Friday, January 16, 2009

American Teen

by Jennifer Xu

It is a known fact that I indiscriminately love documentaries. They create a hyper-reality just stopping short of the point of unbelievability. And anything that sensationalizes real life using footage of actual real life is okay by me.

I have wanted to see American Teen the second it came out. Unfortunately I have waited until this long to have my dream be actualized, and contrary to public opinion, I actually enjoyed it. Maybe it is because high school is so immediate to me, and my trite frustrations with growing up a teenager are so tightly manifested in this film, but I felt a strong pull towards these rather two-dimensionalized characters.

The story is as simple as The Breakfast Club: five people on different rungs of the social "ladder" in an Indiana public high school experience senior year. There is Megan, the popular girl with a compulsive need to be in control, Colin, the funny basketball star who might not be able to go to college, Hannah, the defiantly alternative but unconsciously adorable weirdo trying to break out of Warsaw's suburban hell, Jake, the acne-ridden band geek who just wants to find a girlfriend, and Mitch, the heartthrob jock who wants something more than what his social status gives him.

Apparently at the end we are supposed to garner some understanding that these social classes are not so different after all and even people as different as a jock, a nerd, a bitchy popular girl, and a weirdo can have similar experiences and go through similar personal problems. But if this were the purpose of the film, director Nanette Burstein failed, tragically.

While it is true that all these teenagers experience heartbreaks, jealousies, college anticipation, and prom frustration, they experience these things almost independently of the others, their problems remaining exclusive to their own social circles. For example, Jake is a band geek. Hence, he cannot find a girlfriend. Megan, the popular girl, is bothered by one girl's attentions to her best friend Geoff. Hence, she sends out a mass email with topless pictures of the girl to the entire school body. These things are expected of a popular girl, they are expected of a geek, and consequently they are the things that happen to them.

What this movie really did was confirm stereotypes of people already existing in my own high school. I could connect each character with a real person almost letter-for-letter. And the movie didn't make me understand these people better or sympathize with them more; it only showed me that these types of people exist at every high school no matter how far you think you've fallen away from the center of the earth. High school is high school is high school. You think you're gonna be able to cheat the clique-onomics of the system and break out and be yourself and befriend a variety of different people, but that is never the case.

But even that is a theme in itself, and one of the reasons I feel so biologically connected to documentaries as a whole. You never go where you think you're going to go. Of course you have an approximate point once you enter the project, but if a story remains unscripted upon shooting, twists will naturally come. And when you flow with them, the themes just come out organically.

A problem with this film is that it overrepresents with the quantity of "popular" people, as every high school tends to do. The weird girl wasn't really that weird and was actually pretty well-liked, and the popular girl and the jock and the heartthrob all belonged to the same circle of friends. So that left the one geeky guy to represent the other 80% of the school. Where are the rest of the nerds, the film geeks, the burnouts, the basketcases? The draw of The Breakfast Club is that you cheer for the underdog, you explore high school from the depths of the loser territory. It seems like Burstein shies away from the fringes of the school, either because they are so inaccessible, or because she finds them unremarkable and unimportant.

This is a relatively simple movie about the banal lives of five American teenagers. At the root, this documentary is all about high school drama, meaningless gossip that won't be significant in any of these people's lives in a couple of years. But the fact remains that the gossip is real, and the teenagers are real, and the little events like TPing your enemy's house or being a ball hog flesh out the high school experience better than any stylized director with all his lights and elevated themes could ever do.