The Girl Next Door
Everyone has a relatively unknown film that they love to revisit every once in a while. Growing up as an absolute tramp for romance films, I’ve had my fair share of big-screen romance, some are well-known, whereas some are not. In the summer of 2011, I watched a rather B-rated film, The Girl Next Door, in my basement and instantly fell in love with the plot and portrayal of its characters. It is, by no stretch of the imagination, fantastic or capable of rivalling the best that film has to offer. If you compare it with previous legendary films, The Girl Next Door simply does not hold a candle to say, The Godfather. So in light of that, let’s just call this film an amazing Sunday-night movie. Despite its comical quirks and amateur sequence, I think the film actually leaves audience with some food for thought, lecturing in a very simple theme. In the end, it is a question people ask when they wonder if all the hard work is worth the reward at the end.
Matthew Kidman, played by Emile Hirsch, is what I would define as an overachiever. He is president of some kind of student council, stellar grades, and yearns to get into an Ivy League school. Matthew is not exactly popular, and though it was not been brought up in the film, I’m guessing he’s a virgin. Long story short, Matthew is sort of a teacher’s pet, all bland and boring. Unlike the rest of his high school peers, whose throes of an epidemic of senioritis is hitting them hard, Matthew has his heart set on tackling his scholarship and the question: What is moral fibre? His life remains stagnant, until a drop-dead gorgeous blonde moves in next door. Danielle, played by Elisha Cuthbert, is what every housewife should fear for her husband. This bombshell is playful, spontaneous, and doesn’t always remember to draw her shades, and before long Matthew is head over heels in love. Danielle soon finds herself taken with Matthew as well, but their relationship takes an unusual turn when he discovers that, before she moved to town, Danielle had a successful career as a porn actress. Matthew is able to convince Danielle that she’s cut out for better things in life than appearing in porn videos, but his advice doesn’t exactly please Kelly or Hugo, two porn moguls who figure Matthew owes them big-time after convincing their leading lady to drop out of the adult industry. Matthew comes up with an elaborate plan to make things right — and aided by his newfound girlfriend and the her “work’’ friends, the scheme not only gets them all off the hook but makes them a lot of money as well.
The plot is easy to follow, and I found the characters to be extremely likeable, maybe because they were around the same age I was when I first watched the film. Even though many of us don’t have the privilege of meeting a pornstar in real life, the film’s jocular outlook on pornography is definitely better than an awkward one. One day he sees a sexy girl moving in next door, and soon he’s watching through his bedroom window as she undresses as girls undress only in his dreams. Then she sees him, snaps off the light, and a few minutes later rings the doorbell. Has she come to complain? No, she says nothing about the incident and introduces herself as Danielle to Matthew’s parents. Her aunt is on vacation, and she is house-sitting. Soon they’re in her car together and Danielle is coming on to Matthew.
Did you like what you saw?
He did. She says now it’s her turn to see him naked, and makes him strip and stand in the middle of the road while she shines the headlights on him. Then she scoops up his underpants and drives away, leaving him to walk home naked. They stop their shenanigans and pass time at a diner, Danielle’s drawing and Matthew’s just ogling like the idiot he is. Their conversation is ulterior, before she asks him a very good question.
So, what’s the craziest thing you’ve done lately?
Matthew elaborates on his highschool curricular but fails to provide anything noteworthy in Danielle’s eyes, because he’s Matthew, timid and never-out-of-his-comfort-zone Matthew. He is not one to go on extraordinary adventures, and certainly not the person you’d want to hang out with.
Among its best assets, The Girl Next Door can count its ability to get the audience to empathize with Matthew. One scene in particular stands out. Danielle drags Matthew to a party, and he finds himself at a crossroads. Two opposing impulses war for control of his mind and body. On the one hand, there’s the urge to retreat — to back off and return to the position of safety offered by neutrality. On the other hand, there’s the giddiness of charging headlong into the unknown, of losing oneself in an act that can be glorious or disastrous. For that moment, we’re inside Matthew’s head, experiencing the uncertainty and fear with him, and understanding the pull of both opposing forces. Because this is a movie, the choice is preordained, but the key here is that the film makes us doubt the outcome for a second or two. Drop the ball and lose the girl to this fuckboy named Hunter, or grow a pair and fight for her? He follows his heart, and lunges forward to kiss Danielle, leading to the start of their romance.
Everything is going splendidly until one of Matthew’s buddies identifies her, correctly, as a porn star. The movie seems to think, along with Matthew’s friends, that this information is in her favor. Matthew goes through the standard formula: first he’s angry with her, then she gets through his defences, then he believes she really loves him and that she wants to leave the life she’s been leading. Problem is, her producer is angry because he wants her to keep working.
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Throughout the film, Matthew is made to jump through hoops for this girl, give up certain beliefs in order to convince her that his feelings for her are nothing short of love and passion. Off camera, pornstars have their lives too, yet they especially would find romance a rarity. I’m not much for YouTube, but I do know the Internet couple Mike Majlak and Lana Rhoades. As a dude, and if you are a guy reading this article, I am certain you would have had an “encounter” with Lana once on the Internet. So yes, for their relationship, it would take a Herculean amount of trust on Mike’s part, since porn is indeed a taboo matter. Relating back to Matthew and Danielle, one could understand why he has difficulties accepting her previous lifestyle, explicitly given that he’s literally in highschool.
Though not as pneumatically endowed as you might expect for a woman in Danielle’s line of work, she is both sexy and engaging. At first, Danielle entices Matt to shake off his inhibitions. Eventually, though, she settles into bland vulnerability, and Mr. Hirsch, who looks more like Leonardo DiCaprio the more disheveled and panicky his character becomes, never really picks up the comic slack. That task falls to Timothy Olyphant, who plays Kelly, Danielle’s erstwhile producer and Matt’s mentor in lizardy hipsterism. Kelly, is a weird one (to say the least) jumping from charm to menace with sociopathic syncopation, but Olyphant plays him with a throwaway inventiveness worthy of Johnny Depp. Kelly is a total creep, but he’s also the classiest thing in the movie. Hirsch deftly handles Matthew’s burgeoning wild side with comic aplomb, especially in the scene where he accidentally takes ecstasy before attending a fancy dinner where he tries to win a scholarship.
Their prom-porn shoot is hilarious. The characters all join up to shoot this supposed “porn” scene, which has your pulse racing as they race to complete the shoot under the surveillance of the unsuspecting teachers. When the prom ends and Matthew and Danielle return home on their limousine, they consummate their love on the car. It is simple and to the point, good enough to get the message across without making it too awkward. And yet Danielle says one thing that makes you lose your mind completely.
So, what’s the craziest thing you’ve done lately?
She repeated the same question at the diner to him, and we as the audience, we’re taken aback by these eight words. You think back to the party, the Las Vegas porn convention, robbing Hugo, the prom-porn shoot, things that Matthew would never have done without Danielle. It shows his growth (maybe not his maturity though) throughout the film and how the girl next door turned his world upside down, drawing the contrast between the old and new Matthew.
The film ends on Matthew going to Georgetown with the money he earned from the porn shoot and he has got the girl of his dreams. That’s it. Like I said, the film is straightforward and presents a good premise for a cute couple. Though I know that the film basically a rip-off of Risky Business, The Girl Next Door holds a special corner of my heart and will continue to do so, making future boring Sunday nights not-so-boring anymore.
Porn Discussion
The majority of the film alternates between slobbery adolescent male fantasy and prim Hollywood moralizing, with valuable lessons trotted out in skimpy lingerie. The Girl Next Door offers a view of pornography that is nonjudgmental, even celebratory, but at the same time its premise — that Danielle must be rescued from the shame and degradation of her old job — suggests a more traditional, disapproving point of view. Instead of addressing this contradiction, the movie is happy to wallow in it, which would be fine if it had any real pleasure to offer. As citizens of a civilized world today, we often hear that “sex work is real work”, and despite the film coming from 2004, it definitely does not support this thesis today.
This film is pretty low-budget and definitely does not compare against the bigger films of 2004. Nevertheless, it brings the audience to relate to many of its aspects, and in a way, changes us as well.
