The lie lasts until the third act of the movie, when they have the extreme bad luck of running into the one woman who went to business school and happened to have had a lesson on the couple of guys who accidentally invented the Post-its' weak rubberized glue. Of course, today they could take five seconds to look up that story and find out that no one involved was named Romy or Michele, if they hadn't already seen it on Reddit or any one of a billion trivia sites. We probably wrote about it on Cracked at some point.

But in 2018, they would never have even progressed to that stage. Anyone at the reunion who is a Facebook friend of a friend of a friend of either one of them would know exactly where they've been working for the last ten years. Even if they didn't want to know, they'd know; Facebook shoves it down your throat. "Hey, did you know your high school bully got tagged in a photo posted by the girl who sat behind you in algebra and it was liked by a dude you were pretty sure died two years ago?"

It didn't used to be like this! As long as you lived in another city, you could pretty much be whoever you wanted to be when you took a trip back home. Speaking of which ...

In 2002, we got what has to have been among the last in the genre set in modern day, The New Guy, in which the nerdy Dizzy (D.J. Qualls) endures a series of humiliations that results in him deciding to get himself expelled so he can start over at a new school, reinventing himself as a tough, cool bully. In all of these movies, the hero eventually gets found out. In most of them, they reveal the secret themselves after months of humorous close calls. In every case, they learn something important about themselves and why it's wrong to judge people or whatever.

First of all, if you made it through school without ever having the urge to bail on it and start over elsewhere with a completely rebooted persona, congratulations. You're one of the lucky ones. For the rest of us, these plots weren't just a wacky fantasy. If your family moved to a new town, you could actually do this! Change your hair, get some different clothes, just ... reinvent yourself. Pretend you were the prom king or queen back where you were from. Tell everyone your nickname was CashWolf. All of your embarrassing history, just wiped clean.

Not now. Wherever Dizzy went, no matter what he called himself or what color he dyed his hair, his past would follow. Dizzy's old classmates would have been all over social media with posts, pictures, and videos of the kid with his tighty whities pulled up over his head while sporting an erection in their school's library. Hell, it'd have been on Tosh.0 by that point. He'd have been meme-ified worldwide as "Wedgie Kid."

Sure enough, on the road, Jack strikes up a romance with a wine pourer named Stephanie, they grow close, and he even meets her daughter. It's only when Miles accidentally reveals to a third party that Jack is engaged that she finds out, resulting in her jumping him in a parking lot and bashing him in the head with a motorcycle helmet:

That's right, kids. Once upon a time, dudes could cheat on somebody they were scheduled to marry in two days, and it'd be fine as long as their nerdy friend could keep their mouth shut. Their victim couldn't just whip out their phone, know everything about the engagement within 15 seconds, and know the exact name of the wedding cake decorator within five minutes.

So many romantic comedies used to be based in this kind of deception. Hell, that's how most plot twists occurred! Like in Chasing Amy, which stars future Batman Ben Affleck as Holden, a comic book artist who starts dating a lesbian, thinking that he's the first man she's ever been with. Later on, he learns that she's actually had numerous men in the past, instead of learning that within minutes of meeting her via several thousand Instagram selfies with each of those guys.

Do kids even try that now? How do they do pull it off? Do they claim to each group that half of their Snapchats are posted ironically? ("Did you see how I owned those theater nerds? By winning the lead role in Fiddler On The Roof?") Was there a 1980s version of Black Mirror that threatened a dark future in which adolescents aren't allowed to swap cliques depending on what party they're at?

The key takeaway here is that digging up the details of an old classmate wasn't just difficult; it was considered a weird, invasive thing to do. Memorizing personal details for the purposes of getting close to someone made you the villain of the movie, not one of hundreds of dudes she broadcasts that stuff to on a daily basis. Hell, we wish we didn't know which damned craft beer our old chemistry class lab partner is into this week.

The rest of the movie concerns Tom trying to hide from Dickie's friends, who don't know he's dead. He even manages to convince a woman in person that he is Dickie, but this is as likely to happen in a Facebook world as Mark Zuckerberg proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he's not a self-aware robot. All of which is to say that there was once a time when a wealthy young party dude could die and nobody would know for weeks! Today, search parties would be dispatched the moment he failed to upload pictures of his brunch.

And holy shit, how many potboilers lose their "Tell me your real name!" identity theft twists if set today?Vertigo, There Will Be Blood, the Sinbad psychological thriller Houseguest ... you could just show up to somebody's house and say, "Hey, I'm Billy, whom you haven't seen in several years. I look different now. I am now a part of your life."

Then there are all of those slasher movies, usually sequels, in which it turns out the villain is in fact the son/brother/whatever of the guy you killed in an earlier movie. Like in the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise, when they kill murderer Ben Willis, and then in the sequel it turns out that their harmless friend Will Benson is in fact the SON of BEN WILLis. (GET IT?) That's the kind of shit you could get away with back then! You could just fuck with people!

We're not saying things were better, or that there are no scammers now (they just do it all from the safety of a keyboard). But damn, the rules of the game sure changed in a hurry, didn't they?

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For more, check out 6 Groups Who Don't Work As Movie Bad Guys Anymore and 5 Movie Problems That Kids Today Will Never Understand.

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