The seven types of White people you’ll meet in the 1999 motion picture Cruel Intentions
The White Pages summer movie series is back with the most important taxonomy you'll read this week
The most important thing to know about the 1999 film Cruel Intentions is that it is based on a 1782 French novel called Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Let’s consider that perfect title again. Les Liaisons Dangereuses! That’s its real name! It’s not a fake French title that I, an uncultured American slob, made up while I mimed wearing a beret and eating a baguette. They might as well have called it Les Sexy Teens Who Are, How You Say?… Très Mean To Each Other! I love it so much. How were the liaisons, you ask? They were DANGEREUSES!
Have you watched Cruel Intentions lately? Or ever? It’s a real trip. One of my favorite reference points, in describing contemporary American politics/culture/whatever, is that old Onion headline about how “Marilyn Manson Now Going Door To Door To Shock People.” Suffice to say, Cruel Intentions is a campy, schlocky, “going door to door to shock people” film. Are the kids all right? No, they are not all right! They are devious and backstabbing. They are homophobic and racist and sexist. They are having a logistically confounding amount of sex, and doing so solely to dominate and humiliate one other. Of course the main characters are step-siblings whose conversations are 40% about evil plots and 60% about their desire to have incestual intercourse with each other. Were you shocked at all that back in 1999, teenage Montana yokel version of me? Are you still shocked in 2024, middle-aged Rust Belt dad version of me? Yeah, man. What do you want from me? I’ve got tender middle American sensibilities. I’m just an Okie Montanan from Muskogee a pretty cosmopolitan college town, all things considered. But still!
The point of Cruel Intentions isn’t that the teens are bad. It’s which teens specifically are bad. We’re talking wealthy, White, captain-of-the-universe New York kids. The kind of kids that those of us in the hinterlands imagined existing in far-off metropoles. These were kids that acted like jerk-ish, self-important grown-ups because they were bequeathed far more privilege and self-regard than 99% of actual adults. Precocious kids who had everything in the world and were still bored. Kids who could kill us on 5th Avenue and get away with it. Those kids sucked, we imagined!
I thought a lot about 1999 as I re-watched Cruel Intentions last night. That’s not a trenchant statement. The film is basically a “This Year in Whiteness: 1999” clip show— all “Bittersweet Symphony” and Rachel-from-Friends-haircuts and End of History nihilism. You can learn a lot about an era from how it considers its wealthy White teen jagoffs. By the end of the 1990s, in those last gasp years of the Clinton administration, those of us who weren’t wildly wealthy had largely accepted two interconnected truths: our robber baron overlords were a real bummer, but after two straight decades of Reagan-y anointment and Clintonian third-way institutionalization, they were now a fact of life. I mean, at least the Cruel Intentions gang didn’t try to murder and/or eat each other. Have you seen Silence of the Lambs and American Psycho? I haven’t, on account of being a wimp, but I’ve heard tell!
“Billionaires are ghoulish and potentially murder-y, but inevitable, so what are you gonna do?” isn’t a sustainable foundation for mass political movements, but I’ll give it this: it’s far less cursed than what came next.