Kirsten Dunst and The Tooth Brushing Scene That Made You Blush

In her new book, 'Bring It On: The Complete Story of the Cheerleading Movie That Changed, Like, Everything,' Kase Wickman celebrates the Y2K teen comedy in which dental hygiene plays an iconic role.

Hello friends—

Did Turn-of-the-Millennium Me, who was so not a cheerleader, venture to see Bring It On at the multiplex in the year of our lord 2000?

You bet.

I loved a teen movie that spoke kids’ language without talking down to them and Bring It On — sharply funny and ahead of its time — subverted Hollywood’s stereotypes about cheerleaders, often boxed into lazy clichés: The Villain. The Sex Object. The Dumb Blonde. Rather than look through a male gaze, screenwriter Jessica Bendinger, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs of my youth, wrote a winking riot of a script that took the sport and its athletes seriously. Bendinger’s head cheerleaders — the Rancho Carne Toros’ Torrance (Kirsten Dunst) and the East Compton Clovers’ Isis (Gabrielle Union) — reminded me of the pom-pom girls from my high school. They weren’t vapid arm candy. They were talented and assertive, and their skills and professionalism often made my hometown’s biggest Friday-night celebrities, the boy football and basketball players, look like amateurs. (Hello, former classmate! Someone had to say it!) As I recall, the pom-squad leader ranked in the top of my class and was rumored to have scored a “36” on her ACT. She wore hippie clothes and pink streaks in her hair and even gave the graduation commencement speech. She was cool as hell! Years later, while working as a journalist in New York, I bumped into her on Ninth Avenue, and she casually mentioned that she was a lighting designer for Baryshnikov. As in Mikhail.

This is a very long way of saying that I adore Kase Wickman’s brand-new book, Bring It On: The Complete Story of the Cheerleading Movie That Changed, Like, Everything. Wickman, a culture and entertainment journalist with an irreverent, irresistible voice, chronicles the making of a sleeper hit that resonates to this very day, especially as the rare mainstream film to highlight cultural appropriation. “I know you don’t think a white girl made that shit up,” Isis tells Torrance while rightly condemning the Toro’s predecessor, Big Red (Lindsay Sloane), for stealing the Clovers’ choreography. It’s a powerful confrontation, and Wickman spills all the details in her definitive history, also going behind the curtain of another nostalgic fan favorite, a rom-com masterclass: The Tooth Brushing Scene co-starring Dunst and Jesse Bradford, who plays Cliff, a cutie in a Clash T-shirt, the smitten, smirking brother of Torrance’s cheer-mate Missy (Eliza Dushku). (Of note: While Dunst ends up with Bradford, Bring It On’s queer fandom has cheered on a Dunst-Dushku romance, glimpsing subtext within the sleepover sequence.)

“It surprised me how many people brought up the toothbrush scene when I mentioned Bring It On, a mixture of awe and absolute lust in their voices,” Wickman tells me. “It shouldn't have, since it's totally iconic. It's a short, dialogue-free scene, but somehow manages to communicate so much about the characters (Kirsten shielding her mouth when she spits is so cute!) and so clearly conveys, in an entirely chaste manner, absolutely burning unresolved sexual tension between the two characters. Brushing your teeth is weirdly intimate — there are fluids — and the scene brings the viewer right back to sneaking glances at a crush, just hoping to catch a glimpse of them, then not really knowing what you want to do once you get there. This scene is about the romance of possibility, the grandeur of mundanity. You brush your teeth twice a day, but you only find your first love once.”

Wickman graciously allowed this meet-cute connoisseur to excerpt the inside scoop from her book — rah-rah! Observe the sparks below, then enjoy the author’s backstory:

“Cliff joins Torrance at the sink, totally sidling up to her. Torrance is coyly trying to cover. . . . A playful interlude, bursting with romantic tension.” —Bring It On shooting script

It’s roughly fifty-one seconds that launched thousands of sexual awakenings: Bring It On’s infamous dialogue-free toothbrush scene. After an eventful football game at Rancho Carne —highs include Torrance having scandalous “cheer sex” with Cliff in the stands via extended eye contact, the low would have to be the Clovers showing up and making the Toros look like absolute assholes by making it clear exactly who came up with those sideline shouts — Torrance spends the night at Missy’s parent-free mansion. After watching Cliff roll around in his boxers on the floor riffing on his electric guitar with cartoon hearts in her eyes, Torrance and Cliff brush their teeth side by side in what is somehow the cutest and most chaste, yet most sexual-tension-laden scene in all of teen cinema. Who knew fluoride could be so erotic?

“In one scene, when Torrance and Cliff surprise each other while brushing their teeth, it ascends to the frothy, sublimated seductiveness of classic screwball,” A. O. Scott wrote in his New York Times review of the movie. “Ms. Dunst’s expression as she emerges from the bathroom, having done nothing more risqué than spit in the sink, is perfectly enigmatic and completely convincing, a mixture of mischievous amazement and unconscious arousal. It’s a wonderfully subtle moment — exactly what you’d expect from a cheerleader movie.”

“Let’s talk about the toothbrushing scene,” [Hollywood screenwriter and Bring it On fan] Dan Waters said. “It is one of the greatest scenes in cinema, right? I mean, first of all, tooth brushing is gross . . . the fact that it’s a) tooth brushing, which I don’t want to see, and b) that it works as a romantic moment on so many levels. And without being hot and heavy but it was, it is hot and heavy. To me that’s an amazing scene.”

In fact, the scene wasn’t originally in Bendinger’s script but was a result of a writing session between her and [director Peyton] Reed to strengthen the romantic relationship between Cliff and Torrance.

Reed remembered the inspiration as the film history of decades past. “It’s something that you would see right out of a romantic comedy from the ’50s or ’60s,” he said. “We always talked about those. Frank Capra, It Happened One Night, there’s a scene with Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. They’re on a road trip, and they have to stay in this little lodge, a motel, and they share a room, and of course it’s twin beds, but because it’s the ’30s they string up a clothesline with a blanket over to separate them and it’s just this very innocent thing that’s also fraught with sexual tension. That was the vibe that I was after for that thing. And it also just kind of hit — Kirsten plays it so well, and to me when I watched that movie, for some reason that scene encapsulates who Kirsten was at that time, even though she’s obviously playing a role in the movie, but kind of who she was at the time. She had just turned seventeen. She was so young, and it really like encapsulated who she was at that time.”

“I knew those feelings very well,” Dunst said.

“In the script the whole scene was like a quarter of a page,” Bradford said. “Jessica wrote it and then Peyton, I think like, knew that he wanted to make a meal out of it instead of just a snack, you know, because you can always downgrade, right? I mean, they could always cut the scene out, but I think he had a certain giddiness about what he wanted to accomplish with that scene that I remember feeling off of him.”

That’s not to say Reed knew that it would work when he shot it. One word for how he felt after he came out of that tiny bathroom space with simple, head-on shots: relieved.

“Very early on when we did the master of that thing [we were] saying, ‘Oh, this is — they’re really good together, they really have chemistry, they really have a thing going on on-screen and it’s nice,’” he said. “Sort of like thinking like OK, this is something. When I was thinking about the movie and teen movies in general, this is the kind of moment that I love in those movies, and maybe we’re going to be able to actually have a legitimate one of those moments in this movie that’s entirely separate of all the cheerleading and all the other plot-driven stuff in the movie. It just felt like one of those teen Movie Moments.”

And a Movie Moment it was: “I feel like probably a solid chunk of my sexuality was awakened by that scene,” cultural commentator, podcast host, and A Girl’s Guide to Joining the Resistance author Emma Gray told me.

She’s not alone. Comedian Lane Moore tweeted about the clip, saying, “Truly this scene in Bring It On had everything: a brief scene with minimal dialogue, doing something mundane, fully clothed, and yet you watch this scene and you are unbelievably horny and fully believe this is what true love, or at least the promise of it, will feel like. ICONIC.” Not to mention, she goes on in a threaded tweet, “the overwhelming horniness of this scene is not talked about nearly enough tbh.” As the poets say, where’s the lie?

Asked in 2015 about his memories of shooting one of the landmark teen movie scenes in history, cinematographer Maurer simply said, “I just remember them getting very tired of brushing their teeth. I’m sure their teeth were very clean after that day of shooting.”

Beyond the motivations behind the scene, the old-school movie sensibilities, and the enduring legacy of the sequence, Bradford admits, “When I think about that scene, or think about that moment, the first thing I think of is actually how many times I brushed my teeth. I was just like, Ooh boy, I’m minty for days now.”

Bring It On the movie is available on most streaming platforms, and you can find Wickman’s homage at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Target, and Amazon. As for yours truly, You’ve Got Mail will be on hiatus next week — Happy Holidays, to all who celebrate!