Twin Souls: Missy and Cliff Pantone, Sister Überdyke and Brother *cough* Loser

My book is out in less than a month. (In academic publishing, you’re meant to be kind of cool about this, I think, but I’ll be honest, inside my head when I think “my book is out in less than a month” one of the other voices just goes, “HOLY SHIT”, because whisper whisper whisper it I’m actually very excited to see it out there in the world.)

To celebrate, I am counting down my top screen siblings of this century. When I started compiling the list, I realised quite quickly that my top three were all brother-sister pairs, and so it made sense to carry this trend all the way through. While I have great fondness for depictions of brother-brother and sister-sister relationships on screen, I am the sister of a brother and perhaps inevitably, this is how the list turned out.

In at number five are Bring It On’s Pantone (PANT ONE) twins, Missy and Cliff (Eliza Dushku and Jesse Bradford)1, last seen disrupting the equilibrium at Rancho Carne High when they dare turn up with their (horror) dark hair and (double horror) alternative fashion [Converse, combats. Can you imagine.]. Cliff listens to punk music and Missy has drawn a tattoo on her arm with a wide-nibbed rollerball, so you know they’re t-t-t-trouble, T-T-T-Torrance.

It’s easy to miss, because Bring It On is “just” (just!) a gleefully camp teen movie about cheerleading, but this film is basically Shakespearean. Fitting, really, because although every other teen film of the moment was openly indebted to the man himself, Bring It On contains the DNA of every sonnet twin switch Billy Shakespeare ever wrote.2 Fewer disguises (they left this to She’s the Man, riffing on Twelfth Night), fewer convenient bushes to hide in, but the twin dynamic and doubled subterfuge is classic. Boy-wants-girl-but-girl-has-boyfriend; solve for romance? How about boy-makes-mixtape x boy-has-twin-sister?

This is the text of the film, of course; Bring It On has a rich queer subtext which can be solved much the same way, just substitute one twin for another, which is essentially what the film does in its closing scenes anyway. I write about this at more length in Screening Siblings, but if you look at the composition of the final sequence, when Cliff and Torrance (Kirsten Dunst) finally kiss and seal the film’s happy ending, right up until this moment it’s Missy in the reverse shot. Cliff is a useful foil for his sister’s unspoken desire, but essentially it doesn’t matter which Pant-One is in the final frame; they function as two sides of the same coin. The setting is modern, but the twin shenanigans are endearingly mediæval.

Of course, I’m always curious to see how siblings are depicted (plenty of outrage on exactly this right here), and whether it feels plausible that they’ve actually spent a childhood hiding toy lizards in the other one’s bed / making up (misremembering) songs about pins / insert your own sibling peculiarity here. Missy and Cliff pass the test, if only for the sleepover scene in which both of them catch the other one out, while Torrance remains oblivious. Siblinghood 101: eye roll, tongue out, fuck you, I SEE YOU.