Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #243 G.B.F. (2013)
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Not too long ago someone had the bright idea to resurrect Heathers as a television show. The twist, this time around, was that the conventional social dynamics were now reversed and queer, trans and POC ruled the school, literally and figuratively, while straight white Christians were deemed hopelessly uncool.
To say that the show was not warmly received would be a colossal understatement. It was the exact wrong show for its time and place, a dark comedy that seemed to feed into the boomer-fueled notion that young people were all social justice warriors more interested in performative “wokeness” and being seen as righteous than in doing the right thing or being good people.
It similarly tapped into reactionary paranoia that white straight Christians are the real victims in contemporary society since it’s ostensibly still always Kosher to mock them but #problematic to make fun of anyone else.
Jawbreaker auteur Darren Stein’s 2013 high school comedy G.B.F. is only slightly less influenced by Heathers than the actual Heathers television show. It has all the right influences: in addition to Heathers, it owes a heavy debt to Mean Girls, which is referenced repeatedly, Stein’s own Jawbreaker and Rock N' Roll High School, not to me mention the campy satire of Frank Tashlin and John Waters.
If I might set the bar impossibly low, G.B.F. is more sensitive and less problematic than the Heathers TV show. But it nevertheless also subscribes to the notion that things have changed so dramatically that coming out as gay in high school can be a ticket to instant, explosive popularity rather than an invitation to be bullied and humiliated by jocks and the popular kids.
In G.B.F., ambitious, status-obsessed closeted gay teenager Brent Van Camp (Paul Iacono) has a foolproof plan to rocket up the social ladder, to a place of God-like prominence.
He hopes to capitalize on a culture-wide craze for Gay Best Friends by becoming the first person in his high school to come out as homosexual. He imagines that once he’s out of the closet the school’s most popular girls, the queen bees and mean girls, as it were, AKA the Heathers (G.B.F is really derivative, is what I’m saying) will fight each other for a chance to score him as their Gay Best Friend.
But before Brent can put his plan into action his similarly closeted gay best friend Tanner Daniels (Michael J. Willett) is outed. Everything that Brent hoped would happen to himself ends up happening instead to Tanner.
The three most popular girls in the school, each of whom represents a major clique, compete to win the season’s hottest accessory: a genuine homosexual to serve as a sidekick, comic relief, sassy life coach and fashion consultant.
Tanner ends up losing his soul and his best friend in his mad quest for empty, meaningless popularity.
To the popular girls seeking Tanner’s gay best friendship, the insecure teenager is a homosexual above all else. They are incapable of seeing him through any prism other than their own hackneyed conception of homosexual fabulousness.
They are incapable of seeing Tanner as a human being and equal with dreams and anxieties and needs of his own instead of a fierce, fabulous pet/mascot whose purpose in life is to amuse them as a sort of human accessory.
G.B.F. makes the salient satirical point early on that the stereotype of the supportive, selfless, fiercely loyal and absolutely fabulous gay best friend robs gay men of their autonomy, dignity and humanity and reduces them to cartoons and caricatures.
Unfortunately it then makes that point again. And again. And again. And again. By the time the movie climaxes with Tanner delivering a speech to his high school about how the stereotype of the supportive, selfless, fiercely loyal and absolutely fabulous gay best friend robs gay men of their autonomy, dignity and humanity it’s all too apparent that that’s all the movie has to say.
Instead of being an element of the film’s social commentary, it represents the entirety. G.B.F begins to feel like a one joke comedy. Even more frustratingly, it’s a one idea comedy as well.
G.B.F exhausts its one joke and one idea early on and then is doomed to repeat it over and over and over again with minor variations.
The popular girls are incapable of seeing Tanner as anything other than a sassy, stereotypical gay dude, even though he’s not terribly sassy or particularly stereotypical. The problem is that the movie’s conception of him isn’t much more nuanced.
It’s established early on, for example, that Tanner loves comic books but we never actually see him reading or talking about comic books. It’s a reversal of the stereotype of the fabulous, fashion-obsessed diva/queen every bit as empty and arbitrary as the stereotypes it’s ostensibly subverting.
G.B.F is stylish in the way Jawbreaker was stylish and clever at times and Gayheart has a nice cameo as Tanner’s supportive mother but G.B.F is didactic in a way Stein’s earlier film was not.
It’s not enough for G.B.F to have a moral and a very clear message: it has to keep repeating that moral and message until even the dimmest viewer catches on.
For all of his style and fun, Stein ultimately seems more interested here in making a point than a movie.
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