I Finally Watched: 'Just One of the Guys'

DirecTV goes bye-bye at the end of the month, so I need to shift my finally watched viewings into overdrive. I won’t be able to watch every movie I’ve recorded, but I have added them to my list so I can track them down later.

Earlier this week, I watched a gender-bending eighties comedy I had seen bits and pieces of but never beginning to end: Just One of the Guys.

When Terri (Joyce Hyser) is snubbed for an award and summer internship at the local newspaper, she thinks it’s because she’s a girl. So she cuts her hair, stuffs a sock in the crotch of her jeans, and enrolls at a rival high school as Terry, a boy, to have her article reconsidered. However, she realizes her experiences posing as the opposite sex for a few weeks are far more interesting than the nutritional value of school lunches.

Though I’d seen big chunks of Just One of the Guys, I had never seen the whole thing, including the beginning and the reason Terri becomes Terry. I always assumed she did it because of a bad haircut. Nope. The journalism/investigative reporting angle is perfect and one that appeals to me as an off-and-on journalist (mostly off) since high school. The snub and her drive to win the award and internship add a propulsive twist that may have been missing had she posed as a boy just for the sake of doing so, though it is a worthy experiment regardless. To state the obvious, watching the entire movie and gaining context for everything makes it that much more enjoyable.

Just One of the Guys is a fun movie. It’s clever and funny, easy to watch and enjoyable. It does a good job of highlighting the stupidity of sexism and stereotypes, though sexism stops being the focus at a certain point; it serves more as a MacGuffin. (I thought a MacGuffin was a desired but mysterious and unrevealed object, like the contents of the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. I was partly right. A MacGuffin, according to Merriam-Webster, is “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.” So the suitcase in Pulp Fiction is a MacGuffin, but a MacGuffin does not have to be a mystery.) Ironically, the movie does re-enforce some tired, sexist stereotypes and norms. Denise wants Terri to work for the sports section so they can “interview all the cute jocks.” Terri’s boyfriend is aghast that she cut her hair short (her hair is “gone”) and doesn’t wear makeup or dresses like she did when she was “hot.” (To be fair, her boyfriend is characterized as a sexist, greedy prick.) At the end, Rick asserts himself in his relationship with Terri because “I’m the guy” and will hang out with her as long as “I get to drive.”

Just One of the Guys is a classic eighties teenage comedy with shades of Teen Wolf and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It checks a lot of the usual boxes: annoying (and very horny) younger sibling; absent parents (they’re conveniently out of town during the course of the movie); a torturous gym class complete with surprise jock inspections, an “early shower crew,” and shirts and skins basketball teams; and the most stereotypical jocks and nerds I have ever seen, despite the message the movie tries to convey.

How convincing is Hyser as a boy? I think she’s very convincing, though much of it may have to do with her hair style. It’s easy to forgot she’s posing as male. Could she get away with it in real life? Probably, but she would not be able to weasel out of revealing situations as easily as she does in the movie.

On that note, how realistic is it for a teenager to self-enroll at another school as the opposite sex in what is likely the last month of the school year? It’s not. It’s a stretch at most, especially if Terri needs to fool everybody. I think it could happen if administrators know what’s going on, know it’s a temporary experiment, but it would be very difficult otherwise. It would also be difficult since Terri’s parents are away; the school would involve them at some point in the process. Needless to say, the logistics of Terri’s enrollment at the other high school, as well as her absences at her original school, are conveniently absent.

There I go again, being a realist.

Here are a few more notes:

• Just One of the Guys is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

• I can’t remember where I first saw Just One of the Guys, but it had to be Comedy Central or HBO. It was a featured movie on HDNET MOVIES back in September, so I jumped at the opportunity to record it.

• Terri is on the staff of The Pearl Diver. On the chalkboard in the journalism suite are three “Pearl Diver Don’ts: (1) Quote ‘they’ (2) Spelling mistakes (3) Put the reader to sleep.” Yes, I paused the movie to write them down.

• Just One of the Guys is rated PG-13, but there is a surprising amount of skin for the rating. PG-13 was introduced in 1984 as an intermediate rating between PG and R, and I get the sense the rating has become stricter over time. I feel Just One of the Guys would be rated R if it was released in the nineties.

• Rick reveals he told his mom he has a girlfriend who looks like Chris Evert Lloyd. The name didn’t ring a bell, so I had to look her up. It’s tennis player Chris Evert, who added Lloyd to her last name from 1979 to 1987.

• Just One of the Guys was released in 1985, which was a banner year for teen/high-school movies. The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Teen Wolf, Back to the Future, and The Goonies were also released in 1985.

• A couple beers are featured in Just One of the Guys. Terri’s younger brother drinks a Fosters from a 12-ounce can. (Though I’ve seen 12-ounce bottles of Fosters, I’ve never seen 12-ounce cans. The only Fosters cans I’ve seen are the 25.4-ounce oil cans.) While at Rick’s house and at “the cave,” Terri and company drink generic-brand beer. (The movie is set in Arizona, where the minimum drinking age was 19 until 1985.)

• Rick is a “professional new kid,” having gone to seven schools in three years, but we never learn why. He mentions that his father is dead, but there’s no explanation for why he and his mother move so much.

• Rick reveals that he had sex with his mom’s friend, who wanted to cheer him up after his dad died. He doesn’t say how old he was when it happened, or how old his mom’s friend was, but it sounds like statutory rape to me. Not cool. It’s another cringe-worthy instance when something in an eighties movie has not aged well.

• Before Rick learns what’s going on, he assumes Terry is gay and is surprisingly indifferent about it, especially given how poorly homosexuals were thought of in other eighties movies.

• During the course of this series, I’ve stumbled across cast reunion videos while searching for trailers. Though I didn’t watch those for the other movies I’ve finally watched, I watched the one for Just One of the Guys.