“I don’t want any of you boys thinking that you’re gonna score. You don’t score, until you score,” – Coach Marshall
If you’ve taken the time to listen to the semi-coherent rantings featured in my podcast The Savage Sacktap (If not then listen here) then you’ve undoubtedly heard me profess my undying love for the American Pie movie franchise. I’ve been a proud National Lampoon fan since elementary school, when I first enjoyed such classics as Animal House and Senior Trip. My loyalty to the Lampoon brand was cemented with the first installment of the American Pie series*. In fact, it’s the opinion of this blogger that American Pie was the most important teen movie of our generation.
*When I say series, I mean the whole series. Say what you will about the straight to DVD release, ‘American Pie Presents’ titles, but there were some incredibly fun moments in Band Camp, Naked Mile, Beta House, and Book Of Love. I hear tell that another installment is coming later this year and await its release with bated breath.
So it is from a place of love that I launch the following criticism against the films that have brought me so much joy; Chris Ostreicher is a fucking pussy. It’s not easy for me to say that, after all I was a multi-sport meathead who loves teen movies, and Ostreicher is a multi-sport meathead in my favorite teen movie…but I say once more, Chris Ostreicher is a fucking pussy.
It pains me to see Oz portrayed as such a sopping little twat, but see it I do, clear as day. What word but pussy (or perhaps one of its many synonyms) would you use to describe the kind of ‘man’ who bails on his teammates — in the middle of the big game mind you — to sing acapella love songs with some chick he just met? I for one would call him a pussy — and bitch and another word which starts with f and rhymes with bag, and plenty of others that relate to sodomy or male on male oral copulation and are frowned upon in polite society, but describe Oz to a T, and will hereby fall under the umbrella of ‘pussy’.
But Mike, he’s a popular jock who goes to the cool after-prom party and winds up getting the girl (popping her cherry on a lakeside dock to be precise), how could he possibly be a pussy?
Let us assess:
Assuming Oz has been a lifelong lacrosse player — football too, allegedly — then he’s been playing with his high school teammates for roughly 10 years. Oz doesn’t meet his prom date ‘Choir Chick Heather’ until spring of his senior year. Then, she throws an absolute shit fit after she sees his lacrosse buddies hooting, hollering, mimicking intercourse, and congratulating him on landing a date for the prom.
While I understand that she’s not happy with the team’s boorish response to her budding relationship with Oz, I’m also not sure what she was expecting. These are testosterone fueled, teenage boys enjoying the blissful endorphin dump of an afternoon on the lacrosse field. They’re basically walking erections. More absurd than her ire at the team for their bawdy antics however, is her knee jerk decision to briefly break up with Oz over the incident. It’s easy to miss in the movie, but his sole contribution to the offending act was to merely utter the phrase, “I like those little sweaters she wears.”
Let me tell ya something toots; if the shoe is on the other foot, if Oz sees Choir Chick Heather’s friends pantomiming a scene in which she gets gorilla fucked by a lacrosse stick-wielding stud, he’d be skipping the locker room and taking his post-game shower at home so he could leave behind a puddle of yogurt for mom to clear out of the drain. I got catcalled once by two thicc Hispanic chicks on the stairs of the Christopher Street PATH station and it provided me with jackoff fodder for a month and a half. Oh well, women are from Venus I guess.
What the fuck was Oz supposed to do in that situation anyway? Give his teammates a stern, “cut it out guys!”? Does that work? Does this chick know anything about teenage boys? The fact that he declined to participate in the lustful bravado and instead offered a tepid compliment of his beloved’s sweater oughtta be enough to quell her rage, but apparently not.
Now, given Oz’s objectively good looks, his athletic prowess, and high social standing, one might assume that he’d move on and just find a cheerleader, female athlete, or slutty popular girl to attend prom with. Less stress, less likelihood of clingy attachment, and a near guarantee that you’ll be buzzing the brillo before the night is through**. Of course if you did make that assumption, you would have assumed incorrectly.
**Those are also the kinda chicks who don’t mind giving birth in a mall bathroom stall, then tossing that little bundle of inconvenience into a dumpster behind said shopping center in the event that they get knocked up by your super teenage athlete sperm**
Instead of enjoying his last days on the lacrosse field with his lifelong friends, Oz turns into Dick Van Dyke and spends his senior spring riffing, beepopping, scatting, and shoobeedoobeedoowoppin all over the goddamn place to show Heather that he can sing ‘from the heart.’ He hits rock bottom in the final game of the season, during an incredibly inspiring speech about not slacking off when you have a chance to score, a speech that was being delivered by his head coach — a man who had presumably gone to great pains to mentor Oz and mold him into lacrosse star. In the middle of that speech he abandoned his team to put on a blazer and sing ‘Do You Believe In Magic’ with a bunch of choir twerps that he had met only weeks earlier. I don’t know if I believe in magic, but I do believe that Chris Ostreicher is a fuckin pussy.
Oz remains delusional throughout the film. In an earlier scene, while serving Heather hot dogs at legendary Great Falls wiener joint ‘Dog Years’, Oz mentions that he could probably ‘walk on’ to the lacrosse team at Michigan State. Are you shitting me Ostreicher? Do you really think that a Division 1 lacrosse team wants a walk-on who couldn’t even hang in there for one more half of action with his lifelong friends to finish out the biggest game of the year? Is anyone dumb enough to believe that? Guess what, it’s not happening. This isn’t high school, this is the NCAA, and your coaches and your teammates don’t need that kind of selfish cancer infecting their locker room.
The fact is, no woman worth being with would ever make you miss out on the biggest lacrosse game of your life so you can dress like an ass and sing a few lines from a song that can simultaneously be described as ‘dated’ and ‘shitty.’ The kind of woman who does that is the same kind of woman who will go off to college in the fall and wind up blowing some pimply faced sophomore in unwashed mesh shorts and a Sigma Nu hoodie because he got her roommates into a closed pregame on Thursday night. That’s right, the chick you soiled your lacrosse career for will be sucking a stranger to completion on a twin bed next to the night stand upon which your prom picture sits.
Sure, Oz and Heather are still together when freshman year wraps up at the start of American Pie II, and it “appears” that she remains loyal to Oz during her summer abroad in Europe. The word “appears” appears in quotations because I don’t believe for a goddamn second that she didn’t cheat on Oz in Europe. If you actually believe that a 19-year-old woman on her first solo trip abroad, summering in a house with an ample supply of local wine and unclipped foreign cock, is gonna remain 100 percent faithful to her boyfriend then I have some oceanfront property in Nebraska that I’d like to sell you.
Hometown relationships have an atrocious track record when one or both parties heads off to different corners of the globe to start a new life. This is especially true for the late 90s when AIM, email, and landline phones were the best available modes of communication. I had a hometown girlfriend when I left my small north Jersey suburb for a prude, east coast, liberal arts college. I was intent on maintaining that relationship when I arrived on campus, and was able to hold onto that resolve for a whole semester before submitting to temptation.
Oz was at Michigan State. I don’t work for the Princeton Review, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that it’s easier to track down pussy at Michigan State than it is at Muhlenberg College. There is no way Oz stayed faithful his freshman year, and I would assume that Heather engaged in some sort of hanky-panky during that time as well.
Even if Heather’s intentions were pure — and they were certainly not, given the way she torpedoed Oz’s lacrosse career — I can’t imagine she was able to remain chaste in her boyfriend’s absence. The math just doesn’t work out in their favor. Cute chicks get a mile of cock thrown at them every day. We’re men, we’re pervs, we wanna fuck, so we shoot our shots, that’s just how it goes, and that mile of cock gets compounded tenfold on a large college campus like the University of Michigan where Heather attends undergrad. It’s not entirely her fault though, at some point it just becomes impossible to resist, like being on a diet when your friends decide to order a piping hot pizza from your favorite parlor. Sure, if you’re sober you may be able to hold out for a little while, but not forever. If you’re drunk? Forget about it paesan, your old lady is gonna be swallowing hot gobs of mozzarella and even hotter gobs of meat sauce before homecoming even appears on the calendar.
Want my advice? Grab a bottle from the water boy, rinse the sand out of your snatch, and get back in the game. Your coach will thank you, your teammates will thank you, and your future self will thank you…unless of course your future self would prefer to be a pussy.
Meathead Media 