‘Love Potion No. 9’: The Greatest Trick Ever Played
Everyone in the rapiest film of all time is awful.
NEW STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This newsletter aggressively spoils things.
Hello! And welcome to the part of this newsletter where I aggressively lean into a piece of media so old and obscure it might as well not exist1. I like to do this in the hope that I turn out to be the only idiot old enough and dumb enough2 to have watched a particular film or TV show, so I can say anything I want without sourcing or engaging in even basic logic3. It’s really these sorts of scenarios where I really shine. The only time I’m better at making arguments is when I’m alone and talking to myself4.
So by now you’ve guessed I’m here to discuss the 1992 classic Love Potion No. 9, starring a pre-Speed Sandra Bullock and Tate Donovan, who has been in more than 100 projects but doesn’t have one I’d consider the iconic Tate Donovan jam. This lighthearted romantic comedy has the distinction of possibly being the rapiest movie ever made, but it’s so darn cutesy and silly you can watch it several times before you realize just how awful it is5.
What’s Consent Got to Do With It?
The basic story of this film goes like this: Paul (Donovan) and Diane (Bullock) are super nerdy scientists who have zero love game. They have bad hair6, she wears thick glasses, and they have zero rizz and no confidence. Paul’s friends take him to a psychic (played by fucking Ann Bancroft!) who takes pity on him and gives him a small amount of Love Potion Number 8, which she instructs him to mix into water and drink.
Paul is scientifically dubious, but after his cat eats some and inspires every other cat in the neighborhood to go lust crazy, he brings it into the lab. Together he and Diane figure out that it actually works7. They split the potion and head off to test it in the real world. This testing takes the form of using the potion on unsuspecting people, who magically become utterly infatuated with Paul or Diane. Each of them have adventures: Diane eventually meets the Prince of England and has a Pretty Woman-esque makeover, magically becoming Hot Babe Bullock simply by combing her hair and taking off her glasses—classic8! Paul has many sexual adventures, including a presumably exhausting evening working his way through a sorority house with the potion9.
So, this is a horny movie. The problem is that none of the people Paul and Diane boink while enthusiastically testing this potentially carcinogenic potion (for science!) have the ability to consent, so every single one of their lighthearted Potion Adventures is essentially a form of sexual assault.
Well, It's One Louder, Isn't It?
Yes, we live in No Fun Times when lighthearted jokes about assault and mind control sex are just not funny any more. Boo hoo for us. What’s really remarkable about this awful film is that no one seems to have ever noticed just how awful its central premise is10. Paul and Diane selfishly revel in their power to force people to love them and have sex with them, pretty much without a hint of guilt or regret. The film basically takes the position that if anyone was given the power to melt brains into the missionary position they would do it over and over again with a smirk and perhaps an enthusiastic yee-haw, so what’s the problem11?
The reason this doesn’t seem as icky in the course of the film as it actually and objectively is comes down to a bit of narrative sleight of hand. Writers are tiny gods in their fictional universes, and the audience only gets to see the stuff the writer allows them to see. In Love Potion No. 9 one of the things we definitely don’t see is how Paul and Diane’s creepy sexcapades affect their victims. There are no shots of weeping sorority girls lining up for therapy, no revelations that the Prince of England is waking up in the middle of the night screaming because his sense of personal security has been thoroughly violated12.
That selective focus buries any chance you think about these dark possibilities, but the really brilliant part is that the story does explore the consequences of potion-assisted emotional manipulation and sexual assault. It just does it with the main characters.
Diane is ensnared by a creepy former booty call named Gary (Dale Midkiff), who learns about the potion and purchases the entire supply from the psychic, then uses it to get engaged to Diane, controlling her by instructing her to phone him every few hours so he can reinforce the spell13. And Paul encounters a sex worker named Marisa (Mary Mara) he’d seen earlier in the story, who finds the potion and uses it to rob him blind—including his supply of the potion. Marisa continues to plague Paul for the rest of the film as Paul realizes he’s in love with Diane and scrambles to find a way to break the spell.
By giving all the trauma and PTSD of being mind controlled to the main characters, the story neatly accomplishes two things: One, it does, sort of, acknowledge the horror movie at the center of the story. And two, it absolves the two protagonists of their guilt, because they’re the only ones we see punished. It’s kind of a great trick, honestly. But if you think about it for more than five seconds you realize that there really ought to be a few scenes of people waking up, frowning in puzzlement, and then immediately bursting into body-wracking sobs14.
Of course, I might just be bitter because if I stumbled on a mind control love potion I would certainly accidentally use it on my cats, and that is a true horror movie premise.
NEXT WEEK: ‘Gen-V’ and not letting reveals congeal.
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JUST LIKE ME AND MY WRITING CAREER, HA HA! … wait … now I am sad.
For the record, I am always dumb enough. For anything.
You may be wondering when I do worry about sourcing and basic logic, and the answer is, you got me, I never do.
When it’s just me and the cats I am also a pretty rad dancer, guitar player, singer, and the sort of guy who can use the word rad in a sentence without looking like an ancient dork.
That’s also how I establish friendships: I am so adorable it’s years in before you realize you’ve become best friends with an asshole. Works every time!
All due respect to the makeup staff on this film—this is some of the most plausibly bad hair I’ve ever seen in a filmed entertainment. And since I see myself every day in the mirror, I am something of a Bad Hair Expert Witness.
This involves a bout of hilarious chimp sexual assault and a female chimp cowering in her cage as a male chimp humps it, which is just as hilarious as you imagine.
Full disclosuer: The character also gets her teeth fixed, because as we all know it requires tremendous confidence to engage in basic dental care.
There’s also a late joke involving a villainous character who swallows a huge hunk of undiluted potion and winds up with the entire male population of New York chasing her with the intent to, well, you know, which is, in case you were wondering, also supposed to be hilarious.
It’s possible this is because no one has actually seen it, much like the way I end every short story by telling my readers to go fuck themselves has never been noticed because no one has ever finished one of my stories.
Note to self: Make yee-haw! a thing again.
This is also a universe without sexually-transmitted diseases or pregnancy, apparently, which means it’s pretty much set in the same universe as porn. Which … makes sense.
Considering this is a story centered on forcing people who don’t want to have sex with you to have sex with you, the fact that he wants to marry her is almost quaint.
I start every day that way and I feel great.
I would argue that, beyond story structure and trying to keep us sympathetic to the main characters, it’s actually realistic we don’t see much fallout from Paul and Diane’s use of the potion. Mainly because the people they use it on never find out it’s been used on them. YES realistically it still counts as sexual assault, and their reactions next morning would vary. A real life drugged person who never knew they were drugged has still been assaulted. But especially in this movie verse, using such an unrealistic tool, there’s fair suspension of disbelief that the victims really likely never suspect they were hoodwinked. We see one kind of come-down from the potion of this fashion- when Marisa uses the potion on Gary, we do get the pleasure of seeing it wear off right in the middle of his kissing her. His reaction is basically to break the kiss, look at her oddly, wipe his mouth off, and just walk away, looking a little disturbed, but despite his use of the potion, I don’t think he’s smart enough to really get what happened, and in that vein, he doesn’t seem mad or upset, he just ignores her, throwing her away like he used to throw Diane away when he’d had his way with her and lost interest. I think it was likely even more seamless with Paul and Diane’s victims. Paul had mostly some one-night stands with college girls and attractive women in bars. As they were clear-headed, and remembering everything they were thinking and feeling, they probably are mainly distressed while they’re still obsessed with him, and when it wears off, they remember seeing him as attractive and having all these wild thoughts, but the obsession is gone and it likely becomes as much shame as they might get from any one night stand, because they do not have any reason in any shape or form to believe they were manipulated. They don’t magically assume some love potion drug has been made just cause they mistook their meeting with some rando as love-at-first-sight. Just poor decision making. Similarly, Diane’s a fairly cute girl, and the men she tricks into swarming her likely come out of it feeling like they wasted a bit of money, and “oh shes really not as amazing as I thought, she was just a fresh face I guess.” The biggest fallout I was actually expecting, and disappointed not to see even as a kid, was the Prince- I believed we were bound to see some kind of fallout there, as big as the self-centered Prince correctly assuming she brainwashed him (though the people around him would probably think he was crazy) or as little as him being embarrassed at questions about his new girl on TV, and paying Diane to stay away (in this case, not believing she had done anything to him, and so not realizing he’s only snapped out of it because she’s no longer interested, herself.)
This is I think a typical story build- yes, the potion is rapey and wrong to use, but quite critically, our main characters *do not get this.* Faced with this unrealistic situation, they see their actions as harmless, and based on the reactions they get, it seems like it. But as with any story about the dangers of that kind of power, it comes back to bite them later, as they *do* know what the potion is and are forced to learn that this power is wrong, and are very, painfully aware of what happened when they are violated and traumatized by others turning the situation on them. It’s like Bruce Almighty, where he gets the power to be god and clearly doesn’t regret a lick of his actions, thinking everything’s going well, loving his power to forcibly arouse his girlfriend (which is its own kind of assault-y mess), and he’s even doing good by people when he decides to say Yes to all their prayers. But then the power backfires, as all the consequences of his choices pile up. There are other examples- the movies about characters switching bodies, at first enjoying themselves then being hit by the difficulties of the others life they weren’t expecting, etcetera etcetera. Instead of showing immediate consequences to the “Fun and Games” portion of the story, there comes a time when they’re forced to be the victims of their own scam. That’s where the lesson, that using the potion in the first place was wrong, is communicated.
However, all that said, I don’t think this movie would be played out this playful or family-friendly nowadays, mainly because of the awareness around such matters of consent today. I feel like the movie would be explicit, with an adult rating, and we would see some kind of unexpected fallout/punishment for every use of the potion, really trying to hammer in the real-life point, that using a substance, be it alcohol or drugs, to alter someone’s mind still equals assault, whether the person believed they wanted it or not. I think it would actually be interesting to see the movie remade in that lens.