Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(27)

It’s worth noting that Leslie doesn’t really choose at the end of St. Elmo’s Fire, claiming she needs some time without Alec or Kevin to decide what’s right for her, but who are the screenwriters kidding? We all know Leslie was just throwing her best friend, Kevin, a bone. In a month, you can bet she was making out with Alec again, and they probably didn’t need a Seelie Queen to make it happen.





Case Study 4: The Outsiders (Kathleen Rowell, Based on the Novel by S. E. Hinton, 1983)


The film The Outsiders, based on the book by the same name, is a case study in another aspect of the Duckie effect. No matter how gorgeous and heroic the best friend is, the other guy is more gorgeous, more heroic, more mysterious—more everything.

In The Outsiders, Ponyboy, a working-class Greaser, becomes friends with Cherry, a gorgeous Soc (short for socialites, the rich kids in the novel) from the other side of the tracks, when he chases off some other Greasers harassing her at the movies. Cherry and Ponyboy end up becoming friends, and he likes her. Granted, he hasn’t been pining for Cherry for years, but a crush on a Soc girl is no joke; it’s something we eventually learn can get you killed.

Dallas Winston is also a Greaser, and a friend of Ponyboy’s. But he doesn’t spend his time reading poetry and contemplating the social divide between the Greasers and the Socs like Ponyboy does. Dallas is too busy drinking and fighting and running from the cops, when he isn’t robbing liquor stores and hitting on girls. Cherry meets Dallas only once, and he’s less than charming, but her takeaway from the experience says it all: “I hope I never see Dallas Winston again. If I do I’d…probably fall in love with him.” Dallas embodies the bad boy, something the best friend will never be.

Exhibit F: Jace embodies the bad boy, and Clary is immediately attracted to him because of it.

In City of Ashes, Simon remembers the first time he noticed the way Clary reacted to “the blond boy with the strange tattoos and the angular, pretty face [Jace] as though he were one of her animated heroes come to life. [Simon] had never seen her look at anyone that way before”—including him. Jace is Clary’s Dallas Winston, a gorgeous, rule-breaking bad boy, who seems more like a superhero with his tough exterior and I-don’t-need-anyone attitude. From the moment she meets Jace, she can’t forget him, and despite his sarcastic comments, she can’t fight her attraction to him any more than Cherry can fight her attraction to Dallas. Like Simon, Ponyboy doesn’t get the girl either.

Lots of readers will argue that Simon does get the girl, it’s just not Clary, and that’s true. But that doesn’t challenge the basic principle of the Duckie effect, which is the best friend never gets the girl.





The Exception


It’s interesting to note that the opposite outcome is true when the person in love with her best friend is a girl instead of a boy. In literature and film, the girl always seems to get the guy, even if the girl is shy, geeky, or dare I say average looking. We only need to look to one ’80s film to see how this scenario plays out because it’s always the same; the girl is in love with her best friend, who chases some unattainable girl until he finally gets her and realizes it was his best friend he was in love with all along.

In John Hughes’ 1987 film Some Kind of Wonderful, Keith’s best friend, Watts (a girl), is secretly in love with him. Keith has no idea, in part because he is completely fixated on Amanda Jones, a girl who is way out of his league. Watts buries her feelings and agrees to help him with an elaborate plan to win Amanda’s heart, which tears Watts’ heart to shreds in the process. Unbelievably, as it always seems to happen when a girl is in love with her male best friend, the boy (Keith, in this case) manages to get the fantasy girl. The difference? At the last minute, Keith suddenly realizes he’s really in love with Watts and chases her down the street to give her the diamond earrings he planned to give to Amanda.

So what gives? Why do the girls end up with their best friends? Why aren’t they Duckies too? The message seems to be that guys don’t always know what they want—or who is right for them—until a resourceful young woman finds a way to show them. While this portrait of literary and cinematic boys in general is less than flattering, is it any less flattering than the portrait of girls who undergo some sort of chemical reaction the minute they meet an emotionally unavailable bad boy? Unless the bad boy in question isn’t really bad at all (like Jace). What if these fictional girls empower a few of us who are more Watts than Amanda Jones to go after our own Jace Waylands anyway, off the screen and the page? Girls going after what they want in literature, and life, always get my vote.

Couldn’t ending up with a Duckie be just as empowering? Unfortunately, most film and literature heroines will never find out, though more than a few real girls know the truth: Sometimes your best friend also happens to be the best choice.

Until then, like crop circles, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, and ESP, the Duckie effect is an unexplained phenomenon. Only one thing is certain: Even if he’s an adorable Jewish vampire, the best friend never gets the girl.



Kami Garcia is the New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and international bestselling coauthor of the Beautiful Creatures novels. Beautiful Creatures releases in theaters in 2013 from Warner Brothers and Alcon Entertainment, starring Viola Davis, Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson, Alice Englert, Alden Ehrenrich, and Emmy Rossum. Kami is also the author of Unbreakable, the first book in her solo series, The Legion (Little, Brown, 2013), which is currently being developed as a major motion picture. You can find out more about Kami and her books at www.kamigarcia.com or follow her on Twitter at @kamigarcia.