Mena Suvari vs. Tara Reid
Battle Of The Formerly Teenaged Trollops

Precocity can manifest itself in all kinds of ways. You may see it in a baby who learns to walk at the age of six months. You may marvel at it in a child who displays a virtuoso's skills with a violin before he has all of his permanent teeth. And if you're like most of us, you watched with awe when, in high school, you saw a fifteen-year-old girl climbing into a Jaguar convertible driven by a man old enough to be her father's much older brother, and then making out with him for a few minutes before he drove her to Saks, bought her a pair of $500 calfskin boots, and then took her back to his house, where she proceeded to fellate him so skillfully that he spontaneously promised to buy her a Volkswagen Cabriolet with a six-CD changer. Well, you know...we're guessing. Because unless movies have lied to us, that's certainly the way things work for teenage girls who are sexually precocious.

We can see how the fantasy of a sexually mature teenage girl can be -- if you'll pardon the pun -- a heady thing for a particular kind of man to contemplate. Unlike his wife's, a teenage dream girl's body is firm and limber and unaffected by gravity or childbirth. Unlike his wife, a teenage dream girl doesn't have a lot of boring concerns or stresses and won't nag him to clean out the eavestroughs. And unlike his teenage daughter -- for whom he may have a new and uneasy relationship now that she's passed through puberty -- it's (marginally) socially acceptable for him to imagine having sex with his teenage dream girl. And because the teenage dream girl does project herself as sexually mature -- precocious, one might even say -- he has no guilty feeling that he's taking advantage of a vulnerable young girl; it's the whole "but Officer, I swear -- she looked twenty-one!" phenomenon. This particular kind of man won't care if he and his teenage dream girl have nothing to talk about. He won't even care if he has to end a rendezvous early in order to drop her off at cheerleading practice. He just likes her boobies.

Tara Reid and Mena Suvari so fully conform to the middle-aged screenwriter's fantasy of a nubile, agile, juvenile temptress, you might think they were Vargas drawings come to life -- all curves and moist lips and too-small teeth bared in a misguided display of sexual voracity. With their small stature and Malibu Barbie hair, both are believable as the high-school students or college freshmen they've played in movies like Cruel Intentions, Slums of Beverly Hills, Urban Legend, Loser -- and, of course, the iconic American Pie and its first sequel, in which both Reid and Suvari starred.

Pie got a lot of attention in its day. It was touted as a Porky's for the millennium, a movie all about high-school-aged boys seducing, wheedling, and even tricking high-school-aged girls into "giving it up." The "twist," some commentators claimed, was that what brought this latter-day Porky's into the twenty-first century was that the girls in the story were the ones who held all the power -- whose bidding the boys had to do, or whose complex dreams and wishes the boys had to figure out and honour in order to be worthy recipients of the girls' precious virginity. After all, the idea that a girl's value is bound up in her inviolate body, and that the most significant power she wields is the power to refuse a man's advances really is...wait. That's actually not revolutionary at all. It's a concept that's about as old as marriage. American Pie might as well show its respect for its female cast members by speculating as to how many head of oxen their fathers might grant their future husbands as a dowry.

Suvari and Reid break no more feminist ground in their other most memorable roles -- in American Beauty and The Big Lebowski, respectively -- than they do in American Pie. In both Lebowski and Beauty, the women's roles are explicitly as the objects of older men's fantasies and desires -- Suvari, in Beauty, as an apparently sexually precocious high-school-aged sex kitten (and a cheerleader, no less); and Reid, in Lebowski, as a porn star-cum-trophy wife. While Reid and Suvari could be each other's doppelgangers -- the actors probably could have switched roles without changing either film in any remarkable way -- the roles themselves represent the opposite sides of the teenage trollop coin. Not only is Reid's Bunny Lebowski legitimately sexually mature -- satisfying any man's fantasies without compromising his conscience -- but she is (according to her stepdaughter, at least) also a nymphomaniac. On the other hand, Suvari's Angela Hayes projects an image of sexual maturity and appetite, but when push comes to shove (as it were), it all turns out to be an act; for all Lester Burnham's fevered fantasies, he's been pinning all of his dreams of sexual fulfillment on...a virgin! Therein lies the danger of pursuing a teenage trollop; she may look and act twenty-one in your dreams, but turn out to have no more sexual acumen or desire than a twelve-year-old in reality.

While we don't deny that working the teenage trollop angle has worked out well, career-wise, for both Reid and Suvari, they might consider going another way and getting a role in the film adaptation of a Henry James novel. (Although, in Reid's case, the film adaptation of a Jacqueline Susann novel may be as much of a period piece as she could get away with.) The sexpot routine can be fruitful when you're young, but once you hit age thirty, you need to dial down the cleavage and start displaying some chops; for every Goldie Hawn, there are a hundred Loni Andersons.

Advantage: Have you seen the reviews for Alone in the Dark? Suvari.