high school movies (what's up with)

Here's a line from a review of Mean Girls by Emily Hall, from The Stranger, Seattle's free weekly rag: [Seattle Weekly? What's that?]

There are moments of writing so smart you want to stand up and cheer (some helpful students map out the lunchroom hierarchy for Cady, pointing out the usual gathering places for jocks, nerds, and "girls who eat their feelings"), and then you have to sit down and wait a while for this kind of insight to poke its head up again.

Did your jaw drop? If not, maybe you should skip this entry.

My point isn't to excoriate Emily Hall or Seattle movie critics in general. (Aside: Let it be known that, generally, Seattle movie critics are awful. The only ones worth a damn are Sheila Benson, full of wisdom and experience, and Barley Blair, who I suspect was a pseudonym for Sheila Benson. Oh, and Vern, if he counts. Vern's corporeal existence might reside in the Puget Sound, but I always considered his spirit to belong to the whole of America.)

And my point isn't to cast aspersion on just how smart this bit of writing is; in fact, I could give Ms. Hall the benefit of the doubt and assume that the smart bit of writing is referring to the "girls who eat their feelings line", and not the "lunchroom hierarchy" in general (although if that is what she meant, it isn't written very well).

No, my point is the received wisdom of the "lunchroom hierarchy" in general. I question its veracity, and I question its usefulness in a film.

Now, it's completely possible, hell, more than likely, that my position is formed by age and generation; I honestly don't know what it's really like to be in high school in 2004. I graduated in 1990, so comparatively, I'm an old fogey. Yet while I'm willing to admit that people tend to congregate in groups of similar interests, this hardened social position that is represented in contemporary movies is so alien to me that it may as well be Noh.

Admittedly, it doesn't help my position that I never ate in the lunchroom as a student; I lived across the street from my high school, so I and my friends would go there for an hour. So maybe I missed something. And it's completely possible to an outsider that my friends and I could be labeled as "nerds", and not having a broader perspective, maybe I was part of a hardened social position and just didn't know it. But I can't really accept that. Only one of my friends could've been labeled a genuine nerd; the rest of us seemed like a mixture of qualities, a little nerd, a little stoner, a little skater, a little bit of general outsiderness. But this mixture was so muddled that any general label was useless. I mean, what do you call a person who loves both Metallica and Kate Bush?

(Don't you fuckin' say "Goth".)

Maybe part of the problem is that, in my experience, the social aspect of high school wasn't during lunch or after school, but actually during the classes themselves, the whole reason anyone's there. I was part of the so-called GATE program (Gifted And Talented Education, yeesh), and I did assignments with rich kids and poor kids, football players and French citizens, popular cheerleaders and math geniuses (who just wanted to play golf for a living). Not all of my classes were GATE, and I saw the same kind of mix there as well.

[With one major exception: My school had a sizeable Hispanic population, and I don't remember a lot of Hispanic kids in my GATE classes. Take from that what you will.]

So when I see or read about these high school movies (or watch their trailers) with their rigid caste systems, with their easy labels, my mind rebels. It really feels like a lie perpetrated against teenagers, and I admit I worry about what an accumulation of these kinds of lies will mean in the long run. It could be suggested that this kind of device is analogous to, say, the action movie trope of the hero outrunning an explosion, that it's a genre thing. But that doesn't wash with me. However much fantasy they may inject into these films, they're still based on reality.

It would be one thing if it was just one or two movies, but it doesn't seem to be. And it would be another thing if our Film Critic Corp weren't asleep at the wheel, but this doesn't seem like something that's being addressed. From Stephanie Zacharek's Salon review of Mean Girls:

Their first act of kindness is to present her with a map of the lunchroom, so she'll know which tables have been staked out by which cliques, among them the Preps, the JV Jocks, the Asian Nerds, the Cool Asians and the Sexually Active Band Geeks (the last of whom are shown pawing, groping and sucking at one another with oblivious abandon).

Again, no questioning the reality of this; it's just accepted. The funny thing is, at the beginning of the review, Ms. Zacharek makes the stunningly genius observation that adults are an untapped audience for teen movies. Problem for me is, the crutch of the high school caste trope eliminates me from that potential audience.

It's even more frustrating when movies do come out that buck this trend, and little or no mention is made of that accomplishment. Right now, I'm thinking of, of all things, American Pie. Think what you want about it as a film; but think of how the four main characters are presented. Oz is a jock, but is allowed to move into a different role with little difficulty. Kevin is the ringleader-type, the "Zach" of the group, the kind of character we've seen in movies like Slackers and Van Wilder, but the movie continually undermines his authority. Jim is a klutzy loser-type, but I find that rather than being an object of pity or derision, he becomes the hero of the movie, the only one who really gets his hands dirty, so to speak. And then there's Finch, probably most easily classified as a nerd, but one with a predilection for all things retro and "adult". He's probably the most original character I've ever seen in a teen movie, and it's not surprising that he's neutered in the lame follow-up.

Yet, in another movie, these guys would sit at different tables in the lunchroom.

I guess what I'm finding is, after a thousand words or so, is that, despite whether this caste system, this view of high school, is correct or not is largely irrelevant. For the sake of a few jokes, for the sake of a lazy through-line, the ability to see and depict characters that are original, individual, and not stereotyped is shunted into the corner, possibly lost.

Why would we want that?

Where we saw it: | We deign to rate it: outta 100
Posted by kza at 12:17 PM | Comments (4)