Mash Ferris!

Here's a couple Ferris Bueller Mash-ups for you.

The first one, "Requiem For a Day Off," has a lot of good moments in it. Too many, in fact. It's really just a nearly endless stream of amusingly re-contextualized bits. They're funny, but no real story line comes of it. Hey, Benji, that's why they call it editing. All in all, it's pretty entertaining stuff, though.



The second, "The Fugitive's Day Off," wins points for execution, but it's basically just the fruit of one good idea. Well, worth watching, nonetheless.

Damn you, American Teen!

Yesterday was commencement: not only did I finish everything in time to graduate, but "Barry Manilow's Wardrobe" won me the "Paul Smith Prize" for this year's distinguished Master's thesis (woohoo!). So, now I'm thinking about "what next?" Publish?

If that's the current plan of action, then I'll probably end up turning the epilogue into a full-length chapter, and then writing a proper epilogue. I wrote about this movie before, but after watching the new trailer, and seeing the poster (which, if you happen to have wandered onto this website from a virtual knitting circle, you may not have realized is a mock-up of The Breakfast Club), I'm thinking that it will give me more than a little reason to write some more.

It brings me back to one of the essential (though largely unaddressed) questions of the thesis: which came first, the social stratification in high schools, or the social stratification in high schools as depicted in The Breakfast Club?

Oh, btw Nanette, it's the jock, the geek, the rebel, the princess and the criminal.

Damn Skippy!

Well, here it is. Finally.

I'm just about to print this thing out and have it bound. You can download the PDF here, if you like that sort of thing.

Full Draft

Hallo.

Sorry no updates recently. I've been working hard, or something like that.

Click here to download a PDF of the almost-final draft.

Click here to download the same as a Word file.

John Hughes Piece on NPR

I found out about this interesting NPR piece by way of one of my favorite procrastination engines, Metafilter. (Here's the original post on MeFi.) Proving, once again, that the influence of John Hughes is damn near perpetual, if not always pleasant.

Elephant

This is the second vignette in the thesis, meant to act as a bridge between Chapter 3 (which ends with a discussion of teen suicide) and the Epilogue (which will deal with more contemporary high school films). I'm not entirely satisfied with it; there's something awkward about the flow. I'm also not sure that the whole vignette thing will end up working out, but the general idea for this was to use a contemporary teen film - Gus Van Sant's Elephant - to connect old and new, in particular to point out the odd fact that Hollywood was virtually obsessed with films that dealt with teen suicide at the end of the 80s, but has so far completely avoided the topic of school shootings (which are at least as commonplace as suicide was twenty years ago).

Anyway, here it is...

Director Gus Van Sant confonts several controversial issues in his 2003 film Elephant. Family dysfunction, bulimia, teen pregnancy, homosexual repression and school bullying each work their way into the eighty-one-minute plot, but all of these issues are merely ballast for the film’s true thrust: to depict an incidence of school violence on the level of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. Loosely patterned on the infamous killing spree of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Elephant is one of very few films to address the epidemic of school shootings to recently plague schools in the United States.

Like many of Gus Van Sant’s less commercial ventures, Elephant’s approach to narrative is hardly straightforward. It consists of several short vignettes that follow the daily activities of individual students at an unnamed high school in the American northwest. The vignettes are divided by title screens which simply state the name of the character (or characters) about to be seen. These sections move backward and forward in time, often overlapping one another, but because of the long take tracking shots used, they sometimes create curious continuity problems. Intertwined with these stories are the film’s two primary subjects – Alex and Eric – the perpetrators of the violent attack that ends the film.

Cinematically, Elephant is widely known to have been inspired by the 1989 Alan Clarke film of the same name. Clarke’s Elephant is a dramatization of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, consisting of several sequences – quite similar to one another in narrative content, and cinematic structure – in which unsuspecting victims are gunned down by uncannily resolute assassins. In each sequence the camera follows a subject, or subjects, on a dolly shot as they pursue, and then kill, their targets. Clarke follows his subjects from a respectful distance mostly as they walk away from the camera, but sometimes accompanying them side-by-side. These tracking shots – which are generally not long takes, at least in proportion to the other shots in the film – alternate with static images of the victims, lying motionless after they have been shot repeatedly and killed. With no music or non-diegetic sound, very little dialogue, and only the subtlest structural variations from one sequence to the next, Clarke’s film has a rather harrowing effect on the viewer.

Van Sant’s film borrows the tracking shots from Clarke’s minimalist visual style for a very different overall effect. His shots are often extremely long takes, filmed almost exclusively from behind the characters. While Clarke’s film is filled with menace, Van Sant’s is somehow dreamlike, lulling the viewer into a nearly passive state. The fact that the camera follows behind each subject allows the viewer to identify with them in the same way one connects with a character in a video game. In fact, this perspective is almost indistinguishable from a certain genre of violent video games – often called “first person shooters” – and is a rather loaded reference to one of the cultural artifacts frequently blamed for the prevalence of violence among young people. Along with the occasional addition of slow motion and the introduction of random non-diegetic sounds – like bird calls, the sounds of dripping water, unintelligible speech, all with significant amounts of reverb and echo, no less – the cumulative effect of these aesthetic choices is the vaguely surreal atmosphere that pervades the film.

The overall impact of Elephant is difficult to describe. It is too nebulous to be a straight dramatization, and the lack of substantial character interaction makes it hard to pin down what is being expressed. While there are clear signs that the two shooters are victims of bullying, and may be struggling under the tension of repressed homosexual identities, the film doesn’t make a clear enough connection to point to any definite “cause” for the violence. What’s more, practically all of the characters in the film suffer from some sort of dysfunction – as previously mentioned – but they don’t uniformly seek out solutions in violent behavior. A CBS News report covering the 2005 massacre at Red Lake High School in Minnesota alleges that Jeffrey Weise, the shooter responsible for killing seven classmates before committing suicide, watched Elelphant shortly before the attack. However, it is difficult to imagine that the film could be solely responsible for inciting copycat violence, considering the unusual way in which it depicts the events. Comparatively speaking, Zero Day – also released in 1993 and, to my knowledge, the only other film to openly dramatize this type of school violence – takes a considerably more explicit approach to the material. That film – which focuses exclusively on its two violent protagonists – blatantly fetishes firearms, and even offers an on-screen tutorial for would-be bomb makers.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Elephant is one of the interviews appearing in the twelve-minute “making-of” featurette included with the DVD release. Alex Frost, the untrained actor that plays one of the two killers, remarks: “To me, high school is like going to hell. You get up and go to hell every day.” With the same disturbing nonchalance that marks his character in the film, Alex adds: “There’s always that… possibility that somebody could come to school with a gun and start shooting people, and one of those people could, in fact, be you.” The slight ambiguity is unsettling enough – Frost clearly means to say that “There’s always the possibility that it could be you that gets shot,” but his awkward teen creepiness leads one to think that maybe he really means to say that “There’s always the possibility that it could be you that comes to school and starts shooting.” – yet it is one of Alex’s later comments that is really distressing. At the end of the interview, Frost conveys his incredulity that he could have gone from being a teen nobody to starring in a feature film. It is as if to say that he never imagined the possibility of becoming a movie star, but he seems to think it would be altogether likely that he – or one of his peers – could walk into school one day and start shooting people.

School shootings – like the massacres at Columbine, Red Lake, and more recently Virginia Tech – are at least as prominent in the national consciousness today as teen suicides were fifteen or twenty years earlier. There have been nearly twenty incidents of this type of school violence since 1997, with at least one incident occurring annually (with the exception of 2002, in which no such incidents occurred). If this type of crime is so prevalent, why has it been virtually ignored by the motion picture industry? A significant number of films attempted to tackle the nuances of teen suicide in the late 1980s, but studios seem completely unwilling to do the same with school shootings today. Timothy Shary attempts to broach the topic in his survey Teen Movies: American Youth On Screen: “In the twenty-first century so far, Hollywood seems perfectly content to dismiss issues of juvenile delinquency rather than risk being blamed for encouraging it (90).” But the fear of culpability didn’t seem to significantly deter filmmakers from pursuing teen suicide in the ‘80s. In that sense, Gus Van Sant’s film is aptly titled: the menace of school shootings is like the elephant in the room that no one is brave enough to acknowledge. It is entirely possible that the issue could be dealt with responsibly on screen – as Elephant proves – it is even plausible that conscientious films of this type could be an important step toward understanding the causes and effects of an otherwise disconcerting and perplexing topic.

Drillbit Taylor

Ok, it may not be the two and a half hour director's cut of The Breakfast Club that I've been hoping for, but Drillbit Taylor just might be a promising return to form for John Hughes (under his I'd-rather-not-take-full-responsibility pseudonym, Edmond Dantes). At the very least, he's taking a break from pre-tween protagonists, and returning to high school.

There are a few genuinely funny, er, "bits" in the trailers and clips available here. All in all, it looks sort of like Weird Science meets My Bodyguard (but funny), with a Superbad sensibility, for good measure. At any rate, it'll probably be better than this piece of crap.

P.S. (Man-of-the-moment, Seth Rogen is listed as a co-writer, and the bully is played by this kid, who was one of the gunmen in Elephant. Stay tuned for a post on Elephant, probably coming later today.)

Chapter 3!

If you would like to read Chapter 3, you can download it by clicking here.

I have to admit, I'm starting to run out of steam, and this chapter was a bit of a struggle, but I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. It's still a rough draft, but it's all there for the most part.

Since it ended up being a condensation of what was originally slated to be Chapters 3 & 4, the new title is:

“When You Grow Up Your Heart Dies” –
Parents, Teachers, Principals and Other Complications
(or)
Making Your Life Your Own

Here's an excerpt from the section on Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

There are several more remarkably asinine authority figures that Ferris encounters on his day of hooky, but he finds his ridiculous adversary in Principal Edward Rooney. Jonathan Bernstein calls Ferris “the Bugs to Ed’s Fudd, the Road Runner to his Coyote (81).” Ed Rooney is arrogant, clumsy, vindictive, rude and hopelessly uncool, but his most significant flaw is that he underestimates Ferris Bueller. While Ferris and co. are seeking out the finest that Chicago has to offer, Rooney is staking out the local pizza parlor and prowling around outside the Bueller residence. It never occurs to Rooney that his arch nemesis, juvenile though he may be in age, could be a man of culture. This is a common fault of adults in teen movies: they have predictably condescending notions of the teenage mindset. But Rooney is not simply flawed, like that beleaguered coyote he is downright cursed. In the short period of time he spends trying to break in to Ferris Bueller’s house he steps in the mud and loses his shoe, splits the seat of his pants, gets attacked by the Bueller’s preposterously vicious rotweiler, and amasses enough parking tickets to have his car towed. In short, everything Rooney does brings him suffering and humiliation, while everything Ferris does brings delight and easy triumph. Roz Kaveney helps to define the opposition of Bueller and Rooney: “It is typical of the clash in Hughes’ work between conservatism and anarchy that Ferris’ recklessness is admirable and successful, whereas the reckless disregard for limits of Dean Rooney has consequences (42).” It is the screenwriter’s moral imperative that Rooney must always lose and Ferris must always win. This makes for cartoony fun, but it also hints at a more philosophical side to the conflict.

Jonathan Bernstein provides some more insight, by refining our notion of the adult and teen archetypes in the works of John Hughes. “All representatives of adult authority were characterized in the Hughes canon as cringing, vindictive, foul-smelling, prehistoric, bewildered and spiritually undernourished (52),” while “His teen leads were smarter, hipper, more sensitive, more articulate, and at all times, morally superior to their adult oppressors (53).” Aside from the superficial trappings of youth and adulthood, Bernstein highlights the moral and spiritual elements of the distinction. In his short essay, “John Hughes Goes Deep,” Steve Almond quantifies this distinction: “By definition, the adults in a Hughes film are beyond hope of transformation. But it is his central and rescuing belief that teens are capable of change (11).” Redemption is a privilege available only to the young, while the old are doomed to be set in their senescent ways.

Almond’s essay – light on nostalgia and heavy on analysis – is the finest entry in the Hughes related anthology, Don’t You Forget About Me. While writing about Ferris Bueller’s Day Off he characterizes Ferris as a “raging, narcissistic id who gets away with” (7) everything. But while Ferris lives the dream, his best friend Cameron is trapped in reality. “…Ferris, of course, leads a charmed life. His existentialism comes cheap. For Cameron (as for the rest of us), the experience of pleasure is an ongoing battle against anxiety (7).” Almond goes on to refer to Ferris and Cameron as two nodes of a “psychological dyad.” So if Ferris is the “raging, narcissistic id” that makes Cameron the awkwardly self-conscious ego. Rooney is therefore by implication a narrative personification of the haughtily domineering superego. On one level, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is an “escapist farce,” but on another level it is a metaphorical representation of the ego’s struggle to find balance between the impulsive sensual desires of the id, and the authoritative demands of the superego. In that sense, Ferris is the movie’s red herring – he may be the focus of the action in the film, but actually it is Cameron who makes the hero’s journey.

As Cameron observes of his friend, “As long as I’ve known Ferris, everything works for him. There’s nothing he can’t handle. I can’t handle anything. School, parents, the future. Ferris can do anything.” Ferris is invincible, while Cameron is anything but. It is notable that Cameron makes the preceding statement about Ferris, while his best friend is in the midst of a non-alcoholic bacchanalian revelry of his own instigation; Ferris sneaks onto a float in the Von-Steuben Day parade, uniting all of Chicago in song and dance. The scene elevates Ferris from the status of inspired prankster to something godlike. Dionysus, the patron deity of the bacchanale, is also known as “the Liberator,” and Ferris is largely responsible for Cameron’s liberation.

You Gotta Have Faith... Don't You?

I just finished writing about Pump Up the Volume, which has me wanting to increase the interactivity around here a bit. Can anyone think of teen movies that deal explicitly with religion? The only ones I can come up with are Saved! and The Craft (which is obviously a stretch). I'm curious why religion is almost completely unrepresented in teen film. Any thoughts?

Oh yeah, there's always School Ties!

Preppy!

Sorry I haven't been posting so much as of late. I've been hard at work on Chapters 3 & 4, which have melded into one big chapter. I just finished several paragraphs on Risky Business, which end in a short discussion of the travails of the high school prep. I found this great NYTimes op-ed piece online, which I wanted to share. Enjoy this excerpt (or follow the link):

Part of what made the insular preppy world so alluring was its assurance, which was part and parcel of its conservatism. Preppies hung onto not just furniture and names but also customs and especially shares in Exxon bought back when it was called Standard Oil or something equally quaint. The culture was also conservative in the sense of accepting these things without question. Your true preppy, it seemed in 1980, was a stranger to self-doubt: can we think for a minute about the whale as a design motif on clothes intended for grown men?

Today, though, I think the unself-consciousness that used to distinguish the preppy world is gone. When anthropologists study a tribe, however respectfully, they change it. Preppy clothes had been a uniform by which you recognized the guy to sit next to on the train to New Haven. Like all the best uniforms, they were a visual language, instantly not only identifying but also, more subtly, placing the wearer.

Nantucket red pants came from Nantucket. Period. No Nantucket, no pants. The more faded they were, the more hours you'd spent on the water. They were better than an "I'd rather be sailing" bumper sticker because only the right people could read them.

And then, suddenly, in the 1980's, everybody looked like the guy on the train to New Haven. Imagine how they'd feel at West Point if all the tourists were in uniform too: cadets might begin to wonder about uncomfortable things like claims to legitimacy.

Chapter 2 for Downloading

If you would like to read Chapter 2, click here.

Not Another Teen Movie, Can't Hardly Wait.

I'm not quite sure why I thought I needed to see this one again. It's horrible. Really, really terribly awfully horribly bad. Like the other scary-movie-style-spoofs that I've seen, most of the jokes revolve around sex, nudity, excrement and the like. Apparently, John Cryer - Duckie! - was asked to be involved:

I read the script for Not Another Teen Movie. They actually wanted me to come in and audition to play the teacher who, when the sewage thing explodes above them, is drenched in human feces. I said, 'Wait, let me get this straight. You want me to come in and audition to be drenched in human feces? No, no, no, For the feces-drenching, I'm offer-only.'

The movie's only redeeming quality was a cameo appearance by Jon Benjamin - Coach McGuirk on Home Movies. Yay! - which was actually pretty funny, though in order for it to be a cameo I think Jon Benjamin would have to actually be famous. Not just in a geeky fan-boy way.

For my money, this movie is the real deal. Not a spoof, really, but it is a great teen movie in a meta sense. It has it's own story, and it does it's own thing, but it is also delightfully self-aware. Aren't references more fun if you're not being clobbered over the head with them?

Btw, Elfont/Kaplan also made this movie, which is woefully underrated. Really. Trust me.

Specialist.

I don't have any illusions about the singularity of my obsessions. Lot's of folks have a soft spot for teen movies. Especially teen movies from the 80s.

This, however, is a laughably narrow field of specialized "knowledge."

Chapter 2...

...is finally done.

The title of Chapter 2 is "With Friends Like These - Authority and Rebellion Between Peers."

It includes discussion of The Faculty, Disturbing Behavior, Heathers, Can't Buy Me Love and The Chocolate War.

It is 53 pages long (including two pages of endnotes), so I may or may not post it here. If you would like to read it, leave a comment, and I'll be happy to send it to you as an attachment.

Oh, Ilan!

I'm still not done with Chapter 2, but I will not be defeated. It's a complicated chapter. Lotta ins, lotta outs. I'm just now starting the last section of the chapter which deals with Keith Gordon's adaptation of the Robert Cormier novel The Chocolate War.

The movie stars Ilan Mitchell-Smith as Jerry Renault. Ilan was in a smattering of movies in the '80s, including one of the six movies in John Hughes' teen oeuvre, Weird Science.

Ilan pretty much gave up acting, and took up academia. Here is his faculty profile at Angelo State University (that's in Texas), where he is now Professor Mitchell-Smith. He is an English professor, go figure, and he looks just about the same as he did in The Chocolate War, except perhaps appropriately swollen.

I read a story about him in People Magazine a while back that I like to share whenever I get the opportunity. Apparently, after giving up fame and fortune as a minor child star he completely forget about acting and started living a "normal life". When he met the woman who would later become his wife he didn't even tell her about his past success on the big screen. They had been dating for quite some time before conversation finally found its way to all things Hollywood. The future Mrs. Ilan Mitchell-Smith confessed that when she was a kid she really liked this movie called The Chocolate War because she had such a crush on the kid that played Jerry Renault!

True story. True story? I dunno. It's a good one, though.

Chapter 2...

...is kicking my arse.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

I'm sure you must remember this one - an essential element to my middle and high school years, as I'm sure it was to many, many others. I was thinking again about Murray Milner's insight on the cheerleader - as mentioned in this post - and I remembered this video and how it somehow exploits that idea. Here's the full quote from Milner's book Freaks, Geeks & Cool Kids:

Cheerleaders have no direct role in the games played, but they are the key people who organize “moral” support for the teams. This moral support is expressed through public rituals. In addition to their close association with what is sacred [the team, the “spirit” of the school], cheerleaders are ritual specialists who have mastered the ceremonial techniques of the community and can lead others in carrying it out.

Rocket Science

Thank you Netflix! This quirkier-than-thou high school movie, about one coming-of-age-not-so-gracefully story, was thoroughly entertaining. It follows the mostly intrepid trajectory of one lovelorn stammerer from virtual outcast to state debate championship contender. The strength of this flick is its cast. I can't remember a weak character, in design or execution. I can remember a few irritating characters, but that was sort of par for the course.

My only complaint is the occasional feeling that this movie was trying a little too hard to be in a certain category of recent independent successes. The narrator - who was equal parts Alec Baldwin in the Royal Tenenbaums and Ricky Jay in Magnolia - was the perfect example of what I'm getting at. No matter, it didn't get in the way too often, and there were some singularly heartfelt scenes here (not to mention the singularly funny ones).

Oddly enough, it took place in "Plainsboro High School" in suburban NJ. Though fictitious - there are two West Windsor-Plainsboro High Schools, north and south, but no "Plainsboro" - it hits about as "close to home" as possible. Unfortunately, the majority of the movie appeared to have been fiilmed in Maryland, not the Garden State. Weird, nonetheless.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (movie)

I've been focusing on research for the next chapter - With Friends Like These: Authority and Rebellion Between Peers - so when I haven't been reading Murray Milner's Freaks, Geeks & Cool Kids or watching The Chocolate War or Heathers (or all the commentaries, bonus content, etc.) I've been ingesting other high school movies...

I'm not sure how I missed Buffy when it first came out in '92. After watching half an episode of the TV show (not even) I was even less interested in making up for lost time, but I was pleasantly surprised. It was goofy, and clever, and didn't take itself too seriously. In other words, it was the perfect break from The Chocolate War (which I love, but which is not the sunniest of movies) and Heathers (which I think takes itself WAY too seriously and ends up the worse for it).

Yesterday when I was reading Milner I found an interesting quote which made me think a little deeper about the whole Buffy phenomenon:

In addition to their close association with what is sacred [the team/school "spirit"], cheerleaders are ritual specialists who have mastered the ceremonial techniques of the community and can lead others in carrying these out.

Interesting thoughts for a movie about the head cheerleader moonlighting as "the chosen" vampire hunter.

Milner's book is full of unexpected insights like that one, though it is on the whole more practical and realistic than that quote might suggest. But for another taste of the more offbeat perceptions of high school: Milner suggests that students in "alternative" social groups (like punks, freaks, goths, etc.) are analogous to monks or ascetics in "pre-modern" societies. They openly reject the standards established by their peers and thus operate largely outside of the established social structure.

I Just Wanna Dance!

I'm having a hard time getting the flow going today. I just wanna go out to the movies. No joke. Who's coming with me?