![]() ![]() I adopted what is turning out to be a lifetime aversion to Ernest Hemingway (“an abusive, alcoholic misogynist who squandered half of his life hanging around Picasso trying to nail his leftovers”). I asked my parents for a guitar (I played the harp at this time, which is neither here nor there). And I decided I definitely wanted to be her. “But it’s only four-thirty.” Her father, Walter, beams. “Sadly, no,” she says, barely looking up from her book. ![]() “Make anyone cry today?” her father asks when he comes home to find his daughter curled up with Plath. On the rug, I sit up straight.ĭespite the fact that all princesses know kung-fu now, at the time I had never seen anyone like Kat Stratford on television: a lead female character who drove a cool car, extolled the virtues of feminist literature, once kicked Bobby Ridgeway in the balls (unless in fact he did he kick himself in the balls, right after groping her in the lunch line), used words like “sphincter,” played the guitar, and-importantly-sat around after school reading The Bell Jar. Kat, who does not wear lip gloss, or bop. Kat, who doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her. This movie will now proceed on Kat’s terms. She drives off, and the credits continue, and the music is non-diegetic again-but now it’s Joan Jett. The expression on Julia Stiles’s face is perfect in its neutrality. They sneak a glance in her direction their eyes immediately return to the road/camera in fear. Her Joan Jett drowns out their Barenaked Ladies. Up pulls Kat Stratford-the mewling, rampallian wretch herself-in her rusted red beater. They’re bopping to the beat, singing along. Except that it isn’t, because presently, a car full of lip-glossed bubblegum poppers rolls to a stop at an intersection, and we see that the music is in fact coming from their car. ![]() It’s what I would later learn is called “non-diegetic sound”: sound not existing in the world of the movie, but only for the viewer. The Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week” plays over those colorful chalk-scratch credits. I sit on the rug in front of the television. I saw it only months later, on that second small TV, and I remember being weirdly entranced by the white and green VHS box, with the six main characters on the front, and the little arrow descending from the final ‘u’ of the title to point, oddly, at Bianca’s clavicle, somewhat missing its target of Patrick, who is object of the titular hate. I was twelve in March of 1999, when 10 Things I Hate About You came out, though I didn’t see it in theaters. The only thing I ever remember watching on the second TV is Bob Ross and static. Eventually, we did get a second, equally small TV, with a built-in VHS player, which my parents abandoned downstairs in the living room, unnoticed by our couches, which continued to have eyes only for each other. I do not remember experiencing this as a hardship at the time-it’s not as though that television had cable, even, and anyway I liked to read. It was in my parents’ bedroom, and I was allowed to watch Saturday morning cartoons for a single hour a week. When I tell people this, they usually laugh, as though that’s embarrassing, or a lie. (Yes, yes, we’re all super old.) It also changed my life. A reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, but set in high school (because it was 1999), it opened at #2 in the US, just behind The Matrix. Twenty years ago this week, 10 Things I Hate About You hit the big screen. ![]()
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