Around the time I was born, so was the first iconic “teen film,” The Breakfast Club. The lineup included the indulged clotheshorse, a driven nerd, a vacant jock, a stoner, and an attention-deprived Goth. The movie rages against high school cliques and hierarchies and it proposes that all kids should unite against two common enemies, their parents and a future of soulless-ness. The movie has heart and it rings true like a diary entry… what life is like when parents or teachers leave the room.
That was then… this is now…Clueless, Bring It On, She’s All That, Legally Blond and Varsity Blues, just to name a few. Movies have evolved from the inspirational underdog finding justice, to the hyped stories of the elite insiders, the sports stars, beauties, cheerleaders and rich kids.
“These kids live in the blondest, richest suburbs, suburbs without seasons. The characters have abs so hard and defined they seem to have replaced personalities,” says Alyssa Quart in Branded. She also states that these films’ fascination with the high school in-crowd echoes most big-firm marketing recommendations to snag the shoppers of the in-crowd, called channelers or influencers—“the cream of the crop,” those “that know their status and revel in it.”
At the center of the movie She’s All That, is the senior class presided and soccer player Freddie Prinze Jr. The heroine of Legally Blonde is a Bel Airhead beauty queen, Elle Woods. In Bring It On, the influencer is the captain of the cheerleading team who struggles to keep her kingdom of cruel, anorexic girls happy. With Bring It On, if you followed the old model of the teen movie you would assume that by the films close Kirsten Dunst’s character would learn a lesson about how girls of a normal body mass are people too, but alas, we are simply left again to the blockbuster with a vacant heart.
My personal favorite of all these is—the makeover movie—this is all about normalizing the social outcasts and turning them into influencers and carrying them from the lowest high school rung to the very top, something every average girl would kill to do.
A perfect example is She’s All That, a beautiful and dynamic film about that teaches kids the importance of having fancy clothes and wearing good makeup, truly heartfelt (ha). In fact, in a matter of minutes, with a pair of tweezers, a short dress and lip gloss she transforms from a neohippie to a homecoming queen nominee. Wow, so easy!
My point in all of this is that movies that primp, powder, and brand girls claim that the girls are becoming their “true selves,” but the entirety of the films are testifying to the power of constructed and artificial selves. The films all say that girls just need to find the courage to be themselves, when in fact they are encouraging their audience to become someone else, someone suave, with perfectly straight hair, designer clothes and a perfect body. In the words of Quart, “Anyone can turn into a popular girl or a prom queen, the films say. All it takes is a full commitment to beauty conventions and the high school brand economy.”
Overall, the screen teens are more often what critic Pauline Kael termed “un-people.” Where characters were once confronted with real-life difficulties, they now have contests, social machinations and makeovers… Wow tough life, don’t worry about how you affect the lives of millions of teenage girls around the world or anything, because no one ever takes this all to heart…. Right?
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