Coyote Ugly Captures the Hilariously Sincere Optimism of the Year 2000

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When I was ten years old, I thought the most exhilarating place in the world must be on top of a bar, line dancing to Charlie Daniels' "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" in the dingy basement of a lower Manhattan honky tonk. The year? 2000. The song of the summer? "Bent" by Matchbox Twenty. The late summer blockbuster where I derived my sense of exhilaration? Coyote Ugly. Like most nostalgic look-backs, the world seemed less complicated then. We'd survived Y2K. Tiger Woods was still an American hero! There were three more Harry Potter books to look forward to and the author of those was not yet a horrible bigot. We were thriving.

In that cliché way that time tends to move, it's been a swift two decades since that cultural heyday. My dream of moving to New York City and becoming a part-time bartender, full-time bar clogger has been altered. But that dream—no, the entire aesthetic—from 2000 is encapsulated in the lovably terrible summer hit, Coyote Ugly, which turns 20 this August. Just old enough to drink, as long as cops aren't around. Sure, Coyote Ugly is a categorically bad film, but in its 101 minute run, it manages to capture the vibe of an iconic year that was plucky and unassuming with a delusional and misplaced sense of hope.

The year 2000 felt like that first sip of a Coke—refreshing and bubbly and new. At the end of the year, we'd elect a new president (even though that turned out... kind of sticky). We'd just entered into this new millennium, and there was a hopefulness that permeated throughout film. Almost Famous and Remember the Titans and even Gladiator had this common thread of resilience, even if it seems a bit misguided the more dated it gets. Amid the crop was a notably less critically acclaimed hit in Coyote Ugly. Critics hated it, but audiences embraced the charm of this sugar-coated grit story starring no one you'd particularly be able to pull out of a line up. It grossed $60 million domestically on a $45 million budget and became a summer hit. Coyote Ugly was the underdog success story in a bevy of underdog success stories.

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For those who haven't caught this afternoon-cable staple over the past two decades, Coyote Ugly follows the story of Violet Sanford, a singer-songwriter from New Jersey who wants to pursue music but can't perform in front of people because her mom died. Unrelated? Sure. Do we care? No. After immediately suffering a break-in and getting all of her cash stolen from her freezer, she lands a job at Coyote Ugly—a bar named after the feeling you have after a one-night-stand, specializing in women dancing on bars and the refusal to give patrons water. Violet struggles with this job she had no business getting in the first place, but that's the power of film. She emerges as a star one night after singing "One Way or Another" to stop a bar fight. Everyone listened, and like a boozy phoenix, her bottle handling skills fell into place and she becomes a staple of the establishment. Eventually, she goes to an open mic night, falls in love with an Australian man, and sells a few of her songs to musical legend, LeAnn Rimes.

The plot isn't groundbreaking, but man, if it doesn't fit in well with the vibe. In terms of star power or directorial clout, Coyote Ugly lacked majorly. It banked on the power of a popular doctor from ER, Roseanne's husband, and the primo model of the moment. Its director is best known, outside of Coyote Ugly, for directing Kangaroo Jack. And yet it worked.Starring Piper Perabo in her breakout role, she's flanked by the likes of Maria Bello and Johnny Knoxville and that one Danish actress who was in a few music videos for The Killers. It's like a casting agent sat down and said, "If I wanted to make a time capsule that captured screen legends, actors with a surprisingly short shelf life, and just a dash of someone who never should been in this movie, how would I do it?" And then they cast John Goodman, Adam Garcia, and Tyra Banks in the same film, and it was perfect.

And to soundtrack it, Coyote Ugly tapped LeAnn Rimes: the premiere success story of 2000. The film bet on Rimes in the same way that The Bodyguard bet on Whitney Houston. They paired her up with film song aficionado Dianne Warren, and the two produced ear-worms that still prod around your brain without abandon all these years later. With four original tracks, Rimes was the artist who was supposed to carry Coyote Ugly across the finish line, which makes the film all the more enjoyable. Coyote Ugly swung for the fences with its whole body, hoping that they'd assembled the correct team of "correct" things: actors from '90s staple TV shows, potential "new it girls" in Hollywood, and a marketable mouthpiece to backtrack it all.

Coyote Ugly presents a particularly misguided portrait of New York City in 2000. The city itself is this menacing character that will chew you up and spit you out. It's a New York City with none of the culture or diversity. But ultimately, it's a playground you should visit at some point because if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere! It frames New Jersey as a safe haven removed from the city, and it argues that there was a point in the recent history of New York that you can move to the city with about 500 dollars, get an apartment in a walkable part of town, lose all your money, and end up just fine.

In between the sometimes bleak depictions of '90s New York and the somber, patriotic figure it became after 9/11, New York lived a brief tenure where it was a grimy, but forgiving sand box. It's an absurd portrait of a place that never existed. It seemed like a magical place to live, specifically if you have a dream and literally nothing else. Sure, you might be broke as a joke to start, but all you have to do to make it is to show up with a limited skill set, land a job you're unqualified for, and you're set. You just have to try.

All of that is to say that 2000 was a time of optimism. It was the year that Julia Roberts finally landed an Oscar-winning performance. Blockbuster was so powerful that it turned down buying Netflix. Those were the newsworthy headlines. So it makes sense that Coyote Ugly painted New York as a place where you can go and just happen upon success. Even if that wasn't a reality, that's what 2000 made the world feel like. In all the nuance Coyote Ugly lacked, it managed to capture that feeling, intentional or not. Of course, much like Rimes' critical acclaim, the optimism of 2000 did not last that long. Twenty years later, it all seems very silly and frivolous, if not blithely white-washed and narratively thin.

Banks of all people, whose role in the film wasn't particularly substantial, told Variety that she's been ready for a sequel for years, adding, "I feel like we need to do some type of rallying cry to social media, you know, kind of like a petition to get people to sign to make the sequel. I actually really want to produce it." But could that even work? Can you bottle that essence for a 2020 crowd? Would we even know how to be that whimsical and silly again?

Imagining the reaction of the original Coyote Ugly being released today is nearly impossible. We're too jaded for it. We'd balk at it so hard that some executive would shelve it for an OnDemand release, and we surely wouldn't be writing this. It's not just that it is dated or is "problematic." It's that I'm not sure we'd know what to do with a film so naive. It only works so well because it reflects the era it came out in. Is Coyote Ugly a model film? In almost every way, no. But in these decidedly less optimistic, painfully realistic times, it's nice to remember how whimsically hopeful things were back in 2000. How at one point, we all believed that a dream, some light choreography, and a very loose grasp on light and dark liquors was all you needed to take over the world.

Justin Kirkland Justin Kirkland is a writer for Esquire, where he focuses on entertainment, television, and pop culture.

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DerExperte on August 9th, 2020 at 17:07 UTC »

Waiting for the companion piece about Requiem for a Dream capturing the depressingly sincere pessimism of the year 2000.

Ronaldo_McDonaldo81 on August 9th, 2020 at 16:19 UTC »

It quickly went from the Millenium Bug to 9/11 and it was all downhill from there.

Liightman on August 9th, 2020 at 15:35 UTC »

All late-90s cinema was overflowing with this energy. We really thought it was the end of history and that democracy and the West were ushering in a millennia of peace. Wild shit.