Smells Like Teen Utopia:
Smells Like Teen Utopia:
Hollywood and High School
Kurt Vonnegut claimed that life is not much different than what we all went through in high school. For Aaron Schuster, that statement is reason enough to proclaim the teen movie – with all of its adolescent intrigues, sex, violence and foolishness – the best representation of American society. Of all cinematic genres, the one that that is the most uniquely American, the one that best expresses the core of the American ‘spirit’, is without a doubt the teen movie. And more precisely, the high school flick. Sergio Leone crafted the best Westerns, Sergei Tarkovsky was a master of science fiction, Jacques Demy’s musicals equal or surpass Hollywood’s finest song-and-dance numbers…. But is there an equivalent anywhere to the oeuvre of 80s high school author John Hughes? Of course, it’s not only Americans who know how to make teen films; world cinema is replete with movies dealing with the affairs and tribulations of youth. But no other country has developed the high school film as a specific genre, nor lavished such cinematic attention on the teenager as such. Why should this be the case? America’s singular romance with the teen in all his or her forms – delinquent, hippie, Barbie doll, nerd, jock, rebel, bully, preppy, misfit, weirdo, virgin, slut, goth, rocker, doper, horn dog, drama geek, prom queen – is in fact deeply revealing of its own innermost dreams and dramas. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, ‘High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.’1The history of this critically underappreciated cinematic form stretches from Nicholas Ray’s iconic Rebel Without A Cause (1955) through the 80s masterpieces of Hughes (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and on to Heathers (1989), which both crowns and subverts a certain teenage narrative, announcing a darker horizon for the adventures of adolescence. Throughout the 90s and into the 21st century, the high school movie remains a strong cultural presence, both charting new territory, from space aliens to schizophrenia and therapy culture, and revisiting the familiar, like fake IDs and the eternal quest to get laid. Without claiming to be comprehensive, the following is intended as notes toward a theory of the high school film as, I shall argue, a utopian genre.
The Coming Community of Adolescents
To paraphrase Dr. Freud: What does the teen want? Consider Nicolas Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause, justly considered the Ur-teen film. This movie is often said to mark the birth of the modern teenager: cool, moody, and misunderstood. Yet its portrait of anti-social rebellion and wild youth is equally one of melancholic longing, a desire for authentic human contact in a broken, emotionally stunted world. The period is marked by great anxiety over juvenile delinquency – and indeed, the emergence of the teen went hand in hand with handwringing over the crisis of youth. Teen is, then as much as now, tantamount to trouble. Blackboard Jungle, released in 1955, the same year as Rebel, eloquently articulates this fear as the story of an inner city schoolteacher’s struggle to win the respect of his unruly and in some cases violent pupils. The real societal crisis, however, is not simply the recklessness and defiance of youth, but also the failure of adults to know anymore how they are supposed to behave in order to be adults: they are either too chummy, or too wishy-washy, or too wrapped up – like the narcissistic kids they abhor – in their own solitary lives. What Rebel teaches is the negative consequences of the breakdown of the traditional family. Indeed, far from attacking his father, James Dean’s character Jim Stark (who for all his cool is actually rather whiny) desperately tries to prop him up. He pleads with him to be a man and assert his authority over his nagging, overbearing wife. ‘Why don’t you stand up to her?’ Jim implores. The structural counterpart of the ‘rebel without a cause’ is, if I may be permitted this psychoanalytic expression, the ‘father without a phallus’. In this odd couple, it is ‘aimless’ youth that stands for the properly masculine ethics of confronting one’s problems squarely, making tough yes/no decisions, and so on, while the ‘sensitive’ adult represents cowardly compromise and moral hypocrisy. Faced with a smothering mother and no male role model in sight, our hero seeks refuge elsewhere. And this is what happens in the second half of the film: a (temporary) remaking of the broken social link. In an abandoned old house, Jim constitutes, along with Judy (Nathalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo), a new utopian family of social misfits outside the bounds of the dysfunctional 1950s family. The image of the three cosily gathered on the dilapidated porch is the film’s promesse de bonheur. Plato: ‘I’m happy now, here. I wish we could stay here.’For the teen, high school may often seem like the whole world. That’s because it is. The teen genre’s overriding lesson is that high school is a veritable microcosm of the wider social universe, containing all its essential dramas, conflicts, anxieties, joys, and triumphs. To quote Vonnegut again: ‘We have all been there. While there, we saw nearly every form of justice and injustice, kindness and meanness, intelligence and stupidity which we were likely to encounter in later life.’ He adds, ‘When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with. You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school. You make a fool of yourself in high school, then you go to college to learn how you should have acted in high school, then you get out into real life, and that turns out to be high school all over again—class officers, cheerleaders, and all.’2The message of the teen film would appear to be twofold. On the one hand, it presents high school with its rigid castes, divisions, hierarchies, and rituals as the effective model for our brutal Hobbesian reality. On the other, it holds forth the promise of a new ‘authentic’ community, defying categorization and imposed stereotypes, and transcending the world’s phoniness and hypocrisy. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, this is the magical daylong holiday of Ferris, his girlfriend Sloan, and best friend Cameron, who successfully evade clueless parents and the increasingly deranged school principal. In The Breakfast Club, one of the great cinematic huis clos of all time, it takes the form of an unlikely community composed of ‘a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal’, who reject their ideological interpellation (‘We think you’re crazy making us write an essay telling you who we think we are…’), even if only for one Saturday in detention.The most explicitly political teen film is also one of the strangest. Wild in the Streets, from 1968, is about a youth revolution which begins with a rally to lower the voting age and ends with the total triumph of teen power in Washington: rock star Max Frost becomes president, and ‘old’ people (anyone over 35) are shipped off to rehabilitation camps and dosed on LSD. The movie ends on an ominous note with a nascent rebellion by youngsters against their twenty-something masters: Don’t trust anyone over 10! The utopian dimension of the high school film, however, has less to do with any revolutionary program or particular content, than with what we might call, in a philosophical mood, the teenager’s ontological condition. This condition is a fundamentally a transitional one: a creature of becoming rather than being, the teen is suspended precariously between the prematurity of childhood and the responsibility of adulthood. The age of the teen is one of ‘no longer… but not yet’, a process and not an end, a ‘so-called’ life where all the passions, dramas and conflicts are played out in utter seriousness yet deprived of their full ontological weight. It is precisely this lack of essence that constitutes the pathos of adolescence. Teen utopia consists in grasping this moment of transition as such, not as a period of maturation leading up to adulthood, but as a ‘means without end’, a caesura in the regular march of time. In the words of one of Seventeen magazine’s early readers, ‘I love being seventeen. Wish I could just stay this age for a while. Seventeen is the perfect spot between that strange state called adolescence, which means you are going somewhere, and adulthood, which means that you are on the downgrade.’3 One of the recurring motifs of the high school film is, to quote Ferris Bueller, ‘This is the best day of my life.’
Teen Apocalypse
The flipside of this ‘greatest day’ utopianism is the teen penchant for gloominess, negativity and self-destruction. Apocalypse would seem to be endemic to adolescence. When Alain Badiou characterized the 20th century, with its violent programs for refashioning humanity, as dominated by a ‘passion for the real’, he might well have been articulating the first teen philosophy. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott explains, ‘Because everything is in abeyance, [teens] feel unreal, and this leads them to do certain things which feel real to them, and which are only too real in the sense that society is affected.’4 The teenager’s passion for the real stems from the disconcerting unreality of their ‘in-between’ condition. This passion can express itself, like in the case of Jim Stark, as an unwavering moral attitude (real ethics brook no compromise), or The Breakfast Club’s rejection of imposed stereotypes (who am I really, beyond social clichés?). Or else it can manifest itself in a violent acting out against an all too fake world. There is no better example of this than the film Heathers, which brings the seminal work of John Hughes to its wickedly parodic apotheosis. Daniel Waters’s brilliant screenplay not only gave us such memorable one-liners as ‘What’s your damage?’ and ‘Fuck me gently with a chainsaw’, but put a hilarious noir spin on the whole 80s coming-of-age narrative. The emotive Hughes universe is transformed into a cutthroat nihilistic dystopia brimming with violence and murder. (A darker, more surreal vision of teen life was already intimated in Better Off Dead [1985], featuring John Cusack in a cinematic portrait of obsession worthy of Buñuel: the film opens with a panning shot across a truly stunning array of photographs of Cusack’s girlfriend; when she dumps him, he tries repeatedly to kill himself.) Heathers is the story of a revolt against the ‘Heathers’, Westerburg High’s ruling social clique, which quickly gets out hand and becomes a sinister plot to wipe out the school. Along the way, practically everyone gets skewered, from the sensationalist media, oddball parents, and vapid therapists to the whole hysterical discourse surrounding the MTV generation. With the bomb ticking away its final seconds, Christian Slater, channelling both James Dean and Jack Nicholson, proclaims: ‘People will look at the ashes of Westerburg and say, “Now there’s a school that self-destructed, not because society didn’t care, but because the school was society”,’ sounding like an epitaph for an era. Released in 1989, Heathers predates the Columbine massacre by some 10 years; it’s hard to imagine such a withering comedy being made about high school shootings today. Of the great post-Heathers teen films, Gregg Araki’s ‘Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy’, Totally Fucked Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), and Nowhere (1997), deserves special mention. The last film in particular is a brilliant send up of the rich Californian suburban aesthetic which came to dominate the 90s imagination of teen life; the movie was described by Araki himself as ‘a Beverly Hills 90210 episode on acid.’ Araki counters Aaron Spelling’s plastic paradise – the triumph of the teen as model consumer – with his own outlandish spectacle of sex, drugs, jealous queers, date rape, vapid celebrity, alien abduction, terrorists, and a giant cockroach. In one memorable scene, valley girls played by Shannen Doherty, Rose McGowan, and Traci Lords are vaporized by an errant space alien. For all its extravagant surreality, one should maintain that Araki’s depiction of teen existence is strictly realist. Its aim is not to dazzle with glitzy appearances but to unveil the hallucination that reality has already become. In a world gone crazy, madness is the only viable form of mimesis.Aaron Schuster is an art critic and philosopher based in Brussels.
Aaron Schuster
