Sober Sunday Reflections on...the Lillard

I remember going to the mall every Friday night when I was in middle school to meet up with some friends at the small three-screen movie theater by the food court. Every week: we’d see the newest movie shamelessly pushed at kids our age. These movies came in two types: the Pygmalion teen rom-com, in which one of the two main characters changes in some supposedly significant way to become date-able to the other main character (She’s All That, Drive Me Crazy, Cruel Intentions, Ten Things I Hate About You, et. al.) and the teen slasher flick (the I Know What You Did Last Summer movies, the Scream movies, Valentine—and the others I’m not thinking of at the moment).

While these movies may seem ostensibly different, there was a lot of crossover between them—not just in the fact that they borrowed the same crop of actors (Freddie Prinze, Jr. is in I Know What You Did Last Summer and She’s All That; Ryan Phillipe is in I Know What You Did Last Summer and Cruel Intentions; Matthew Lillard is in Scream and She’s All That, etc. etc.), but also in one very particular unifying trait, that heretofore (first and last time I’ll probably ever use that word) has not been addressed: most of the movies (if not all of them) feature a character I like to call: the Lillard. 

 Pictured: THE Lillard

 The Lillard, named after Matthew, is a quirky white guy who serves as the puckish comic relief to the often saccharine, melodramatic or gory-but-not-really plots of these movies. He’s like Shaggy—he has no business hanging around all these super-cool (often rich) kids, but they keep him around because…he’s the Lillard, man. Incidentally, Matthew Lillard (the Lillard King, himself) now plays Shaggy in the live-action Scooby Doo movies.

The interesting thing about the Lillards mentioned in this article is that a lot of them went on to relatively successful careers—before disappearing off the grid almost altogether. Save for Matthew Lillard (King Lillard, himself) and Dude from Breaking Bad, who kind of resurrected their careers with roles in movies or T.V. shows that…people with entertainment standards like—Lillard with a recent role in the Descendants and Dude from Breaking Bad in…Breaking Bad.

Anyway, here’s the list:

1.      Matthew Lillard

Scream was the first movie I saw from the Lillard-era. I remember kids talking about it at school. At the time, movies like this didn’t really exist for our generation. The kids in the eighties had the Brat Pack. But it wasn’t until Scream came out that we got our first taste of a generation-defining movie—and what a ruckus it caused.

The meta horror movie in-jokes seemed really funny at the time and I seem to remember being really disturbed by the killings in the movie, but…looking back at the movie now, it’s hard to grasp why it was so revolutionary. The parts that stick out like a sore thumb now are the parts that I responded to as a kid and ultimately what made the movie generation-defining. But…it’s also what makes the film now feel dated. 

What we at home don't realize is that the script actually called for McGowan's nipples to be obnoxiously erect during this scene.

I do feel lucky, though, that my first exposure to the Lillard character was THE Lillard and not one of the Lillard knock-offs listed below. 

In Scream, Matthew Lillard plays a character named Stu. The way he talked, the way he acted—the inflated bro-confidence and laid back stoner-but-not-stoner affectation in his voice—really struck a chord with most males my age. Likely, because we’d never seen the comic relief in a movie characterized like that—both funny and cool. He later went on to sort-of reprise the role in She's All That. You could argue that Ferris Bueller is funny and cool (maybe a precursor to the Lillard), but Stu  and whatever-Lillard's character's name is in She's All That belonged to our generation and Ferris belonged to the eighties.

So, here’s to Matthew Lillard. The Lillard of all Lillards. Thanks for ruining us. 

2.      Dude From Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is a show enjoyed by everybody. And its appeal (for some reason) spans generations. In the olden days of ten years ago, people with very little in common used to bond over broad topics like sports or guess-what-little-Billy-did chit-chat. Now (and I am witness to this), they talk about Breaking Bad. When I go to work, all I hear are people talking about Breaking Bad. Mop-headed hipsters with gauges in their ears ask the baby-boomer next to them if they watched the latest episode. Dorky guys in their thirties relate to moms-of-four in their forties how they used to like Walter but now they don’t but they still feel compelled to watch him. And of course, backwoods Juggalos confide to their straight-laced superiors how making meth seems like a totally viable alternative to what they’re doing now. 

 The guy who prompted one-million Juggalos to ask: "Meth...how does that shit work?"

But before any of this hoopla, one of the show’s main characters, Dude Who Plays Jesse, used to be a Lillard.

That’s right. It was during the tail-end of the Lillard phase—just as my generation was getting sick of being pandered to with formulaic Hollywood schlock and graduating on to things that free-thinking individuals like, like movies-that-say-something and post-grunge Radiohead. 

Pictured: "bleep bloop"

So, lucky for Dude From Breaking Bad, nobody saw his Lillard performance in Whatever It Takes. In the movie, Dude From Breaking Bad is sort of a non-pot-smoking reiteration of Jeff Spicoli. His big plan is to secure his high school legacy by doing something crazy before leaving high school forever. He ends up removing the neck from a statue of the man who the school is named after, which stands on the school’s front lawn. 

Meth-dealer seems like a logical progression from former high school Lillard

The movie is also notable for featuring a young, not-yet-hipster-household name James Franco—and for the fact that Franco and Dude From Breaking Bad get second-billing to then-popular Shane West and that chick who played Gia from Full House. 

The film falls into the high school Pygmalion category of late-90’s/early-aughts teen movies, with Franco as one of the guys who must change in order to date Gia—and by change, I mean learning from her best friend and next door neighbor, Shane West, that Gia’s favorite book is Nine Stories and her favorite band is the Eels, then telling her that those are his favorite book and band. So, note to Facebook stalkers…boning the girl of your dreams is as simple as regurgitating their profile information. 

3.      Jamie Kennedy

Aww, poor Jamie Kennedy. His first and only Lillard role was playing second-Lilllard to the Lillard in the first Scream. 

Not Pictured: Martin Freeman from the UK version of the Office and the Lord of the Rings movies

In the movie, he plays eternal-virgin Randy—a video-store, horror-movie obsessive with his own horror movie “rules”—broken one-by-one, almost the second he voices them.Unlike the Lillard, Jamie goes on to survive for the sequels, where he offers up even more goofball Lillard-isms. 

One line in particular I remember being quoted at my middle school for the better part of a year--the line where the ghostface killer asks Jamie Kennedy what his favorite scary movie is and Jamie Kennedy says: "Showgirls." I don't know why, at that age, we thought it was funny to abuse kind-of-funny one-liners from movie trailers, but that was definitely one that got abused.

4.      Seth Green

Matthew Lillard may be the original Lillard, but Seth Green takes the cake for playing, not one, but two Lillard roles during this period. The first: in Can’t Hardly Wait, where he plays Kenny Fisher—a white kid from a predominately white area trying to act like a black rapper. The character might have been source material for fellow-Lillard, Jamie Kennedy’s Malibu’s Most Wanted, since they’re pretty much the same character. 

Lillard Historians take note: this is what a Lillard looks like (the quirky glasses, late-90's fashion sensibility, pocket chain and crazy hair). Shaggy for the Gen-X/Gen-Y in-betweeners.

The second Lillard role was in Idle Hands, in which Green played “funny, stoner guy zombie-friend” to Devon Sawa. 

Green’s character in the movie is notable for crossing that line that no other movies featuring Lilllard characters crossed: in the movie, Green smoked weed—the fourth wall for Lillards. While the other Lillards on this list owe a lot of their quirk to Lillard prototype, Jeff Spicoli, none of them are shown smoking weed—nor is it suggested that they smoke weed. They follow the Shaggy Principle: Shaggy was obviously a dooby-smokin’ tweaker, but they never explicitly admit that in the cartoon. Green’s character in Idle Hands broke that rule—at a time when the Lillard was on its way out. 

So, maybe it’s safe to say Green destroyed the Lillard in the same way that that new country song, “If ICould Have a Beer With Jesus" destroyed country. What is there left to say or do when you make a song that explicitly says what country music has been about (drinking beer and Jesus) since country music has been country music? Similarly, where can the Lillard character be taken once you’ve explicitly made him what everyone suspected he was: a goofy, on-the-cusp-of-the-21st-century reincarnation of Jeff Spicoli. It’d be like an episode of Scooby Doo, in which Shaggy is shown puff-puff-passing with Scoob and Thelma is shown twenty years in the future as a sexually-repressed, spinster librarian.

So, thanks, Seth Green. Without you, the Lillard thing might have gone too far. It might have been taken where most tropes and franchises go to die: in space!

Goddam it. Never mind.