She carries her own symbolic weight in teen culture, and she is not to be confused with the homecoming queen. If a school picks the same girl to be homecoming queen and prom queen, then something has gone terribly wrong in the universe, or this town is just too small.
A bit of a stir unfolded recently when Gen-Z pop phenom Olivia Rodrigo leaned into the prom queen aesthetic for her “Sour” album release, including a live-streamed, prom-themed concert that featured an image of herself holding a bouquet and wearing a tiara while mascara runs down her face.
Singer Courtney Love publicly seethed that the image was copied from the cover for her band Hole’s 1994 album “Live Through This,” which featured a similar tiara-wearing bouquet holder with mascara streaks. The influence is undeniable, but the lines of homage and rip-off blur when separated by three decades.
In an era in which all the tropes of gender dynamics, beauty standards and the experience of going to high school seem up for careful review, why do we keep returning so often to the prom queen as the epitome of adolescent achievement? While educators and school boards continue to reshape and redefine what high school should be, popular culture holds certain characters dear: the quarterback, the nerd, the prom queen. It’s no wonder that Rodrigo, at 18, finds something eternal and fascinating in both the joy and heartache of being a prom queen.
In the universe of teen romantic comedies, the prom is a naturally fitting narrative construct. It’s an important flourish on the school year’s end, where subplots settle into resolution, the big kiss may (or may not) happen and someone must be crowned queen.
Some classic teen movies structure themselves around the coronation. “She’s All That,” released in 1999, places Laney Boggs (Rachael Leigh Cook), the artistic dork, as the nobody whom the school heartthrob, Zack Siler (Freddie Prinze Jr.) wagers with the other dudes that he can transform into prom-queen status by year’s end. The movie is one of many ’90s flicks that borrowed from classic literature (George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” in this case). Laney falls in love with Zack, but, spoiler: She isn’t crowned prom queen after all.
As a teenage actor too busy to experience the routines of life at her Minneapolis high school, making “She’s All That” was Cook’s only prom experience. Now 41, she said real proms probably don’t get any better than her movie one, with its professionally choreographed dances and an appearance by Usher. Her theory on the appeal of prom queens? She thinks of them as a “marker on otherness.”
“It’s to create a viewer and viewed relationship,” she says. “It’s to create unity among everybody who isn’t the prom queen. It’s sort of reverse inclusive.”
“She’s All That” screenwriter R. Lee Fleming Jr. says that Laney’s loss of the prom queen vote — and not needing to be queen in the first place — is more fitting for her character, as well as an acknowledgment of the superficial nature of the title. “It’s the kind of thing that diminishes rapidly, like an expensive car that gets less valuable once you’ve driven it off the lot,” he says. “Once you get beyond high school, [being prom queen] may even become a source of embarrassment because it’s associated with a sort of vacuousness.”
Fleming is also writing the upcoming gender-flipped remake of the film, called “He’s All That,” streaming Aug. 27 on Netflix and starring TikTok megastar Addison Rae as a high school social media influencer who attempts to boost an unpopular classmate’s social standing and ultimately win him the title of prom king. Despite the gender flip, Fleming says it’s still a useful shorthand for teen triumph 22 years later.
A prom queen’s rise translates across centuries. In 1983′s “Valley Girl,” high school replaces Renaissance Italy for a “Romeo and Juliet”-styled story of the totally tubular Julie (Deborah Foreman) who falls for Hollywood punk Randy (Nicolas Cage). It ends at Julie’s prom instead of ending with a double-suicide. Randy shows up at the last minute and spirits her away in a limousine. It’s a reliable way of making teen characters seem wise beyond their years: have them shrug off the pressure of prom, and of being queen, altogether.
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1986 film “Peggy Sue Got Married” also considers the fleeting nature of being prom queen. After passing out at her 25th high school reunion, Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) time-travels to 1960 for a reconsideration of her choices. The film also considers the fate of the prom king, Charlie (Nicolas Cage, again), the sweetheart Peggy Sue married. The whole thing is a rumination on how fast this sort of glory can fade.
“Shut up, count your calories,” Lili Trifilio, who fronts the indie rock band Beach Bunny, sings in the opening lines of the band’s song “Prom Queen,” which was released in 2018 and skyrocketed in popularity on TikTok. “I never looked good in mom jeans.”
When Trifilio started to write a song about struggling with eating disorders, it was always going to be called “Prom Queen.” She says it was a natural choice; for her, the idea of a prom queen conjures the most standard features of Eurocentric beauty — blond hair and blue eyes. “It correlates with people’s fascination with Barbie or the all-American perfect girl,” she says. “I thought it was a good way to personify the American ideal, at least for White people.”
TikTok users love “Prom Queen,” posting videos in which they lip-sync along while on-screen text tells of their experiences and struggles with image and perception. Rae, the “He’s All That” star and the third most followed person on TikTok, also posted a “Prom Queen” video, which was criticized for its bright and bubbly dancing and mood, missing the point of a song about starving oneself. (She has since deleted the video.)
Trifilio says she has a love-hate relationship with the app, The rapid spread of “Prom Queen” helped the band get a record deal, but allowed TikTok users to take its sensitive lyrics and present their own interpretations of the prom queen motif and the restriction it embodies.
“When it first came out, it was doing fine,” she says. “As soon as TikTok took off with it, it was like, wow, this is the most relatable song that I have.” While she’s not happy so many people could find something of themselves in the self-destruction lamented in “Prom Queen,” she said she hopes the song has helped their recovery.
No discussion of prom queens gets far without “Carrie,” the 1974 Stephen King novel and Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation starring Sissy Spacek.
Before the bloody climax and high school gymnasium slaughter, Carrie sparkles — indeed, she remains the queen of all of Hollywood’s other prom queens. De Palma slows down time as she is crowned, a moment the late film critic Pauline Kael described in her review as “her first taste of feeling beautiful.” Carrie’s brief joy makes the coming rampage all the more tragic.
That moment is echoed in the prom scene of the 1999 black comedy “Jawbreaker,” written and directed by Darren Stein, which starred Rose McGowan and followed a group of girls who have accidentally killed their friend. Despite some similarities to “Heathers” a decade earlier, Stein said his biggest influences for the movie were “Carrie,” “Pretty in Pink,” and working out his pent-up anger after graduating in 1989 from the Harvard School for Boys in the San Fernando Valley.
At a school he says was populated by all-American popular kids, Stein says he was a “queer kid thrown in with the outsiders.” He asked a girl he met at a summer camp to fly from Florida to Los Angeles to be his prom date, pressured by heteronormative traditions of the time. Stein said that apart from the scepter and crown, the prom queen’s real draw is in capturing the moment of beauty and eternal youth they represent.
“They have the power of nostalgia, of memory,” he says. “They get real estate in a yearbook. They get emblazoned into your psyche, into your memory in a way that no one else quite does.”
McGowan, who played “Jawbreaker’s” evil prom queen incarnate, Courtney Shayne, says that image of eternal perfection makes the prom queen a figure people love to tear down. “It’s like cinematic slut-shaming. It carries in with that love of elevating and destroying a person at the same time.”
Sarah Slavin was the prom queen in 2017 at Westfield High School, in Westfield, N.J., and she thinks it’s possible that the tradition may have died out that year, or soon after. A school spokesperson couldn’t confirm if the school is still electing prom queens at Westfield these days, which is understandable, given the times. While there’s no conclusive Pew Research report on high school proms, some schools have indeed stopped crowning prom royalty. Maybe it’s an effort to way to stop placing students above one another, to evolve out of constrictive, old tropes. Let the pop stars and Hollywood have it.
In real life, Slavin’s big night had no surprise buckets of pig blood, no choreographed dance, no epic takedown or sweeping romantic scene. It was just a school dance.
She and the prom king, a friend, pursued royal status as a kind of joke, to counter the feeling that some of their classmates were taking it too seriously. When they were crowned, they had expected to slow-dance to the old “Dirty Dancing” hit, “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life.” The 2014 song “Time of Our Lives,” by Ne-Yo and Pitbull blared instead. Slow dancing seemed so ridiculous that they soon started waving everyone to join them on the dance floor.
At 22, it might as well have been a million years ago. “I don’t even know why people romanticize it and think of it as being like this larger-than-life thing,” Slavin says. She did, however, get that thing all prom queens get: For a moment, all eyes are on you.
Prom does come from the word “promenade,” after all — a walk where one is meant to be seen. We may be moving past the prom queen, but we still see her. And she is, eternally, waving.
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