“10 Things I Hate About You” Replaces One Problematic Trope with Another, but is Still Awesome

The Rom-Com Project is still on, and the theme for February is “Deception.” I’m going to look at romantic comedies that include deception and lying as a major plot point.

You’re familiar with this trope, I’m sure. One character (usually the man) pursues the female lead in a romantic fashion, but he has an ulterior motive. As the man and woman spend more time together, however, the man falls for the woman in earnest. Near the end of the film, the woman learns that the man has been deceiving her. They have a fight and she wants nothing more to do with him, but at the end, she forgives him and the two people begin a relationship.

I can’t imagine that this happens very often in real life. The deceit part, sure – people lie to each other all the time. The forgiveness part is much harder to swallow. Why would anyone who discovered that a romantic partner was a lying liarpants want to continue a relationship with said romantic partner, except to rush the predetermined Happy Ending that everyone wants to see?

I thought about this issue when watching 10 Things I Hate About You for the first time in years.

Let me clear about something: I love this movie. I love the chemistry between Julia Stiles and (sob!) Heath Ledger, I love the witty dialogue, I love Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Krumholtz, I love Allison Janney as the romance novel-writing guidance counselor, and I love that the Baptista character is now a paranoid ob/gyn who can’t stand the idea of his daughters dating because he’s paranoid that they’ll get pregnant.

At the same time, I can’t ignore the fact that the premise of 10 Things I Hate About You is a little problematic.

Based on The Taming of the Shrew, the movie centers on Katarina Stratford, a sarcastic, vocally feminist high school senior whom other students refer to as “the shrew” or a “heinous bitch.” Two different boys want to date Kat’s younger sister Bianca, a popular, more stereotypically feminine sophomore, but there’s a catch: Bianca isn’t allowed to date until Kat does. Their father, an obstetrician who seems to work with primarily underprivileged young women, is terrified that one of his daughters will become pregnant, and institutes the unfair rule as a way to protect Bianca. The boys then conspire with (and against) each other to pay a tough, seemingly violent senior named Patrick Verona to date Kat so one of them can date Bianca. Patrick is then faced with the task of pursuing Kat and winning her over, but soon finds himself falling for her in earnest, as Kat softens up to him and opens her heart for the first time in ages.

This is a prime example of the “deception turns into love” trope. Patrick learns everything he can about Kat before pursuing her and pretends to be interested in her before he’s actually interested in her. Near the end, she discovers his deception and cuts off ties with him, but after a romantic gesture on his part, they’re back together and all is forgiven.

If you think about it too hard, the movie seems problematic – yet it’s downright progressive when compared to the source material.

In Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio pursues Katherina with money as his end goal, but there’s no real deception involved. Marriage was considered a contract more than an expression of love, so the idea that Petruchio would marry a woman for her money was not thought to be mercenary, but merely practical. Therefore, the “deception” trope doesn’t really apply. What does apply is the “domestic abuse is hilarious” trope, where Petruchio starves Katherina and performs acts of physical abuse, all in the name of wacky hijinx and hilarity!

10 Things I Hate About You wisely avoids all of those problematic elements. If anything, this movie is less The Taming of the Shrew than A Hot Guy Thinks He Has to Tame a Shrew But Discovers the Shrew is Actually an Awesome, Independent Girl.

Still – Kat discovers Patrick’s lie fifteen minutes before the end of the movie, and she forgives him and takes him back in the last scene of the film, all because he buys her a guitar and tells her that he fell for her.

On the one hand, it’s a really sweet scene, because we learn that Patrick bought the guitar with the money Joey had paid him to date Kat in the first place. He’s making amends by turning something negative into something positive.

On the other hand, we haven’t forgotten that Joey, the boy who paid Patrick in the first place, was not only a sarcastic, egotistical thorn in Kat’s side, but the boy who slept with her in ninth grade and then dumped her for not wanting to have sex with him again.

I don’t know if Kat told Patrick about what Joey did to her in ninth grade. If she did, that would make her forgiveness much harder to understand. If she didn’t – well, I’d still say that the resolution is a little problematic. That kind of betrayal would be hard to forgive in a real-life context. Can you imagine someone saying, “I was just pretending to like you before, but now I really like you! Be my girlfriend!” and have that work? I don’t think so.

Yet, somehow, I still buy it.

Maybe I buy it because of the poem Kat reads right before she discovers the guitar in her car, where she reveals that she still cares for Patrick even though she knows she shouldn’t – after all, love is rarely logical.

Or maybe I buy it because of Patrick himself. I have a theory that this movie works better depending on when you start to see Patrick genuinely falling for Kat. If you think he likes her in earnest later in the film, you’re less likely to buy their relationship than if you see him enjoying her company from the beginning. Personally, I think his appreciation for her grows as the movie goes on, but his initial moment of attraction occurs during their second interaction, when he watches her slam into Joey’s car – the grin on his face is pretty revealing.

Or maybe it’s a simple matter of chemistry, and Heath Ledger (sob!) and Julia Stiles have more chemistry than most romantic comedy couples I’ve seen, and I forget about any problematic elements the movie has when I’m watching them.

For whatever the reason, I believe her when she forgives him and wants to take him back.

It helps that the movie has some other neat feminist elements that make me happy.

No, I’m not pleased that Bianca and Cameron get away scot-free with deceiving Kat and we never have a scene with Bianca apologizing to her sister, and I don’t like that Cameron is presented as the good guy of the piece when he seems wholly unconcerned that Kat almost got a concussion at the party. I can’t take Cameron’s pining for Bianca that seriously when he just met her, and I’m disconcerted that Kat’s best friend doesn’t seem to have a problem with her new boyfriend setting up her best friend. (I’m also disconcerted about the number of ambiguous nouns in that last sentence.)

BUT, I love that Kat manages to find a happy place between her ninth-grade persona of trying too hard to be popular and her twelfth-grade persona of trying too hard to be part of the counterculture. I love that the well-intentioned dad who tries to control his daughters’ sexuality eventually realizes that he needs to let them decide how to live their own lives. I love that Bianca stands up for her boyfriend, her sister, and herself against the boy who wanted to use her for one thing and then discard her. I love that both of the two girls are encouraged to stand up for what they believe and are (eventually) commended for doing so.

In short, 10 Things I Hate About You changes the “domestic abuse is funny!” trope to the “deception turns to romance” trope. While both tropes are problematic, the second is the lesser of two evils, and I think the movie mostly succeeds as a feminist text as well as an entertaining one. I mean, how many romantic comedies and teen movies have their two lead characters talk about The Feminine Mystique?