With entertainment.ie turning 25 this year, we're rolling back the clock to 1997 and revisiting movies on release during our site's early days. Each week, we'll take a trip down memory lane and come back with a movie you may remember or may have forgotten. As this very day marks its 25th anniversary, we're looking at 'Romy & Michele's High School Reunion'.
Although this series is about revisiting movies from a 2022 perspective, 'Romy & Michele's High School Reunion' is one that feels so markedly aged in a lot of ways. Specifically, the very concept of a high school reunion is one that's become completely outdated in today's world. Who needs to find out where people ended up after school when we've got Mark Zuckerberg's watchful eye telling us all we need to know? In fact, the idea of a ten-year reunion seems almost premature in today's world given how the normal signifiers of adulthood have long since evaporated.
People in their late twenties nowadays are rarely getting married or having kids, nobody's buying a house because who can afford them, and the idea of working in a luxury car showroom or being unemployed but designing clothes in this same age period isn't particularly damning. Hell, Romy & Michele would probably have a decent Instagram following and their apartment could be a hype house if it was remade now.
What hasn't aged a day, however, in 'Romy & Michele's High School Reunion' is how outsiders in high school feel like outsiders for the rest of their lives. Even when the dynamic duo escape to Los Angeles and leave their shit-kicker town behind them, they cling to one another for meaning and comfort in nightclubs or in gyms. When Romy encounters Janeane Garofalo's chip-on-her-shoulder Heather Mooney, she herself is every bit as damaged and angry as she was ten years prior. Moreover, she still harbours all the resentments from then and carries them around in her bag next to her quick-burning cigarettes. It's interesting to note, as well, that Heather is the very thing Romy and Michele later claim they are - rich, successful, invented something that everyone knows about - but she's nowhere close to being happy.
It's only when everyone begins to accept themselves that they find happiness. Romy and Michele drop the act and change into their own attire, Heather admits she was unhappy in school because she loved Sandy Frink but didn't love her back, and Billy Christianson (Fun Bobby!) is the failure he was always going to be. Why 'Romy & Michele's High School Reunion' still has resonance isn't just its cult status, though it's certainly well-earned. Fun fact - Alan Cumming, who played Sandy Frink, owns a gay cabaret nightclub in New York and has a themed 'Romy & Michele's High School Reunion' where all DJ requests have to be delivered with Post-It Notes.
Where it gains relevance and resonance in today's world despite the change in milieu is its theme of acceptance and friendship. Acceptance and friendship are something that the movie manages to make clear, and how those forged in a foxhole - or in this case, high school - are the ones that last a lifetime.
