craving some easy meaning i went to blockbuster on a quest for a teen movie from the mid 80’s – mid 90’s. i am an addict for these movies. from sixteen candles to edward scissorhands. with heathers, pretty in pink, breakfast club, the legend of billie jean, and empire records in the middle. yo, i’ll even throw in clueless for good measure. ultimately i left the store with pump up the volume, which i hadn’t seen since i was maybe 10 years old. i just knew i’d thought it was great, so i figured it would warrant re-view.
when i was done it occurred to me how sometime in the late 90’s–while tv was totally knowing where teens were at with dawson’s creek, buffy, and my so-called life, teen movies started becoming boring. i kept watching them anyway, hoping to uncover, like a buried fossil, something from the past, but to no avail.
the whole past decade of teen movies seems to have traded in actually delving into the tension and awkwardness and loneliness of adolescence for straight comedy and cheap laughs. traded in the process of discovery that everyone is secretly strange and unusual for the discovery that underneath it all, strange and unusual people can too become normal and popular.
had the process of being a teenager really become dumber, or just the movies about it?
or maybe there’s actually a silent third influence to blame: the actors.
do you remember when jonny depp was trashing hotel rooms? when julia roberts was wearing flannel and dumping fiances? when drew barrymore had a drug problem? when river phoenix od’d and died?
they may have been as stupidly rich and famous as, say, lindsey lohan or britney spears, but there was something… real about them. when you imagined who they would have been in a REAL high school, they were ALL the kids who were hanging out in the back of school, smoking, skating, doodling in sketch books, dying their hair black. the way they all seemed to be so uncomfortably unable to cope with stardom in a sincerely human way was a sort of reflection of how any teenager is unable to handle adolescence. and of all the scripts being written by all the writers in all of hollywod, THESE were the people deciding which ones they were going to sign on to act in–meaning, they were affecting which movies were getting made.
now? the definition of “unable to cope with stardom” instantly conjures up the image of lindsey lohan getting arrested for a dui after coming out of rehab. 15 years ago, when drew barrymore was battling addiction it was tragic. now this kind of thing reads from the cover of us weekly as you stand in line at the pharmacy as simply ridiculous. dude! if you’re that rich and you want to drink and drive with discretion, hire a fucking chauffer.
and this is, of course, the inevitable moment to mention that yeah, in the past 15 years the tabloid industry HAS vastly expanded. (on the other hand, with an endless supply of reality “stars” sliding down the conveyor belt, celebrity itself has expanded too–it TOOK less magazines to cover the terrain before.) ok, fine, so the paparazzi has turned into the stalkerazzi, but simultaneously i think it’s also created just another substance for the new celebrities to abuse.
fame.
it’s like the ONLY actors that have been making teen movies for the past decade are the heirs to the Brat Pack legacy. what’s the social commentary in american pie, exactly? where is the satire in mean girls? (NOT the same as parody, btw). don’t get me wrong, i thought american pie was hilarious, and mean girls was amusing, but… why is it that i have to back up two decades to get any meaning out of a teen movie?
perhaps, being a teenager didn’t so much become dumber, as more polarized. the dumb kids got even more obsessed with popularity for popularity’s sake, and the interesting, introspective ones, the ones who could have compelled you with the tension of adolescent discovery, who didn’t confuse courting celebrity for what their “career” was supposed to be, played amidala or spiderman instead.
american pie seven anyone?