She's the Man (review)

Over the course of the so-called "Bard Boom"-which began with Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in 1989 and continues unabated with his recently released As You Like It-cultural manifestations of Shakespeare have become increasingly populist. In 2005, an extract from A Midsummer Night's Dream was used to advertise that most iconic youth-oriented product, Levi's jeans; and in 2007, the playwright himself battled intergalactic demons in an episode of the third series of the hugely successful, revamped BBC television program Doctor Who. I chose to study this popular appropriation of Shakespeare in my doctoral research because, as a teenager, I witnessed how my generation's attitudes towards our exam texts and their author were changed by films like William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (Luhrmann, 1996), Shakespeare in Love (Madden, 1998), and 10 Things I Hate About You (Junger, 1999). For this reason, I was interested to see a new addition to the burgeoning Shakespearean teen film sub-genre, She's the Man (Fickman, 2006), which declares itself "inspired by" Twelfth Night and was written by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, the duo behind the 10 Things screenplay.

The key element of Twelfth Night reproduced in She's the Man is the central plot involving gender masquerade and romantic complication. Viola Hastings disguises herself as her twin brother Sebastian, taking his place at a new boarding school while he is on an unauthorized jaunt to London with his band, in order to win a place on the boys' soccer team and thereby prove that she is capable of competing with the stronger sex at "the beautiful game." There Viola falls for soccer captain and roommate Duke Orsino, who has a crush on her lab partner, the recently dumped and vulnerable Olivia Lennox, who is in turn attracted to the unusually sensitive new boy in class. Viola-as-Sebastian offers Duke insights into the female mind and receives extra soccer coaching in return. The situation reaches a head when the real Sebastian returns and, unaware of his sister's deception, is astonished to find himself first assailed by Olivia and then ushered onto the soccer pitch. During the course of this crucial match, the truth emerges and Viola establishes her right to play with the boys by scoring the winning penalty kick. Duke recovers from the shock of discovering that his teammate and dorm confidante is also a "hot chick," and he escorts Viola-now in her "woman's weeds"-to the debutante ball, where Sebastian partners with Olivia.

In this way, the makers of She's the Man follow Shakespeare's "blueprint" in "homage" to Twelfth Night, as they explain in a DVD featurette. The film's cast of supporting characters and subplots gesture towards the play, but the relationship is fairly loose. Duke has two soccer playing friends named Andrew and Toby, who serve a comic function as idiotic embodiments of the contradictory impulses of today's adolescent masculinity. Olivia, meanwhile, attracts the unwanted attentions of Malcolm Festes, a preppy and obsessive fellow student, who has a pet tarantula named Malvolio and who shows up at the climatic soccer match wearing yellow, diamond-patterned golfing socks. The addition of extra players to the romantic game, in the form of Viola's "dumb jock" ex-boyfriend Justin and Sebastian's high-maintenance girlfriend Monique, seems intended to emphasize the difference between unsatisfactory, transient modern relationships and timeless true love. Other references are made to the film's Shakespearean intertext through diegetic detail: the school is Illyria Preparatory; the debutante season is organized by the Stratford Junior League; there is a billboard advertising the school play What You Will; and the students' favorite eating and meeting place is Cesario's Restaurant. The only lines from Shakespeare's text that are cited in She's the Man are the now proverbial ones concerning greatness, which here feature as a sporting pep-talk, with Duke quoting his coach rather than the original source.

McCullah Lutz and Smith thus replicate the strategy for expressing Shakespeare in teen...