6

It Used To Be Easy To Lie About Your Career (Romy And Michele's High School Reunion)

A comedy that came out in 1997 shouldn't feel like ancient history, but when you realize only 20 percent of the U.S. had internet connections at the time and iPhones were a decade away, it might as well be the freaking Dark Ages.

So in this Clinton-era romp, Romy White (Mira Sorvino) is a cashier at a car dealership, and Michele Weinberger (Lisa Kudrow) is unemployed. When their ten-year high school reunion is coming up, they realize they have failed miserably at being grown-ups (see, because back then, it was absurd to not have a steady career by your late 20s). So they decide to fake it for all of their old friends back home. Because that was an option.

They borrow an expensive-as-hell Jag from the dealership Romy works at, and Michele makes them business suits. Their plan is to tell their former classmates that they invented Post-it Notes, figuring it's something everyone has heard of but no one knows the inventor of. See, that's the kind of lie you could tell in 1997, and during all of human history prior to smartphones. Who was going to spend a whole day at the library debunking it?

5

Changing Schools Used To Mean A Fresh Start (The New Guy, Many Others)

There used to be a genre of teen comedy in which some put-upon youth concocts a way to move to a new school under a completely new identity. In 1985, we had the subtle masterpiece Just One Of The Guys, in which a young woman feels she isn't being taken seriously because she's too hot of a babe, and thus enrolls in another school as a male (the idea of someone enduring several gender-related mishaps in a locker room was considered hilarious at the time). In 1987, John Cryer had some convoluted reason to go back to high school as an adult in Hiding Out, pretending to be a new student and taking the opportunity to do it all over again.

4

You Could Actually Lie About Being In A Relationship (Sideways, Chasing Amy, Etc.)

Let's start with the 2004 movie Sideways, starring Paul Giamatti as Miles, a wine aficionado who goes on a trip to wine country with his best friend Jack, played by Thomas Haden Church, who wants one last sexual fling before getting married. This was an era in which some kids might have MySpace pages, but a middle-aged dude certainly would not -- if he said he was single, you just had to take his word for it.

This is technically the first attempt at a Sinister Six origin movie.

3

You Could Totally Change Your Personality To Impress Your Crush (Mean Girls, High School Musical, Grease)

In High School Musical, Troy Bolton (Zac Efron) meets a fellow teenager named Gabriella (Vanessa Anne Hudgens) at a winter teen party over Christmas break. They bond over karaoke and the joys of being hot young Disney stars before exchanging numbers and moving on with their lives. Except wait! Gabriella transfers to Troy's school and he's not the karaoke loving goofball she met at the party. At school he's a jock. Chaos ensues as Troy struggles with which version of himself he wants to be - a basketball player or a singer. That's right, back then you could just ... choose. You know, all the way back in 2006.

In Mean Girls, we had something similar with Lindsay Lonan's Cady Heron, a straight-A student who falls for handsome jock Aaron Samuels. She shares a math class with him, so luring him in is as easy as playing dumb and asking if he'll tutor her. So what if she's actually competing in -- and winning -- her school's math bowls at the time? This was 2004, for Christ's sake -- a time when you could still trick a sufficiently dumb person with lies about your interests.

In fact, we're pretty sure that such lies used to be the mortar that held all of society together. Go all the way back to Grease (made in 1978, set in 1958). To his friends at Rydell High, Danny Zuko is a tough ladies' man who openly brags that he doesn't care about any girl's feelings. But when he spends his summer on the beach away from his hometown, he acts kind and softhearted toward his summer fling, Sandy. When Sandy moves to Danny's hometown, he's forced to confront how differently he acts around his friends than he did with her back on the beach, and decide which Danny Zuko he wants to be.

2

Stalking An Old Fling Used To Be Hard (There's Something About Mary)

In 1998's There's Something About Mary, Ted (Ben Stiller) has lost touch with the girl he loved in high school, Mary. To find her, he hires a private detective to track her down, except the detective ends up falling in love with Mary himself and using everything he has learned about her to try to win her over.

That's right, in the Before Times, in the dark epoch that has now all but fallen from the memory of man, the people you knew in high school were just gone after graduation. If one of you moved to a different city, it might as well have been Tibet. Catching up with an old fling in a romantic comedy meant paying someone hundreds of dollars to violate their privacy in a deeply creepy and unethical way. This is because your old crush was not livestreaming their toddler's birthday party right there in your social media feed, or spamming you with Trump memes until you're forced to mute them.

The whole running joke in the film is that everyone is lying about their past. Another of Mary's friends, the handicapped British man "Tucker," turns out to be an able-bodied American who also has been lying for years. That was a plausible plot point -- a fake accent and some crutches was all it took to literally be a new man.

1

Apparently, Identity Theft Was Just Effortless (The Talented Mr. Ripley, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer)

"Smooth con man lies his way through a taut thriller" is another genre that might as well be dead unless it's set pre-Facebook. There are still shows based on the protagonist living under a stolen identity (Sneaky Pete, Banshee), but usually they have to hand-wave away the entire concept of social media with "I'll have my hacker friend change the online records!" No you won't. You're using the name of a guy who doesn't look anything like you, and that guy probably has a LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, and a popular Twitch stream in which he plays Fortnite as DrChubby_LIVE.

So then you go back and watch older movies, like Matt Damon's The Talented Mr. Ripley (set in the 1950s). The setup is that a rich old guy named Herbert Greenleaf has lost contact with his son, Dickie (Jude Law), who has moved to Italy. He unwittingly hires conman Tom Ripley because he mistakes him for a former classmate of Dickie's (today, easily resolved via any number of online platforms), tasking him with going to Italy to find his son and bring him home. There, Tom kills Dickie and then assumes his identity, creating a series of tense near-misses along the way.