Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
After the launch of the first blockbuster For all the boys film in 2018, Jenny Han, author of the trilogy of which franchise is adapted, wrote in Today, “Knowing that Korean American Lara Jean Covey joined Samantha Baker in Sixteen candles and Cher Horowitz in Clueless as iconic heroines of the teenage rom-com looks historic and important. ”And, in fact, Lara Jean is perhaps the first of these teenage American characters of the last 40 years who is in her mold and is not a prototypical white suburban girl.
Like Molly Ringwald and Alicia Silverstone before her, Lana Condor’s acting, wonderfully tender and more charismatic as the films progress, will help to consolidate Lara Jean as one of those classic teenage heroines. Although Noah Centineo seemed, at first, to be the emerging star of the franchise, at the end of the third film, it is Condor’s charm that endures, not Centineo’s increasingly dark smile. The other, and main, reason for which she will live, is that Lara Jean is made of the same fabric as those teen characters who were fondly remembered decades after the fact. How CluelessTravis Birkenstock’s could say, what I feel about Cher Horowitz is how my kids will feel about Lara Jean.
But I wonder what it means and if it is necessarily a good thing. My own references come mainly from Disney, Hillary Duff, Miley Cyrus and Lindsay Lohan characters from the daughters. They taught me about bras, hormones and the importance of friendship, but the strongest impressions they left were those most often reinforced: that I must place a sacred emphasis on American public school rituals, like school dances and football games. That my main antagonist in life would be an unnecessarily malicious girl and that, at any moment, my efforts to be cool could be frustrated by some kind of public embarrassment. All of these are tropes that are repeated in the TATB films, with the instance of constraint – the circulation of Lara Jean’s “sex tape” – being resolved before the effect of public sexual humiliation on a teenager is explored.
But you can trace Lara Jean further back, to the teenage heroines of the 80s and 90s. She is not undergoing a makeover, but it is easy to see her similarities to another cunning and studious introvert – Laney Boggs. This is emphasized by the party scene needed since the first TATB film in which Peter Kavinsky takes Lara Jean as his date, just so that she can be ridiculed by the unnecessarily malicious girl. Meanwhile TATB it is not entirely a story about a boy trying to change a girl because she is not good enough, we still see Lara Jean trying, in the second film, to align herself with her idea of “perfect girlfriend”. It is an idea built on a long line of classic teenage heroines and Peter’s instructions, which include the suggestion that Lara Jean dress as a cheerleader to support him in his lacrosse game.
And of course she does, because as the films unconsciously explain, Lara Jean’s idea of love is completely Hughesian, a type of romance so regressive that Ringwald herself adopted THE New Yorker to reassess his work with John Hughes after the events of Me Too. It is an idea of love that describes romantic male heroes as ideal, and makes them so undeniably perfect that we can forget that they are an accessory to a dating rape. It is an idea that teaches girls that great romantic gestures mean love and that virginity is a precious thing to be saved and that the act of taking it out must be ecclesiastical or we have failed.
Lara Jean is so similar to Samantha Baker that Sixteen candles, your favorite film, is referred to several times throughout the first TATB film, and its elements are recurrent throughout the trilogy. The strangest moment of this is when she and her sister watch with Peter, and he points out that Long Duk Dong’s character, a famous example of anti-Asian racism in American cinema, is indeed racist.
It’s a scene that wouldn’t have existed 15 years ago, but I wonder what I would have gotten out of it if I had seen it back then. Perhaps Peter would receive my seal of approval for noting racism. At the same time, I would have seen Lara Jean, the rare heroine who looked more like me than the others, excusing racism because Jake Ryan’s character is hot. I would then see her fall in love with Peter Kavinsky – Jake Ryan from TATB universe – and I don’t doubt for a second that I should aspire to be with someone like him.
And of course I dated Jake Ryans from all over the world, because I saw the same thing 15 years ago. With a few exceptions – 10 things I hate about you Kat Stratford comes to mind – our most enduring teenage characters not only share the same romantic aspirations, but have failed to evolve beyond a shared set of traits marked by passivity, obedience and insecurity. These are the things that make them iconic, and it only makes sense when we remember that the films and programs about adolescence in America are, for the most part, made by men for girls. (The first TATB film was directed by a woman, but the two seconds were directed by men.)
Perhaps the franchise’s greatest legacy is the positioning of Condor, a Korean-American actress, as a teenage icon in the image of Alicia Silverstone or Hillary Duff. I am optimistic that she will have the same kind of opportunities as her white predecessors, as it has already been announced that she will star and executive produce a new Netflix comedy.
As for Lara Jean, what I can say is that she is a step in the right direction when it comes to how an archetypal and traditional American teenager looks and lives; unlike the previous ones, she comes from a biracial family, sometimes uses hanboks and drinks Yakult instead of Coke.
These things seem, especially to people like me, who grew up biracial in America, more like fun cultural signs that work well for a Netflix movie than significant aspects of their Korean heritage. But my teenage self would have seen much more of her life in Lara Jean Covey’s than in Cher Horowitz. And I think that’s what Han meant when he said that Lara Jean is historical and important – because, in that sense, she is. In others, it is the same as all the others.
For all boys: always and forever is now available on Netflix.