Cult comedy: 25 years of “American Pie”: Can you still watch it today?

The apple pie. The flute “that one time” at summer camp. And of course: “Stifler’s mom.” Anyone who, after reading these terms, has to admit that images that they thought they had long forgotten come to mind was probably young 25 years ago – or at least not quite that old. In 1999, in July a quarter of a century ago, the teen comedy “American Pie” opened in US cinemas and suddenly became a phenomenon. One of those films that everyone had seen in the schoolyard at some point.

It’s worth remembering because you can say that super-successful films aimed at an audience that is just growing up have a certain influence on that growing up. And because as someone who was there at the time, you ask yourself today: How could I have found that so funny? And how much of “American Pie” is still in me? The die-hard fan adds at this point: “Hehe – it’s in me!”

Because “American Pie” was about sex. The then relatively unknown Paul and Chris Weitz – director and producer – showed four boys in high school who desperately want to sleep with women and feel great pain that this has not yet happened – as they define it. “We’re all going to end up in college untouched, do you realize that?!” Jim (Jason Biggs) alarmistically tells his friends. The group of boys therefore makes a pact: it has to happen by the prom.

“American Pie” was an event

The plot doesn’t sound all that revolutionary and was panned accordingly (“cheaply made teenage comedy with blatant fecal and masturbation humor”) – but the film was different from many things that people knew. “American Pie” stands out from the swamp of numerous boys-discover-their-penis films, many of which it itself provoked through its success. “American Pie” was an event.

“I had travelled to America at the time and asked a friend what I should definitely watch,” recalls Joachim Friedmann, professor for serial storytelling at the International Film School Cologne ifs – and contemporary witness. “And he said: ‘American Pie’ was the sensation at the time.”

From a purely technical point of view, the film is still very good today, he says. “In my view, it was one of the first teen comedies to take a multi-perspective approach,” says Friedmann. Everyone in the group of friends had their own narrative thread and their own problems. “That is very dominant. As dominant as we know it from series today.” Then there was the sex. “The sex was so explicit that it was fascinating not only for teenagers,” says Friedmann. “You had never seen anything like it in a comedy before.” And not in sex education class with the biology teacher either.

The poor apple pie

The copulation efforts of the boys’ clique were also extremely embarrassing. Sometimes the film conveyed strange messages, such as that premature ejaculation is the worst thing that can happen in life. Sometimes, however, its luridness also made all the micro-injuries that one experiences during puberty more tangible. Jim is particularly hard hit in the film when his father surprises him in the act of sexually abusing the eponymous apple pie.

The answers and role models that the film presented to its presumably sexually meandering teenage audience still seem strange 25 years and several intelligent debates later. Filming the exchange student secretly and without asking while she is changing? Almost everyone immediately thinks that’s a brilliant idea (“All you need is a micro camera. You hook it up to the internet and tell me the address!”). The film’s secret cult figure? Stifler, who rarely asks, but rather does. Toxic masculinity and what it means was not something that anyone thought about much back then. The female characters are drawn rather flatly – either as mystical saints or as eccentric phantoms.

The revenge of film history

“The heteronormative, male, white worldview that is in there – you wouldn’t do that today either,” says film professor Friedmann. He also says: “The male characters in the film are all punished for what they do wrong sexually and emotionally.” Even Stifler, who at one point finds his mother – “Stifler’s Mom” ​​- with the very guy he previously bullied.

Of the actors and actresses, it was mainly the women who went on to have careers – such as Alyson Hannigan (“How I Met Your Mother”) and Jennifer Coolidge (“The White Lotus”). The men – well. Perhaps it was film history’s revenge for a rather stupid pact.