Katherine Waterston and John Leguizamo
Don’t tell Mom the babysitter gives head
The Babysitters lies where Mean Girls meets Show Girls, and it isn’t pretty
By Alexa Weibel
Published: April 17th, 2008 | 2:52pm
As an overachieving high school junior, Shirley (Katherine Waterston) baby-sits to save pennies for college. When she develops a seemingly innocent crush on Michael (John Leguizamo), the awkwardness is palpable: she blushes uncontrollably, and her giggles betray her otherwise-mature demeanor. But, no doubt nudged by the disappointments of a mundane marriage to his nagging wife (Cynthia Nixon), Michael decides to live a little — and out of guilt for his forwardness in daring a forbidden kiss, forks over some extra cash.
Indeed, The Babysitters dangles where Mean Girls meets Show Girls. Shirley reasons, “Paid fellatio isn’t that much more humiliating than flipping burgers.” Shirley continues to provide top-notch service, only when she once would have scrubbed the bathroom floor after putting the kids to bed, she instead fornicates with the father on the ride home. Although the romance is a sweet escape for Michael, the surrounding imagery is jarring: he is in meetings, while Shirley is watching STD slideshows in sex ed.
From there, the distressing film continues on its train-wreck course. Shirley begins to pimp out her friends, filling Excel calendars with dates and makes business cards mockingly interpreted as “cute” by Michael’s oblivious wife. When her business gets usurped by the cheerleaders — go figure — Shirley pulls all the stops to seize it back, eventually threatening, “You fuck no one — not even your prom date — if I don't say so.”
As the neighborhood fathers and daughters jump into the melee, lives are set up to be destroyed, culminating in an ecstasy-fueled getaway — or what the husbands tell their wives to be a “company retreat.” Eerily pitted against homogenous suburban homes and banal sprinklers, the collision-course tale, to Shirley, is nothing but “something to be nostalgic about later.” Most disturbing of all is Shirley’s nonplussed lack of regret about the community’s shattered lives, her own included, noting the event as simply “a unique detail in an otherwise ordinary life.”
Issue #35
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