21 year-old actress Julia Stiles has been famous for roughly three years, since her starring role as a pregnant teen hippie in the 1999 NBC miniseries, “The 60’s”, and as of this writing has appeared in 12 theatrically released films. Today, a Google search of her name produces nearly 90,000 results; temper your query by adding the word “Shakespeare”, and you’ll still be left wading through 5,600 responses. This is because in her brief career, Julia Stiles has starred in three modern-day adaptations of Shakespeare: 10 Things I Hate About You, Gil Junger’s 1999 high school reworking of The Taming of the Shrew; Michael Almereyda’s Gen-X-meets-corporate-America revision of Hamlet (2000), and the 2001 transplant of Othello, O, directed by Tim Blake Nelson and set around a high school basketball team in the South. Shakespeare’s work has long been considered an honor for actors to perform; we associate some of our greatest thespians with the Shakespearean productions they have anchored. So why is Ms. Stiles, although she continues to draw reviews along the lines of “Julia Stiles' Ophelia is of the knit-brow-and-pout school of ingenue nonacting; her performance is an embarrassment”, continually assigned to play some of the most indelible female characters of all time? What makes her a marketable vehicle through which to transport Shakespeare into contemporary teen culture? An examination of the 10 Things I Hate About You will demonstrate that the answer lies not in her performances as Katharina, Ophelia and Desdemona, but in her performance as Julia Stiles, a starlet within the spectacle of teen-girl culture after feminism.

Ten Things I Hate About You is Julia’s first foray into Shakespeare, and her Katharina forms the blueprint for each performance of “ingenue nonacting” to come. Whilst locking down the bare bone essentials of "The Taming of the Shrew"’s plot and characters, it disposes many roles, and whilst occasionally lines from the original text are snaked into the dialogue as winking gestures to the audience (pointing out Kat to Cameron on his way out of a scene, the Tranio stand-in says. “That’s the mewling, rampallian wretch herself. Stay cool, bro.”), the script really requires nothing from its actors but late 20th-century haircuts. Stiles’ Kat Stratford is a third-wave Riot Grrl whose “grr” feels pitiable instead of ferocious, who uses the cursory totems of pop-feminism (Sylvia Plath, “angry girl music of the indie-rock persuasion”) as a defense mechanism. Kat surely understands that her poised, lithe teenage body is a loaded weapon, but instead of learning how to use it, she puts it on display, out of reach, as if to constantly remind potential suitors that they can look but not touch. The problem is, Kat gives no indication that she is worth touching, and nor does anyone in her class have any desire to do so. When Cameron (or Lucentio, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) attempts to find a date for Kat so that he can take her sister Bianca (Larissa Oleynik) sailing, he is turned down by The Fat Kid, The Stoner Kid, even all of the nerds, despite the fact that Big Man on Campus Joey (Andrew Keegan, who later turns up as Cassio in “O”) is offering a financial reward to make Bianca available. Only the school criminal, Patrick Verona (Australian heartthrob Heath Ledger) will rise to the challenge, and even then only for a price above Joey’s original offer.

Shakespeare wrote Katharina to be initially unlikable, but in the hands of the right actress and opposite the right Petruchio, we want to see her thaw out. In 10 Things I Hate About You, we sympathize with the most pathetic of the parade of losers Cameron rounds up, who says he’d only consider dating Kat if she was the last woman on earth, and if there weren’t any sheep. Then his eyes brighten and he asks, “Are there sheep?”. This is the first of many films which use Stiles’ own “ideal” teenage body as the sole positive aspect of her character, as a reason to ignore her blank eyes, her sullen theatrics, her permanent pout, and to view her as a sympathetic person. Kat and Bianca’s father is not offering the dowry that Baptista offers. All these girls have to offer in exchange for commitment are their bodies. Despite her constant regurgitation of rote entry-level feminism (she refuses to read Hemingway for English class, complaining about “the oppressive patriarchal values that dictate our education”), Kat showcases her body more than any female in the film. Stiles’ stunning midriff and toned arms make an appearance in nearly every scene - her pants are always a little too big, her shirt, just a little too short and tight. Bianca, who is supposed to contrast starkly with Kat’s tough-nut shrew as the vain, vacuous bimbo, tends to wear almost prim skirt-and-sweater sets, which are cute and feminine but never very revealing. Bianca has an easy-to-read personality and a body which will remain”closed” until her true love opens it up; Kat inappropriately forces her own body into a discourse which her closed-book heart has made unwelcome.

Unfortunately, although she could certainly use at the very least an afternoon with Miss Manners, a post-feminist adaptation allows for no “taming” of this shrew. Kat is allowed to keep her wretched attitude all the way through, and Patrick patiently pursues her in spite of it, as if an unpleasant woman is tolerable if her tempestuousness is rooted in 1970s feminism. The message to teenage girls is, you can treat men badly, over and over again, and as long as you maintain that you are punishing them for the “oppression” of their “patriarchy”, they’ll still serenade you in the middle of gym class. It is, it seems, Kat’s job to tame Patrick - she forces him to play designated driver when she gets smashed, makes him both quit smoking and hanging out at the biker bar, and has him clean up to fit her “pretty-boy” ideal. Whereas Shakespeare had Petruchio behaving badly to teach Katharina a lesson, Patrick is not in control of the situation - he is not behaving badly on purpose, he stops on command, and he’s not behaving that badly to begin with.

Though at times she seems genuinely in love with him, their interactions remain flirtatiously barbed, and the only solid sign the audience gets that Kat has softened completely comes in the last scene. She has previously learned of Patrick’s payoff, in a blow-up at the prom wherein jilted financier Joey demands his money back after seeing Bianca and Cameron canoodling on the dance floor. Like any good wayward teenage heartthrob, Patrick tries to explain that he “didn’t care about the money. [He] cared about you!”, to no avail, and now they are in Monday morning English class, where Kat must recite her homework assignment aloud. It’s a poem, the Ten Things [She] Hate[s] About [Patrick], and ends with the line, “But most, I hate how I don’t hate you even a little bit, not even at all!”, with which Kat bursts into tears and run out of the classroom, which is all well and good but the real question is .... What’s that she’s wearing?!?! Gone are the low-slung jeans, the combat boots and the leather jacket. Kat stands before Patrick and her classmates in an outfit that appears to have been borrowed from Bianca’s closet - Frilly white blouse, pink skirt, and girly hairdo. The site of change, of taming, does not take place in Kat’s soul, but on her body. When she puts her “assets” away, in a sense, she can finally open up her heart.

The agent of taming here is not Petruchio, nor any member of the patriarchy which Kat so despises. Kat’s tired first-wave feminist ethics are being tamed by post-feminism itself. In Shakespeare’s text, Bianca and Kat trade places at the end of the play - Bianca, once safely married to Lucentio, becomes disobedient and demanding, whilst Katharina’s marriage to Petruchio has her making speeches on the importance of a wives’ subservience, claiming that since female bodies are “soft, and weak and smooth...but that our soft conditions and our hearts should well agree with our external parts”. As Charlotte Brunsdon writes in her essay “Post-Feminism and Shopping Films”, a post-feminist girl is “neither trapped in femininity (pre-feminism), nor rejecting of it (feminist). She can use it. However, although this may mean apparently inhabiting a very similar terrain to the pre-feminist woman, who manipulates her appearance to get her man, the post-feminist woman also has ideas about her life and being in control which clearly come from feminism. She may manipulate her appearance, but she doesn’t just do it to get a man on the old terms.”

In Junger’s version, there is no simple trade-off of woldview or personality - Bianca, at first congenial to boys but obsessed with social status and rude to Kat, becomes measurably friendlier and more understanding once teamed with Cameron, whilst Kat simply needs to put on a new outfit in order to become loveable, and sensitive to love. Up to this point, Patrick has done nothing in the way of apology since Kat left him at the prom; it seems that Kat’s change of personality has come part and parcel with her change in clothes. It is, in a sense, what she knows she has to do so that she can safely claim her man and get on with things.

Though it doesn’t have the counterpoint of Bianca’s fall from grace, Kat’s sudden transformation in the last scene of 10 Things I Hate About You serves as the post-feminist translation of Katharina’s speech in the final scene of The Taming of the Shrew. Brunsdon writes that although the termin ology “post-feminism” is problematic (as it suggests that feminism is over, which it is not, and/or the feminism of the 1970s was the only feminism, which it is not), there is a sense that cinema of the post-modern age has helped to develop “a new kind of girly heroine who, while formed in the wake of 1970s feminism, disavows this formation...Post-feminist women can try on identities and adopt them.” When Kat publicly sheds tears over Patrick, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s really changed at all, it just means that in this costume, she can cry for a boy and express her love, which she can not do in her old costume, even though the action of it makes little sense in relation to the ethics she’s expounded thus far.

This is the contribution of post-modernism to feminine practice: we now have the benefit of collaging images of ourselves as a political statement in and of itself, without being oppressed by either the femininity nor the rejection of it. The magic of Julia Stiles, the thing that had turned her into a cover girl and a role model, does not lie in her acting disabilities, or even in those rock-hard abs (or at least, not in the abs alone). Julia Stiles represents the luxury that young women today have earned,which allows us to be whatever we like, un-qualified and nearly above critique.

Notes:

1. By contrast, search Tara Reid, another high-profile young actress and teen idol, alongside Shakespeare, and only 1,090 items come up.

2. Lazere, Arthur. “Hamlet (2000)”. Culturevulture.net, www.culturevulture.net/Movies/Hamlet2000.htm

3. Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew. Act v, scene ii.

4. Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Post-Feminism and Shopping Films”. The Film Studies Reader. Oxford University Press Inc., New York. Page 292.

5. Ibid, 292-293

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