do think, given all the cool and charismatic girls in this genre, no matter how bad they are and what crimes they commit, there is still often some level of emotional connection and identification to be made by female viewers.”
This, Hagen points out, makes a clear connection to a previous genre about women who “snapped”: “I think a lot of women have not had those characters since the forties or the fifties, with film noir,” characters that allow the viewer to say “’Oh, she’s bad. But I love her.’” Though ‘90s teens often killed over friendship, while ‘40s femme fatales usually killed for love or money, both trends depicted women who transgress in a sympathetic light, giving the viewer room to examine their own transgressive feelings, using over-the-top violence as a metaphor to examine jealousy, rage, and other emotions women are largely expected to repress. “Some of these [‘90s teen] characters, I think, are sort of radical and can fit in more of those transgressive feminist modes,” says Hagen. Most viewers don’t identify with Heathers”‘ Veronica Sawyer because they think it’s cool to commit murder; she’s beloved because she offers a transgressive dramatization of the social pressures teen girls live with. We look at her and think, Hagen says, that “it’s hard being the good girl all the time.”
However, some of these films are exactly as gross and sexist as you’d think a film about a sexy teenage girl murderer would be. In films like “The Crush” or “Wild Things” (or even, to a lesser extent, “Jawbreaker”), teenage girls are evil, one-dimensional vixens who claim adult men as their victims—and to pull that off, notes critic Leila Latif, “you actually have to make the 16-year-old girl a full-on Hannibal Lecter sociopath.” Rather than reading as explorations of the darkness and gray areas of female adolescence, the characters in these particular films, says Latif, “always feel like male fantasies to me … And I wonder whether there’s a slight self-reassurance about, ‘We [adult men are] not the bad guys.’”