Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew: The Mystery in Hollywood Hills

Emma Roberts, Rachael Leigh Cook, Max Thieriot

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. Teenage girls are like puppies. Everyone who has a puppy and a teenage girl in their house knows what I mean. If you see one of them on the street or in a store, you cannot help but think to yourself about how cute they are. Bubbly, so filled with life, they almost bounce when they walk. They both have more energy than they know what to do with. There is an internal urge to snap up the little creature and take them home with you. But if you do, you are going to make the worst mistake in your life. Puppies whine, whimper, and cry. Teenagers do the same thing. Dog owners are going to come home at some point and find maybe their door jams scratched up, messes on the floor, a hole in the couch, carpet, or bed, an electrical cord chewed up, or your favorite object in the world chewed up into little bits and strewn everywhere. Girls do the same thing on a figurative level. There are the fights over rules and regulations because both think they have enough experience to know what is going on and, if you do let them do what they want, the house is going to be an extremely unlivable place. They both will try to be in charge if you let them. Each thinks the world centers on them. With their highs, lows, and bad behavior, there will be moments where you will want to put your hands around their throat and strangle them. The same thing goes for puppies. A puppy will sneak into the one room that it is not allowed to go into to take care of business because it thinks, “I’m not allowed in this room so they will never know it was me who left this mess.” Teenage girls will do the same thing, sneak around and not tell you the truth about what they are doing because some of the things they want to do, if caught, will leave stains on the carpets of their lives, that all the scrubbing in the world will never get out. If you are the parent of one, you know that every day is a soap opera. No one understands. You’re unfair. The last person you would pick for your child to date is the person they want to be with the most. Even though you love them to death, the first moment they become worth living with, they are living with someone else. This is why I cannot understand why middle-aged men fall all over themselves to strut like a peacock around an 18-year-old girl. What do you talk about? They cannot understand what you are going through or have experienced.

I mention all this to note that I am probably not the best person to review a movie geared towards teenage girls. In turn, I recruited one of my teenage nieces to be a sounding board for me. Do teenage girls even know who Nancy Drew is and if they do, is she even relevant to their lives? These are kids who have never known an Iron Curtain, have always had the Internet, cannot imagine a world without cell phones, and have memories of only two Presidencies. Nancy seems as outdated as Pong, free love, and the Lyndie. I only remember her because when I was a kid, the delicious Pamela Sue Martin played her for one season in the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys Mystery Hour before the popularity of Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson kicked her female detective backside to the curb. (She was replaced by Janet Julian, who as Janet Louise Johnson, along with the Landers sisters and several other bimbos, provided the jiggle factor in that wholesome 80s television. She lasted just 4 episodes as Nancy.) Except for Monk, the whole mystery genre that was once the main staple of 1970s and 80s television has pretty much vanished. In many ways this is the first generation in a century that has not been weaned on the likes of Sherlock Holmes, the Thin Man adventures, Charlie Chan, Colombo, Encyclopedia Brown, or even Agatha Christie. Also, Nancy is a creation of the 1930s, a much more innocent time when it was not a big leap to imagine a trio of teenage girls could remain unsupervised for long periods of time so they could solve dangerous mysterious that often ended in spooky abandoned houses.

Nancy Drew was created by the Stratemeyer Syndicate as escapist fare for children suffering through the Great Depression and World War II. For only a few pennies, little girls could escape their hard realities to a world of freedom. Nancy’s world was one that they could only hope for. It was an idealized world of picket fences. She was not burdened by school or work, having graduated early from high school at 16. As the daughter of a successful lawyer, Carson Drew, who lived in affluent River Heights, Illinois. There was no such thing as poverty in the blonde-haired girl’s world. With only white conservative Christians as far as the eye could see, it was the kind of world the home schooled Prussian Blue twins could only dream of. Nancy cruised around town in her blue roadster, bossed around her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, was not adverse to giving adults a piece of her mind, even if they represent the law. Her outfits of high heels, pearls, and dresses were often completed with a handgun that she was not averse to using. She never went anywhere without her two friends, boy crazy Elizabeth “Bess” Marvin and tomboy George Fayne. (Imagine a teenage Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.) If a young reader could not identify with Nancy, she certainly could with one of her two young cohorts. In order to keep a sense of homeliness and continuity, the syndicate used the pseudonym Carolyn Keene as the author of every Nancy Drew mystery. Every young girl could picture in their mind a Katherine Hepburn-like plucky woman hammering away at typewriter sitting on the dinning room table. (Using the pseudonym also allowed the syndicate to keep rights to authorship and future royalties all to themselves. The most interesting Nancy Drew mystery was who was Carolyn Keene, and who got said rights? This played out in the US courts in the 1950s.) It is a formula that worked like a slot machine with the syndicate selling over 200 million books over the next half century and even enjoyed a sting of nearly forgotten, but successful black-and-white films staring actress Bonita Granville. (As a side note, my grandparents made the mistake of taking me to California when I was an ankle biter. One of the hotels we stayed at was owned by Bonita and her husband. I escaped out a hotel bathroom window so I would not wake my sleeping grandparents. Then I conned a nice teenage girl into buying me a ticket to see a new Star Wars movie. (It is amazing want a teary-eyed toe-headed little boy can get, especially when he claims that his brothers took his money and all he wanted to do in the world is to see that movie.) I got a beautiful girl rocking me against her chest and her arm around me throughout the film, a free ticket, popcorn, pop, and an extremely early realization that girls were cool. At Disneyland, I got to watch my cousin throw up his Mickey Mouse pancakes after riding Space Mountain, my grandfather nearly lost his eye when my cousin poked him in it, and talked with Bonita, it was a near perfect vacation, except they put mayonnaise on my ham sandwich at Universal Studios. I tried to explain to the dull-eyed surfer kid in the paper hat who smelled like those funny cigarettes my best friend’s older brothers smoked and my grandfather who was looking like Peg Leg Pete with his eye patch, that you cannot just scrape it off. It soaks into the bread. You might as well have hocked a green one on it, bastards. Needless to say, my grandfather and I had a long talk.

Over the last few years, new owner, Simon and Schuster, has tried to get young girls excited about the franchise again. In 1995, they pinned their hopes to a Nancy Drew series starring Tracy Ryan. It lasted about as long as one of Paris Hilton’s boyfriends. Eight years later came the Maggie Lawson made for television movie on ABC. Now it is Emma Roberts turn. Only fifteen years old, Emma, the daughter of Eric Roberts and the niece of Julia Roberts, is going to be the next big thing. A staple of Nickelodeon, with modeling and recording contracts already, she has the whole world in her hands and could probably retire before she can legally drink with all the zeroes she has in her bank account. In five to ten years she will probably replace her aunt as America’s sweetheart. The buzz around Hollywood is that she is the next “It girl.” (A term coined in 1927 to describe sex symbol Clara Bow and the elusive qualities that made her a star. “I don’t know what she has. She just has it.”) At minimum, she is already this generation’s Melissa Joan Hart and like most people over 18, I didn’t even know who she was. (You can tell she is going to have the same horse face that her aunt has when she is older.) Warner Brothers thinks enough of her ability to bring young female fans into the theater, that they are planning on building an entire Nancy Drew franchise around her. She is joined by unknowns Kay Panabaker as George and Amy Bruckner as Bess.

Nancy Drew enthusiasts, (I did not know such a group existed until this movie came out) are up in arms that the movie has diverged from what made the character so successful for nearly three-quarters of a century. As one critic notes, “The powers that be have taken a pretty decent teenage detective heroine and tweenified her, ditching the original premise in favor of a generic fish-out-of-water small-town girl moving-to-L.A. and dealing-with-fashion-faux-pas flick. The murder mystery seems secondary at best. It looks like a really pathetic version of Clueless for the Vacant-Stare Generation, right down to another bad cover of ‘Kids in America.’” In some ways the critics are right, but Nancy Drew mysteries have always involved traveling to exotic locations, emphasized small town protestant values, and been overly concerned with fashion and style. Basically, Nancy has always been the perfect teen heroine for George Bush’s America. All this movie does is shave three years off her age because, god knows, the studio has to get at least 3 films out of the franchise before an 18-year-old Emma is forgetting to wear her panties in public and checking herself into rehab. I say, who is better to communicate the message that small town, middle class, Midwest values are the best, than superficial, fast-living, self-indulgent, glamorous Hollywood and the daughter of wealth and privilege.

So, where is Nancy Drew off for this adventure? Flood-ravaged New Orleans? Blood-soaked Darfur? Snow-bound Minnesota? No. Where does every American girl dream of going? Heaven, according to our glossy magazines. Tinseltown, California. Little Becky Sunshine, I mean Nancy Drew, is a big fish in her little Stepford Wives town of River Heights. She is Sherlock Holmes in a training bra, Columbo with a learner’s permit and pigtails. Poor old Nancy is plucked out of Pleasantville while she has to accompany her father, Carson (Tate Donovan – “The O.C.,” "Ally McBeal") on a business trip. Of course our wrinkle-free Jessica Fletcher has to go to school while she is out there. Cut the Clueless music, and the Heathers stereotype hipster girls, who at first are really mean to sweet little Nancy, but by the end of the film, see the error of their ways. After all, if they didn’t have the fluff, all that would be left is the mystery of the death of the movie star and what self-respecting teenybopper girl who writes their first name and the boy in their class who they like’s last name over and over again in their notebook, would be interested in a big old mystery to solve. (It would also mean they would have to write a much more interesting mystery.)

If your daughter is a big Emma Roberts fan and likes all those tweener flicks that usually want to make me put the muzzle of a revolver in my mouth, then this movie is for her. My advice is go out and buy her the first two seasons of “Veronica Mars” and the old Bonita Granville Nancy Drews which has recently come out on DVD. Maybe buy her a book or two while you are at it. In time your little darling will figure out that she is not the Nancy Drew she thinks she is when it comes to life. Because once they get a clue, they will not be so annoying and say stereotypical statements like girls are like puppies.

Verdict: On Par With Emma Roberts’ Aquamarine