Never Been Kissed (1999)

directed by Raja Gosnell

Tara Giancaspro

Someone once told me that to write well you have to write what you know. This is what I know. I am thirty-three years old and I have never really kissed a guy.

Yes, yes, I have been kissed. I have been kissed by Michaels and Matts and even a Gianmarco. I have been kissed by bassists and drummers and a boy who sang Dwight Yoakam’s “Fast As You” and only Dwight Yoakam’s “Fast As You” in the shower. I have been kissed on piers and in Nissans and at a company Christmas (after)party.

But I have never kissed a guy on a baseball diamond in a frilly pink dress and a steep barrel curl in front of a crowd of my coworkers and classmates. I have never had the kiss that rattles my bones and the enforced mundanity of my world, that begins my life anew, that harkens my heart’s calling and heals all my hurts, and all my life I have felt robbed. Robbed like Charlie the Unicorn of his kidney. Deprived, denied, like Judy Garland her Oscar for A Star is Born. In my most privileged moments of solipsism, it is the Supreme Court Chief in-Justice of my life.

1999’s Never Been Kissed is the feather-trimmed, frosted-lipped culprit.

*

A geek to the core, most of my childhood years were spent doing extra homework I requested from the teacher.

It is just lip skin on lip skin. I got a 2030 on my SATs and spelled “privileged” up there without swapping the e’s and i’s like spit. My hometown library had to implement a rule because of how many books I took out per visit, no matter that I returned each, read, ahead of their due date back home to their shelf siblings. I am smarter than this.

Except I am not, and never have been.

My high school did not offer study hall so I outsourced, doing the homework of another class during each 45-minute bout of instruction and, once completed, courting middle distance as I fantasized about, for much of it, the boy who wore the very tight Queens of the Stone age T-shirt, who received the torrented CD-R of the new Los Campesinos! album that gave me a virus and crashed my computer. The boy, the skinniness of his jeans, the traits we shared that proved our star-cast compatibility, was interchangeable—had been since I was a very little kid watching edited, Mentos-commercial-hyphenated TNT movies with my mother in bed. The objective was not.

In the scene, which could be set at night or in the school hallway or at, sure, a baseball game, anywhere public enough to create high stakes or dark enough to negate how squinty I become in sunlight, Kevin/Noel/Joe/Paul/Chris/Louis/Nick/Other Louis/Kyle would stride forward, after banter that would make George Cukor blush, after twin peals of laughter and caught eyes, after some disagreement laden with secreted love, and kiss me. Intentional, always standing, only breaking stance to perhaps walk me backwards towards the nearest wall. And their hands on my face. There have to be hands on my face. What is the point of you having hands if they are not on my face.

The scene was scored, then and now—it’s not nostalgia if you never put it away—by teen dramas and dramatic teens in my view. Jackson Waters’s “Center of Attention,” cribbed from Peyton Sawyer’s confession of love to one Lucas Scott on One Tree Hill. Steel Train’s “Kill Monsters in the Rain,” cribbed from Ms. Wheeler’s art class playlist sophomore year. PAS/CAL’s “Wake Up Wake Up Wake Up,” cribbed from a Payless commercial.

I have lost entire months’ of time across my life to this behavior.

I blame no one but Drew Barrymore.

*

Yes, it is embarrassing to share this with the world. But it would be hard to explain what I learned and how I learned it without sharing this humiliating history.

Never Been Kissed, directed by Raja Gosnell off a script by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, chronicles a 25-year-old journalist going undercover at a local high school to report on the antics of the modern student, posing as one herself despite her woeful and cruelly-rewarded own endeavor of once being a teenager. Josie Geller (Drew Barrymore, in a series of unfortunate wigs) surveils the inscrutable, struggling to acclimate to those who would inform the story and validate her unhealed inner teen best, the popular clique (Jessica Alba, Marley Shelton, James Franco) led by the “totally rufus” Guy Perkins (Jeremy Jordan), not your conventional football jock but something far more ethereal, a purple button-down relieved of half its buttons and the shallow pool of “deep” thought that will get him roped into an ayurvedic cult run by a white man named Dennis his first trip to Burning Man. He has bangs and full lips and soulful eyes, the poetic beauty that a Josie Geller, a young woman who creates patchwork pillows and likely reads more poetry about horses than you knew existed would perch on a pedestal, envision him as the gentle type of man who would kiss her chastely until their wedded eve, treat her to lavender massages for her “time of the month,” indulge her 34th rewatch of the Pride & Prejudice miniseries, Colin Firth soaking wet in a be-laked blouse and love.

Josie’s brother, Rob (professional wrestler I’m serious David Arquette), once a promising baseball scoutee and an avatar for peaking in high school, too invades South Glen South High to flex his natural Carnegism and become the darling of the school, ensconcing Josie into the popular fold with some well-placed untruths about Josie before her “transfer” to the school. This isolates the one person who welcomed her with open and Scunchied arms, Aldys (Leelee Sobieski), a math nerd, a mechanic, a kaleidoscopic woman beautifully sure of herself and her convictions. This also gives Josie a pedestal of her own to fall from, as she balloons with assurance inspired by kiddie-pool confidences with catty girls who she is lying to with every breath. Along the way, a thread of true faith in herself is loomed, thanks to the inspiration she finds through Aldys—the reason Josie eventually sacrifices her cover, as it should be—from her first day; through her coworkers at the Times growing more eager to see her blossom, to the extent that they throw live viewing parties of her hidden camera reconnaissance missions; and through Sam Coulson (Michael Vartan, Jesus Christ why was Michael Vartan not in more romantic comedies), her English teacher, who is impressed by the supposed 17-year-old student’s bright opinions and refined tastes that much mirror his own.

The growing rapport and substantial emotional attraction between reporter-student and teacher-teacher is immediately tangible to her editorial staff, who, after Josie’s planned reporting on a spot in town for underage substance use and fooling around gets scooped by a rival paper, are concerned for her ability to bring home a salacious and sellable story.

*

A certain teacher was trampled in my path to self-discovery, and though this article may serve as a step, it in no way makes up for what I did to him.

The movie makes overtures to reconcile its map of the problematique—Coulson’s behavior becomes the hook for Josie’s story to Gus (John C. Reilly), her straight male supervisor who remains the only voice of statutory reason in the film…other than Coulson himself who, upon Josie’s prom revelation, slinks off to the background feeling rightly manipulated in the face of his feelings, feelings that brought him palpable shame. No relief. And Josie does not blow her cover for Sam. She blows her cover for the cruelty of James Franco and a can of dog food dangling over the silken hair and beatific smile of Aldys, lured into a dance with one Guy Perkins. She blows her cover for the cruelty of high schoolers. Josie says “I think I am in love with you” on the printed page of the Chicago Sun-Times.

In our modern world, Josie would be accused of some bastardization of catfishing and being a mainstream media journalist peddling fake news by grooming minors. Her old Tumblr posts about Emily Dickinson would be screenshots on Libs of TikTok. She’d get a death threat or two, likely from a man who doesn’t even have kids and has no real chihuahua in this fight. Sam Coulson would be asked to resign from his post (convenient, as we see him packing and preparing to move in the film’s final act anyway, choosing to depart the scene of his thoughtcrimes to make a new less-attuned life with his less-attuned girlfriend) and also have his Emily Dickinson Tumblr posts blasted out on Libs of TikTok. Sam might sue Josie, or the paper, for what he might feel was entrapment. Aldys would write a book about this in ten years and be the center of a Bad Art Friend debate. Rob, who captured the interest of at least one young woman, would be in jail. Under the jail. I’m prepared to swoop in and defend Aldys and kinda let everyone else fend for themselves here.

But the kiss between Josie and Sam on the pitcher’s mound, with her steep barrel curl and Brian Wilson in harmony, ablutes. Purifies, clarifies, alkalizes.

A happy ending cauterized and cleansed by lip skin on lip skin.

*

And, I would like to add one more thing—I think I am in love with you.

The movie is called Never Been Kissed. The ending is not Josie getting a promotion, shoving her own high-school bully, now stripped of his shine and working a blue-collar job in a classist meted “punishment,” into a locker when she realizes his son is the star quarterback, nor her quitting her journalism job and following her real secret dream of writing romantic comedies, concluding with the reveal that the voiceover we’ve let wash over us in Barrymore’s sweet lisp is in fact her conducting a reading at a bookshop full of adoring women nerds. No, the end is why we paid 6 dollars in theaters or 3.99 for an SD rental on Amazon Prime or cracked open the DVD I bought in 2008 and sat our butts down: to watch Josie Geller get kissed. It is her reward, not cruel for once, not pelted like eggs, but bequeathed with an assist from the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby” and a stark black vignette. Her article is a success, it packs the stands of a baseball diamond, it sells newspapers. She does beam with new confidence, she does change in ways that make her happy and whole, she does maintain a friendship with the two bad bitches of the movie—Molly Shannon’s sexually-liberated Anita and Leelee Sobieski’s Aldys, one of the most self-assured, interesting, and well-rounded women I have ever seen on film. But why she is standing on that sandy field is to be kissed with forgiving fury by a man who is the only good thing the French have ever produced.

These rash of films excuse so much with one cinematic kiss—malignant cases of avoidant attachment, French farce misunderstandings that portend communicative doom, people with doubts at the literal altar, shutting down that nice woman’s bookstore.

These movies peddle harm. I have been harmed. I have become daydream, destroyer of worlds—worlds in which the situation(ship) is clear to everyone but me. I have been known to say that “it’s all downhill from the first kiss.” And I mean the entire relationship. Forget the spaceships, the gunslingers, the dragons. This is the violent escapism, the stories in which the kiss absolves. The swordly bite of this lesson extends through the television, the projector screen, and into the stomach of the viewer, young and impressionable, curled up next to her mother in bed, soma that will trance you out for years as you and your standards of truest, kindest love bleed out all over the carpet.

And yet, I bend to receive it further.

*

Because inside, everyone is a loser afraid to be loved, and out there is the one person who can kiss us and make it all better.

The best kiss I ever had was with a guy named Corey in front of the Au Bon Pain in the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

It didn’t work out.

*The section headers have been taken from the original screenplay of Never Been Kissed, and may not reflect the lines of the final film.

Tara Giancaspro is the creator of xoxo Gossip Giancaspro, a weekly Substack (taragiancaspro.substack.com) including personal essays, pop culture commentary, and the various and sundry of her silly little life. She has released music under the name Sweaty Lamarr, available to stream everywhere, including "Abbey, I'm Sorry I Stole Your Man," a Jolene sequel from Jolene's perspective. She has been published in Bullshit Lit, Drunk Monkeys, Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, Dusk Magazine, Roi Faineant, and got bit by a dolphin once, establishing a potentially generational blood feud. Giancaspro can be found on Instagram and Twitter at @SweatyLamarr. She is based in New Jersey, if you couldn't tell by the hair.