With Disney clearly letting its hair down with just how “freaky” Freakier Friday can be, the laxity of what constitutes “family-friendly” “fun” has further increased in the years since the 2003 version of Freaky Friday was released. A movie that already pushed some boundaries on “appropriateness” levels…at least by erstwhile “Disney standards.” Granted, Disney is also known for having “hidden” sex messages/jokes in its movies—and no, not just in the clouds of The Lion King. But the upping of the ante on Jake Austin (Chad Michael Murray) being a total fetishist for older women in general, but Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis) in particular, has seen the company reach a new height of “open perversion.” Though, to be fair to Jake, it’s not his fault he started falling for Anna Coleman (Lindsay Lohan) right at the time when her mother, Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis), took up residence inside her body.
What’s more, it seemed that, within the universe of the movie, Jake being attracted to Anna is almost as scandalous as him being attracted to her mother, with comments on Anna being too young for Jake getting made a few times. And it’s true, when Lohan was playing fifteen-year-old Anna, she was sixteen. When Murray was playing presumably eighteen-year-old Jake, he was twenty-one. So yes, any way you slice it, Tess-as-Anna isn’t wrong, from a legal standpoint, when she tells Jake, “Truth be told, you’re way too old for me.” But, at that time—circa ‘02 (when Freaky Friday was actually filmed), it wasn’t unusual in the least to cast much older actors still feigning being younger as romantic interests for teen girls. To boot, Lohan herself would start dating then twenty-four-year-old Wilmer Valderrama when she was still seventeen. The relationship only lasted six months, but it still landed her a guest spot on That ‘70s Show as Danielle, Fez’s (Valderrama) short-lived girlfriend. So Murray, at twenty-one playing eighteen (his presumptive age, for that’s what he would have to be in order to so freely lust after Tess), is hardly as offensive as Valderrama at twenty-four dating Lohan. However, what is “offensive” to most, particularly in a culture that abhors when a woman “dares” to act like a man, is a forty-four-year-old (Curtis’ age at the time of filming) “encouraging” a twenty-one-year-old-playing-an-eighteen-year-old in his amorous ideas about her.
Then again, it seems many people—of all ages—still have amorous ideas about the now sixty-six-year-old Curtis, who recently did a TikTok “ad” for the movie in which her “low-cut top,” as it’s being described, caused more than a few double takes (at those “double Ds,” to wield the finishing line to “double take” that everyone else was thinking). Not to mention Curtis’ suggestive sentence structure: “You’re going to join with a big group of people who are finding something really sweet at the end of the summer to remind them what it is to be alive. I’m just privileged that I get to take you on the ride.” Said by someone not showcasing their rack, the sentiment might not feel so innuendo-laden. And so, it’s yet another strike in the column against Disney being “family friendly” with Freakier Friday. Though the main one is that Jake, now all grown up (or even more grown up than he seemed before), has apparently developed a fetish for much older women. Something that, needless to say, began with the mind fuck of being super into Anna while he thought she was Tess.
Indeed, Anna did herself a terrible disservice in Freaky Friday by not trying harder to act more like a dull, oppressive adult. More specifically, with the stick-up-her-ass vibe that Tess has. Instead, she makes Tess look “edgy,” “cool”—millennial. Worse still, she talks all about her musical tastes, which just so happen to align with Jake’s. This making him perhaps hardest of all during a scene when he’s apparently able to kick back and chill in the coffee shop where he works once Anna-as-Tess walks in. At one of the tables, the two discuss the bands they like (Ramones) and the ones they don’t (The White Stripes—and yes, not liking said band is a controversial opinion). And then, as they’re having their “moment,” a Bowling for Soup cover of Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” comes on over the speakers of the cafe. When this happens, Anna-as-Tess really imprints (sexually imprints, if you will) on Jake as the two start singing the lyrics, “When I’m not with you I lose my mind/Give me a sign/Hit me baby one more time.”
Catching herself in this intense flirtation, Anna-as-Tess realizes she has to get the fuck out of there before she really does end up doing something lewd with Jake while still in her mother’s body. But it’s too late; the effect it creates leaves Jake absolutely hooked on the woman he thinks is Tess, running after her to tell her, “I don’t know what’s going on here, okay? I don’t know what this whole thing is, all right? I just…I feel like I know you.” As a matter of fact, he does. It’s the same girl he was initially drawn to at the beginning of the movie, when she was still Anna in her own body.
Alas, when it comes to Anna effectively ruining her eventual romance with Jake by using all her best lines on him as Tess, perhaps she’s ultimately the one to blame for ruining Jake forever. As viewers see in Freakier Friday. For, despite Jake being an adult who seems pretty put together in that he managed to turn his musical passions into owning a record store, The Record Parlour (in real life, it’s a different Chad who owns the store: Chadwick Hemus), the instant he clocks Tess hiding out on the floor behind one of the shelves, all those lustful feelings come flooding back. And naturally, a Britney reference is again made during this scene, with Tess holding Spears’ In the Zone (because …Baby One More Time would have been too played?) album in front of her face as a means of “camouflage.”
The irony, of course, is that, once again, the woman that Jake thinks he’s talking to is not Tess at all. This time, it’s her soon-to-be granddaughter-in-law, Lily Reyes (Sophia Hammons), who has found herself trapped in this body. And, like Anna before her, she has an amply ageist reaction to seeing what she now looks like in the mirror. For, where Anna said Tess looked like “the Crypt Keeper,” Lily appraises her new “aesthetic” as follows: “My face looks like a Birkin bag that’s been left out in the sun to rot!” However, Jake doesn’t seem to think so. More attracted than ever to “the one that got away.” And it can be assumed that perhaps his ongoing, lingering attraction to Tess is at least part of what led to a breakup between him and Anna back in the day, with Anna subsequently getting pregnant at twenty-two and making an evidently big deal about raising her daughter, Harper (Julia Butters), on her own. But also with the help of Tess, who has now taken some of her therapy services to podcasting. This likely being further proof to Jake that she’s so “with it” for someone her age.
Besides that, he already appeared to develop an aversion to any woman younger than him in Freaky Friday when, while Tess is in Anna’s body, she acts so stodgy and demanding that it leads Jake to the conclusion, “I think you’re right. You’re too young for me.” With Tess, on the other hand, it seems like his mantra is, “The older she gets, the better.” But since she still has no interest in making him her boy toy in the sequel, Jake has to do arguably the freakiest thing of all in the movie: settle for an older woman who looks like Tess…the way Anna made her look in 2003. Talk about a highly specific kink. And a highly scandalous sexual hang-up to appear in a Disney movie.
Then again, maybe it’s proof that, despite the movie coming out during yet another Republican presidency, things have managed to get slightly more progressive. Or is “uncomfortably weird” the more accurate phrase? One supposes it depends on the level of fetishism the viewer himself has for Tess Coleman, ergo Jamie Lee Curtis.
Genna Rivieccio
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