I actually wanted to bring this topic up from a different direction, since in my experience of sex films (or films dealing primarily with sex, or whatever you want to call them) has been that that they almost always reach the conclusion that the solution to all the protagonist’s problems is to either turn gay, take-up polyamory, or both. I suppose a lot of that has to do with the target audience or something. Still, it seems like one of those conclusions that can only be reached so many times in so many ways before it gets old.

One detail of the film I’ve always loved is the fact that the girls to to a Catholic school. This underlines several of the girls’ motivations: one, they clearly are rebelling against the strictures of an organized religion. Two, the well presented reality of a “uniform” being modified by its wearers to throw the idea of conformity or even a level playing field back in its delvelopers’ (no matter how well meaning) faces.

And three, the pretty clearly implied fact that not only are none of the girls believers in Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, beyond the most superficial tokenry, but none of thier parents are either! As you mentioned, Nancy is probably on scholarship, but she’s a this particular school because of its academics, not its religious background (her mother certainly doesn’t seem devout.) And Sarah’s parents are as close to literally invisible as it’s possible to be without being Claud Raines. You again get the feeling this was the closest “good” school to the house they happened to select and that’s where Sarah’s going. You only see Bonnie’s mom in one scene and Rochelle’s not at all, but it doesn’t take much to come to pretty much the same conclusion about them.

The fact that these girls were pretty much tossed into a system with which they had no affiliation or sympathy and then, for all emotional purposes, abandoned, was a big theme throughout the ninties. The benign neglect from loving-but-clueless parents that was shown in countless eighties films streamlined into something altogether meaner and darker in the next decade–the idea that kids were to be condsidered “responsible for their actions” at younger and younger ages, and that there were structures, in place of people, to fulfill any caring or nurturance needs.

When eighties kids rebelled in the movies, they did so against evil people. When nineties kids did, it was against the evil of structures, of emptiness and fragmentation.

The Car: “But we can’t cancel the parade! It would destroy tourist season!”

Interesting that this film should have succeeded where most of the Jaws copycats didn’t – perhaps because, having abandoned the killer animal conceit, the makers felt no need to make any pretence of random selection or non-malevolence about the monster?

If you’re adapting Ovid, it’s a crying shame not to have at least one of the protagonists called Corinna!

The Craft: I agree that much of the concept in earlier rebel-films is restoration: putting the rebels into a good place in society so that everyone’s happy together, rather than allowing them to stay happily outside it. But the only alternative to being in the mainstream of society that most filmmakers can conceive is weirdness, and probably violence and death. (Just as most filmmakers have trouble portraying a romantic relationship that’s not one-man-one-woman; anything else is usually just there as an initiator for jealousy and murder.)