The 2000s brought us many blessings, such as heinous fashion trends (now coming back around, of course), questionable children’s toys, and some weird tingly feelings about that drama queen, “feminism.” Caught up in those weird tinglies was a wave of girl gang flicks centered around career goals and supportive female relationships, with a relative lack of romance-focused plot. One of the most prominent for millenials was Josie and the Pussycats, directed by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan. While these formative films seemed to phase out as a result of poor box office sales, and oddly similar rotten reviews, they continue to have a cult following. This cult following consists of many a bisexual, of which I am one, and I am here to argue Josie and the Pussycats’ eternal vitality amongst our community.
The opening credits roll over pre-teens behind bars squealing with exaggerated pain and delight as the faux hit boy band “DeJour” performs their Backstreet Boy knockoff, “Back Door Lover”. It is the only unoriginal, clearly spoofed song in the entire film, and it’s both fitting and totally entertaining. Cut to a private jet, with a close up on the bickering boys as they resolve their fraternal issues and bring up a mysterious background recording on their last track. When confronted, their manager – the eyebrow-centric villain Wyatt Frame (Alan Cumming) – quietly crashes their plane, safely parachuting himself down and into the town of Riverdale, where he stumbles upon struggling all-girl band Josie and the Pussycats.
Our introduction to the Pussycats is a rockin’ bop over a montage of their various skills and hobbies which vary from sporty to charitable to… general pet lover. Fairly stereotypical so far, but luckily, in the following scene, the titular Josie (Rachael Leigh Cook) fixes her love interest’s car while she gets serenaded by him, as he (Alan M) plays the damsel in distress with a broken down truck.
Over these first ten minutes of the film my pubescent semi-sexual curious brain experienced some life altering realizations. Firstly, I realized screaming teenage girls can be obsessed with something that I am not, like men in leather fire pants and fuzzy top hats (i.e. worshipping talentless men/heteronormativity at a very young age). Then the stark contrast of opening with the silly pop boys and quickly flipping it to the true narrative of the rockin’ girls, made me realize how few stories center on a majority-female cast with motives unrelated to men/love. I was completely disarmed by an all female band, especially one that consisted of best friends, supportive relationships, and a communal living situation. Up until then my mind hadn’t really computed what would happen if you didn’t fall in love, move in together, do the marriage, and have the babies.
The cherry on top was watching Josie fix the truck, and thinking “wait you can be straight and fix cars?… Or maybe she’s bisexual, and maybe when you’re bi you don’t look butch. Maybe I’m bi. But I can’t fix cars. But I want to, and I think I really want to date Josie.” These first two scenes cracked open a world of possibilities for me, both in life and sex, and I know the rest of the movie played a memorable role in many a bisexual’s’ journey.
Why does my tweenage brain process matter? Because while everyone was out getting boyfriends, I was watching mass media and wondering why everyone suddenly seemed to be “obsessed with penis and vagina” as Spring Awakening so delicately puts it. For us late bloomers the “am I gay?” questions come at breakneck speed with every movie consumed and best friend made. We struggle with accepting our questioning selves, riddled with the notion that “coming out” is intrinsic to entering the loving arms of the gay community. The reason we feel this way is not the LGBTQ+ community and how it represents itself, but the mainstream media that attempts to represent it by circulating repetitive stereotypical characters and plots. In Josie and the Pussycats, while none of the characters “come out” as bi or gay, by watching multi-dimensional female characters who possess some integrated “queer” traits/signifiers, and don’t have clear love interests, I could allow myself the space to question without the pressure of knowing my sexuality.
So, post initial bop and montage but pre-stumbled upon by a record producer, the girls are sharing a bowl of 25 cent ramen and getting paid 5 dollars a gig. Yet, they are hopeful, supportive, and clearly living in a priceless female rock haven. Enter their joke of a manager who remains comically useless throughout their ascent, highlighting the girls’ self driven career attitudes and “friendship superpowers” that carry the rest of the movie.
This “friendship super power” is one of the most profound trends to take the media by storm in the 2000s, starting with the literal superheroes The Powerpuff Girls (whose rock theme song is very reminiscent of the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack). Instead of using women as antagonists towards each other or the antitheses of men, there was a shift to an inward focus on the divine power of supportive female relationships. The media was quick to adopt the formula by re-creating the character dynamics of “sugar, spice, and everything nice” in order to maintain dramatic tension without romance or sex involved. This is evident in both Blue Crush and Josie and the Pussycats, with “Josie” being “Sugar”, “Val” being “Spice”, and “Melodie” being “everything nice.” Josie moves the plot forward by being the ringleader, Val creates the tension by being wary, anxious, and eventually confrontational about all the fast/major changes, and Melodie creates comic relief, provides morale, and eases the tension in the group.
This was a key element regardless of its huge contribution to feminism, because even though the screenwriters may not have intended to write bisexual characters, this formula gave the illusion that they did. As a young viewer I was primarily exposed to heterosexually structured plot lines, with the tension relying on love and relationships. What happens when you substitute all those characters for women is that the characters supplying the main tension could be perceived as love interests. While Buttercup (Powerpuff Girls), Eden (Blue Crush), and Val never come out as gay or bisexual, their characters share some stereotypical characteristics of the queer community, from Buttercup’s character description as “tomboy” to Val and Eden’s buff sport-centered lifestyles. By sprinkling in some “queer traits” while using these characters to create the tension, these films created a safe space for those of us curious and questioning. In my mind, if this character was thriving without me knowing her sexuality, I thought I might be able to thrive without 100% knowing mine.
In mass queer media, teenage characters are often depicted as either gay and not admitting or coming to terms with it, or openly gay and being bullied/shamed for it, which conveys this narrative that being gay is a true known fact that’s buried somewhere inside you, and all you have to do is accept it. While that may be true for some, I only found peace with my sexuality when I accepted that Questioning was a valid form of identity, which ultimately led me to bisexuality. Bisexuality itself doesn’t get much of the mass media limelight, and when it does it’s often associated with a strong sexual appetite, or as “just a phase”. While I could be projecting bisexuality onto these characters because they were the closest thing to relatable the media had given me, by integrating a grab bag of queer traits Josie and the Pussycats helped pave the way for more complex queer characters.
If this celebration doesn’t have you amped enough already to go watch (or hopefully re-watch) Josie and the Pussycats to celebrate their 20th anniversary, I’ll entice you with the rest of its major highlights. Not only is it a satire on capitalism, which maybe I was just so turned on by that I thought I was having queer thoughts about the characters, it’s short, fast-paced, and contains a mind-fuck-element that – while riddled with plot holes – is equal to or greater than the mind-fuckedness of Tenet. It’s no wonder that Disney would blatantly rip it off immediately with their own similarly feline *cough Cheetah Girls cough* girl power formula film.
Happy watching!
