I was still working at a video store when The Girl Next Door (2004) came out on DVD and videocassette. Where I happened to work we made most of our profits from renting adult videos. The Girl Next Door, with its promise of sexy shenanigans, rented really well, often as a kind of chaser to the popular hardcore rentals. Even though The Girl Next Door was a hit and plenty of our much older male customers recommended that I see it, I actually never watched it until today.
The Girl Next Door begins as a coming-of-age comedy about a nerd, Matt (Emile Hirsch), who learns the ins and outs of being a “man” from the new girl next door, Danielle (Elisha Cuthbert). The adventure is part high school rom-com, part sex comedy as Danielle teaches Matt how to navigate masculine social rituals and misogynist culture; empowering the geek to be a toxic male. Much of the comedy and social views presented in this first act of The Girl Next Door have not aged well with regards to political correctness. But for the most part, everything about the first act of The Girl Next Door is exactly what one would expect from a film of this genre made in 2004.
Then, as act two commences, it is revealed that Matt’s savior from high school un-popularity is in fact a porn star. Suddenly all of the dynamics in The Girl Next Door change as Danielle goes from being a central character to an object within a barter system between possessive males as they bid for dominance and control over her. Danielle’s agency in The Girl Next Door evaporates as her archetype transforms from virgin to whore. As the slightly older and wiser love interest and mentor to Matt, Danielle’s character was an interesting though derivative take on the female lead of a teen comedy. As an object of desire, Danielle functions entirely as a status symbol for the male characters interested in her.
This shift in The Girl Next Door is predicated on the assumption that pornography is not at all performance but entirely sex work and that sex work itself is fundamentally wrong. The narrative trajectory assumes that Danielle cannot take care of herself within the porn industry and that only a man (Matt) can rescue her from the evil clutches of pornography. With the exception of Danielle who recognizes that porn is something to be ashamed of, all of the characters associated with the porn industry are depicted as mindless bimbo types or as hyper masculine, violent gangster types.
So The Girl Next Door transcends beyond being a mere heterosexual male fantasy film and becomes a kind of right-wing adolescent wet dream. The themes and ideas behind the plot of The Girl Next Door, although hidden behind the spectacle of women’s flesh, is nonetheless discernible at every turn. The ad campaign for The Girl Next Door sold it as a kind of Porky’s (1981) comedy, but what it delivered was something a bit more grotesque.
