If you were a teen or preteen in the late 1990s, chances are you watched Cruel Intentions at least once. It was a cultural phenomenon with super sexy “teenagers” (read: clearly adults in their early 20s) behaving badly with sex, drugs, and Catholic school uniforms to boot. Plus, the soundtrack was killer, and to this day, every time I hear “Bitter Sweet Symphony” by The Verve, I picture Reese Witherspoon driving the classic Jag at the end of the movie.1
Now, to be clear, I’m not defending this movie. It is … not great in retrospect, with a 2026 lens focused on it. Teenage step siblings who wanna fuck? Watching a whole movie of hot “teenagers” behaving like your 30 year old friends who are still single and doing copious amounts of drugs to deal with their shitty lives, except these are teens that have a ton of money and privilege? Everybody’s JUST SO WHITE (except for Cecile’s love interest, and him being not white is a HUGE PROBLEM for her family)??? Yeah! Okay! The 1990s were a TIME, y’all, and as I was 11 or 12 when I saw it, these people felt much older than me and I did not see the problem with a movie full of extremely hot people being extremely sexy all the time. In fact, I quite enjoyed it, and I can give it partial blame for why I am now so obviously bisexual.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The kiss between Kathryn (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Cecile (Selma Blair) that imprinted on all of our minds the second we saw it on screen. The tongues! The spit! The length of time (20 seconds)! The way Cecile keeps trying to kiss her even after Kathryn pulls away! They won the MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss in 1999. It was just under two minutes of the entire movie, but it became a huge pop culture moment that’s still talked about today. For a young girl who realized she liked girls, seeing “first base” depicted between two women in a mainstream movie was a huge deal. Sure, it was clearly done to keep the boys who were dragged by their girlfriends to see this movie engaged, but us little queer baby girls and femmes did not complain.
Then there’s Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe) and Annette (Reese Witherspoon). The bad boy successfully seduces the good girl, and they both just so happen to be incredibly beautiful. Who could have predicted this, or that the two of them would wind up being married for a while and bearing children that are basically their clones? Inconceivable! Not only do we get passionate love (and a hot sex scene) between the two, we also get an excellent shot of Sebastian’s bare ass that felt life-changing when I first saw this movie. It’s so typical for sexy movies to have the men just take their shirts off while women get fully naked and we see their bare breasts and/or butts that Cruel Intentions showing a man’s naked backside was a breath of fresh ass.
But I think, collectively, we’ve forgotten that a bleach blonde Joshua Jackson plays Blaine Tuttle, a gay high school student who is secretly dating the quarterback of the football team, with said quarterback played by Eric Mabius (aka Jenny Schecter’s boyfriend/ex-boyfriend Tim in seasons one and two of The L Word). The hairstyle makes it hard to believe it’s Josh Jackson, but Pacey girls will always recognize their man. (Honestly he might be my favorite part of the movie.) Plus there’s Sean Patrick Thomas as Selma Blair’s love interest, and you might know him for getting Julia Stiles into Julliard; there’s also Swoosie Kurtz, Christine Baranski, and Tara Reid all in the greater ensemble cast!!! This movie is SO GAY even though the whole plot is, ostensibly, “scheming slutty step siblings wanna bone each other but turn it into a bet where the stepbrother has to be slutty and also take another girl’s virginity before the promiscuous stepsister with a hardcore coke problem lets him sleep with her.” NORMAL. TEENAGE. BEHAVIOR. OBVIOUSLY.
This movie is scientifically formulated to make kids gay. You’ve got hot villains, beautiful heroines, and every other cast member is gorgeous. The cinematography is great, the plot is weird and based on an old French novel, and there are canonically gay characters and other characters who could easily be read as queer. The dialogue is overwrought and completely amazing (Kathryn’s monologue about being “the Marcia fucking Brady of the Upper East Side” will live in my head rent free forever). Plus, since everyone is loaded, all the interior sets of their apartments are gorgeous, as is their extremely expensive Catholic prep school. And dare I mention the escalator scene? SWOON. When I die, if I’m not greeted in that exact manner by that exact version of Ryan Phillippe, or I don’t get to have Heath Ledger walking towards me in leather pants at a lesbian bar, I’m going to be very upset.
- This car also made me gay. It’s the only vintage car I’ve ever wanted/coveted in a film or … possibly ever? A black 1956 Jaguar Roadster. Even the name is sexy. To this day, so many years later, I still want this car. ↩︎
