Narrowing the Scope - Another Excerpt from the Introduction

Timothy Shary posits that there are six categories in which teen films generally fall. This system of classification is supported in part by Jonathan Bernstein in his mostly irreverent tome about 80s teen movies Pretty in Pink: the Golden Age of Teenage Movies. According to Shary the six general categories are: the horror film, the science film, the sex comedy, the romantic melodrama, the juvenile delinquent drama, and the school film (Shary, 8). Though Bernstein corroborates Shary’s opinion, Shary admits that the science film did not persist much past the end of the 1980s, which saw a string of almost inexplicable movies depicting young science whizzes at work and at play. While films like War Games [1983], Space Camp [1986] and Back to the Future [1985] were prevalent enough to demand genre-fication in the 1980s, they almost completely disappeared by the 90s. Hackers [1995] was quite possibly the last film of the genre, with nothing of the like appearing in the thirteen intervening years between now and then. The remaining five categories are still quite useful in understanding teen film even today.

Obviously, this inquiry concerns itself with what Shary calls the “school film”, and for our intents and purposes we will refer to as the high school movie. The school film is the most diverse and flexible of all the categories, often incorporating one or more of the other genres into itself. However, the significance of the high school movie is more than just the ready-made setting and social structure it provides. As Timothy Shary observes:

“What makes the school film a specific subgenre is its focus on the actual socialization process at the school, as opposed to other youth issues which are less integral to the school setting, such as crime, sex, terror, or family (although these issues are often developed in films around school settings).” (27)

Therefore, the high school is more than just the setting for the story, or rather in a high school movie the setting is the story. That being said, the movies that we will more closely examine in the following pages were chosen because they deal with a persistent aspect of both the high school setting and the “socialization process” that happens there. These films show teenagers in the midst of an often extremely hostile social environment, both because of their peers and their superiors, and in a time of life when they are still actively trying to determine who they are and who they would like to become.

The movies with which we will concern ourselves are movies that depict the genuine high school experience, from the point of view of the high school student, and for their ultimate benefit. There are any number of films that may fall under the general classification of “high school film” that will nevertheless be useless for our purposes. For instance, movies like Blackboard Jungle [1965] and Class of 1984 [1982] are undisputed classics in the genre of high school film, but they are ultimately of more interest and appeal to parents and teachers than the students themselves*. They are cautionary tales that come off sounding more like public service announcements than honest depictions of the trials and tribulations of your average high school student. After all, the public service announcement is a genre of film and television that any self-respecting teen considers laughable at best. We will also not be concerned with movies like Lean on Me [1989], Stand and Deliver [1988], or Dangerous Minds [1995]. Movies of this ilk are made for the enjoyment of teachers not students, and could, monetary limitations aside, quite possibly be financed by the teachers union in order to convince more brave young men and women to join the ranks of public school teachers. As we have already alluded this study will also not concern itself with vapid teen fare that just happens to take place in high school, nor horror films and sex-comedies that share the same setting, unless of course these movies have something compelling to say about the high school experience in between the time their characters spend running for their lives or trying to “get laid”.

The high school movies we will be concerned with will accomplish two primary goals: they will (1) offer valuable insight to the social dynamic of the high school experience as lived by the high school student, average or otherwise, and they will (2) depict a process of growth and transformation that is often executed in opposition to the protagonist(s) peers and/or superiors. We are of the opinion that this transformative experience, which scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell calls “the hero’s journey”, is of the utmost importance in the creation of our own contemporary “mythology”. In other words, stories that depict the hero’s journey, no matter how banal the external circumstances may seem, are the most powerful stories for the audience’s potential self-transformation, and are therefore the richest sites for deeper exploration and discussion.

It is practically unimportant that the movies at hand are for and about teenagers. Though they may also be classified as “coming of age” stories, there is no reason to limit this coming of age to a single point in the course of one’s life. Rites of passage occur throughout our lives, and we can therefore assume that we may “come of age” at virtually any age between the useful bookends of birth and death. Movies like The Big Chill [1983], American Beauty [1999], and Six Degrees of Separation [1993] all deal with this idea of coming of age at various points later in one’s life, and therefore also depict this process of transformation for the betterment of one person and the benefit of many. If these rites of passage are common to many different points in the human experience, then we can all benefit from these stories depicting the years of growth and change that take place during high school regardless of our age.

Furthermore, the changes that take place during our high school years are often the most significant changes we experience throughout our lives, and the decisions we make about who we are and want to be will have lasting effects, helping to determine the development of our personality. Those changes and the resulting decisions are largely the result of two dynamics that we will explore throughout the proceeding pages: authority and rebellion. We could also say that these changes come as a result of the single dynamic created by these two opposing forces. We could even say that these changes come as a result of the numerous dynamics created by these two opposing forces. No matter the perspective, the films we will examine all depict young people who experience a sense of tension from their innate resistance to the power and influence that others exert over their lives and personalities. The power and influence may come from parents, teachers and sometimes even fellow students, and the tension produces narrative interest by bringing about the many ways in which our protagonists attempt to rebel from these external influences and assert themselves as unique independent persons.

There are numerous high school films that concern themselves with the narrative opposition of authority and rebellion, but we will primarily concern ourselves with a small handful of movies that were released between 1985 and 1990, with the exception of earlier and later films that will be introduced on either end of the main discussion. The movies that will inform the majority of the text are The Breakfast Club [1985], The Chocolate War [1988], Dead Poets Society [1989], Ferris Bueller’s Day Off [1986], Heathers [1989], and Pump Up the Volume [1990]. The films discussed in this text are limited to a rather narrow five-year span because of the proliferation of high quality teen movies at this point and time, and also because they have each had a significant impact on the personal development of the author. The selection of films is also largely homogenous in regards to the race and gender of their protagonists. There are numerous compelling high school movies depicting female and/or African American or Hispanic protagonists that meet the criteria that we have already established. It is our conviction that films like Mean Girls [2004], Pretty Persuasion [2005], Boyz n the Hood [1991], and many others also deserve to be more closely examined with a critical eye, but it is also our own humble opinion that there are other authors who are better equipped to handle such a project.

The High School Film as PSA

I just revisited the "foreword" to the 1958 classic Blackboard Jungle:

“Today we are concerned with juvenile delinquency: its cause and its effects. We are especially concerned when this delinquency boils over into our schools. The scenes and incidents depicted here are fictional. However, we believe that public awareness is a first step toward a remedy for any problem.”

There is a similar foreword (and ridiculous afterword) in High School Confidential that refers to the "insidious menace" of "marijuana cigarettes" and teen violence that plagues our schools.

Class of 1984 has it's own foreword as well:

“Last year [1981] there were 280,000 incidents of violence by students against teachers and classmates in our high schools. Unfortunately, this film is partially based on true events. Fortunately, very few schools are like Lincoln High… yet.”

Seeing them all together like this makes me realize exactly why I can't take them seriously: they are perfect examples of the high school movie as public service announcement. The PSA is a genre of film and television that teens - and really intelligent people of all ages - consider laughable, almost without exception.

Sure, they often make an impression. Just repeat this line to anyone of a certain age: You alright! I learned it from watching you! Instant flashback. But like animated "crime dogs" films like Blackboard Jungle may make an impression, but they don't really speak to the high school audience in their own language.

High School Confidential

Aside from a few inspiring distractions I spent yesterday reading this book and this book. I also revisited Ghost World, which was interesting, but largely off-topic. Today I finally started writing, taking a little time off for another sensationalized depiction of teen drug use called High School Confidential [1958]. Here are the first few, hopefully not too pretentious, pages of the introduction. What do you think?

(Btw, there is a TV show starting in March, also called "High School Confidential". It looks like it'll be worth watching, but not as good as a short-lived documentary mini-series/reality show called "American High" that aired on Fox back in 2000.)

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In 1936, roughly forty years after the Lumière brothers first captured moving images on film, Jacques Lacan introduced the idea of the “mirror stage” to the world of psychoanalysis. Lacan suggested that there is a significant point in early childhood development, which he determined to be at six months old, when we are first able to identify our own specular image. At this stage in our growth the amount of control we possess over our own bodies is awkward and incomplete, but the image of ourselves that we encounter in the mirror is oddly “whole”. Lacan insists that we resolve this contradiction by choosing to identify with the reflection instead of the physical self. He considered this phenomenon to be the moment at which we first create a sense of our own identity; it is the moment in which we create ego, or our own sense of self.

As we mature, this dialogue with our mirror image continues as we attempt to negotiate some sense of resolution between what we perceive as a subject – where perception encompasses all levels of conscious awareness of self – and the image that confronts us in the mirror. Though we may come to take this experience for granted, this in no way devalues the significant impact it continues to have on our ongoing personal development. While Lacan first stressed the “historical value” of this experience – the effect that this initial experience has on our psychological development as a turning point in our conscious awareness of self – he later stressed it’s “structural value” – the dynamic impact that the initial experience, and future experiences with our own reflection have on our ever evolving sense of self.

Like Narcissus we may become obsessed with this reflection, unable to turn our gaze on anything else. In fact, even when we do look away, we will quite often see people and things in the world around us only as they relate to ourselves. That sense of self, initiated by our first encounter with our own mirror image, really only exists in relationship to other people and things just as that initial encounter takes our natural sense of integrity or wholeness and introduces an awkward separation. In other words, this identification with the mirror image is only possible when we are able to separate our “selves” as a subject, or a centrally located point of conscious awareness, from the physical representation of that “self” in a more corporeal form: the material body. Of course, in the moment Lacan describes, wherein we choose to identify with the reflection, that sense of the subjective self becomes indistinguishably tied to the physical body.

However, this awkward moment of tension between what we feel and what we see persists throughout our lives as we repeatedly try to come to an amicable agreement between the two. That process of tension and resolution is played out in all of our relationships, wherever there is a sense of distance between our “selves” and some “other”, and that tension exists in all of our endeavors to make the world conform to our own idealized image of what we feel it should be.

At this point, dear reader, you may well be wondering if what you are reading has somehow been attached to the title page of some other, entirely more interesting, and certainly less cerebral publication. What, if anything, does Jacues Lacan’s mirror stage have to do with Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall? Let’s hope there is some connection, that we may well come to in due course. First, let’s backtrack to the brothers Lumière and their monumental contribution to the complicated evolution of our contemporary experience.
After a few short years of research and development Auguste and Louis Lumière held the first public screening of “moving pictures” in December of 1895. The Lumière Cinématrographe was the refinement of a design patented in the same year by Léon Bouly, and enabled the Lumière Brothers to record, develop and project films that had an approximate running time of 40 to 50 seconds.

Among their first ten films, premiered in 1895, was a 49 second piece of comedy called Le Jardinier (l’Arroseur Arrosé), or “The Gardener: the Sprinkler Sprinkled”. It is a medium shot; a mustachioed man of middle age stands in the left hand side of the frame facing in the general direction of the camera. He is holding a garden hose in both hands and is presumably watering some nameless greenery that is just outside the general purview of the Lumière Cinématrographe. After a few moments, someone enters the right side of the frame, unbeknownst to our dutiful gardener. This blonde and spiky-haired antagonist places his foot firmly on the length of hose that lies in his path, out of view of the unsuspecting jardinier. Acting hastily in his confusion, though not convincingly so, the gardener commits an unfortunately comic error, looking directly down the nozzle of the hose as if to spy some obstruction. And ho! What antics follow as our young ne’er-do-well lifts his foot from the hose, releasing a powerful stream of water that soaks our protagonist. Never fear, shortly thereafter our mustache wearing protagonist deftly turns the hose on our youthful prankster and exacts his just revenge.

In his exhaustive survey, Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen, Timothy Shary suggests that this short film by the Lumières is proof that even, “the earliest motion pictures ever made featured youth at play” (Shary, 5). Therefore, even the earliest motion pictures depicted young people as irresponsible practical joke playing malcontents with little respect for their elders. Unfortunately, this shallow and uncharitable characterization persists up to the present day where teens on screen are largely witless sex-crazed ciphers that exist merely as spokespeople for thoughtless consumption.

And yes, dear reader, Lumière may well seem more apropos to the under-aged inhabitants of Shermer, Illionois and other fictional locales, but what about dear old Jacques? Let’s not leave Lacan aside just yet. The tension between self and other that is expressed in Lacan’s mirror stage exists just as palpably between the self and his fictional representation on the movie screen, as it does between ourselves and our mirror reflections. Therefore, those reflections of “self” we encounter in the simulated privacy of a darkened movie theater exert a force on our ongoing personal development that is every bit as powerful as the mirror image. Perhaps these “reflections” are even more powerful because they are able to depict not just our apparent state of being, but who we may wish to become, or even what we fear we may well be.

And so in this intersection Lacan and Lumière meet the long and sordid history of Hollywood teen film...

The Faculty

After yet another flick today - the delightful little sci-fi/horror/teensploitation mish-mash, The Faculty [1998] - I'm considering another short chapter: Conformity as the Ultimate Nightmare. It would also have to include another paranoid tribute to the evils of the in-crowd, also from 1998 oddly enough, Disturbing Behavior.

Am I the only person that has see both of these entertainingly horrible movies?

Not so perfect timing.

I just sent two pathetically desperate emails, trying to get copies of films that have not yet been commercially released: a documentary about the influence of John Hughes called Don't You Forget About Me, and another documentary, which looks nothing short of super-duper, called Billy the Kid. Both films look like they would be invaluable for my thesis.

Anyway, if you have connections, or if you are connections, drop me a line and add something singularly wonderful to this geektastic little tome in progress.

In the meantime, I'm going to pry my eyes away from glowing screens of all sorts and spend some quality time with the printed page. I've been waiting to read this book for months.

Class of 1984

What a way to start the day! This morning I watched the cult fave Class of 1984. Ouch!

A strange cinematic homage to the classic, but almost equally sensational Blackboard Jungle, Class of 1984 is a cautionary tale: a warning to parents everywhere just how senselessly depraved our schools may yet become. I'll save you the scene by scene comparison to Blackboard Jungle, and instead stress the complete outrageousness that infests this movie. Oh, and the total abandonment of subtlety. There's the scene where one student, high on angel dust, climbs the flag pole and then falls to his death wrapped in the American flag. Then there's the scene in which the biology teacher decides to "get through to his students" by holding them at gun point. It's the ending that really drives home the social commentary though. The selflessly heroic teacher, played irritatingly by Perry King, finally gets his revenge: severing one of the student's arms and then impaling him on a saw in shop class, setting another on fire, crushing two more in a car crash in the automotive shop, and then finally pushing his nemesis through the glass ceiling above the auditorium to swing by his neck on the end of a rope, all while his orchestra students plod through the 1812 Overture below. This is one classy movie (pun intended?). At least Glenn Ford knew to turn the other cheek.

Don't get me wrong, though. It was enjoyable. Entertaining even. In a kitschy time-capsule sort of way. The theme song, by Alice Cooper, is still stuck in my head. In another nod to all things subtle, the lyrics go something like this:

When does a dream become a nightmare?
I am the future, and you belong to me.
I am the future, the world belongs to me.

It reminds me of Richard Vernon and Carl sitting in the basement of Shermer High School sharing a beer. Vernon says: Now this is the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night... That when I get older, these kids are gonna take care of me.

Ultimately, Class of 1984 falls into a category of high school movies that I have very little interest in. They are told from the perspective of paranoid adults who want to commiserate with each other over the terrible state of "these kids today". The only high school movies more annoying are the ones that the teacher's union bank rolls every few years in order to inspire would be public school teachers to take up the mantle of public education. You know the type: Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, etc. These movies don't really interest me. At least not as much as the ones that actually depict the high school experience from the perspective of the students themselves.

Light It Up

Netflix calls Light It Up [1999] "Taps meets The Breakfast Club in the inner city in this late 1990s answer to the Brat Pack flicks of the 1980s". I didn't find it to be that, exactly. It was (again) melodramatic, and highly implausible - when the students get their demands out to every newsmedia outlet in the free world via internet access in the curiously operational computer lab, in a school that has neither text books nor heat mind you, I had to raise my objections - but I have to admit that it did tip its hat to The Breakfast Club once or twice.

There was a chubby and bespectacled Judd Nelson - Young man, have you finished your paper? - as the selfless martyr to education, Ken Knowles. Then there was the five, plus one, social caricatures brought together against their will in the school library. I thought that Sarah Gilbert may have been a half-decent proxy for Ally Sheedy's character in TBC, and Rosario Dawson could have passed for a less clueless Molly Ringwald, but after that the comparison sort of breaks down. And the movie ends with a freeze frame that was strikingly similar to Judd Nelson's upraised fist at the end of TBC, but that one may be a stretch. Oh yeah, and then there's the semi-omniscient narrator that bookends the action in both films.

By and large I thought Light It Up was pretty lousy in comparison to the teen films of yore. There is really much more sensationalism than substance. But hey, that Usher Raymond kid is pretty dreamy, isn't he?