American Teen – just your average movie high school experience
July 24th, 2008 by Alex | Co-Editor
American Teen, the new documentary by Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture), has more narrative, in a good way, than your average documentary. However, it ultimately fails by being even more stereotypical than John Hughes’s fictional high school film, The Breakfast Club.
American Teen attempts to describe the quintessential high school experience in small town blue-collar white Christian America, Warsaw, to be exact, and prove that those old Hughesian stereotypes – the jock, the prom queen, the artsy, the geek – really do have some basis in reality. Well, sure, if you choose to only take an on-the-surface stereotypical look at people, you can probably fit them into one of those stereotypes! And so Burstein does.
We meet Colin, the handsome, charming, pointy-chinned, and even smart, basketball superstar. Colin’s father pushes him too hard to play hard and get a basketball scholarship since his father did not bother to save money for his son’s college education. We meet Megan, the high school prom queen, student council president, and resident backstabbing mean girl, not to mention vandal. She is also quite smart and comes from a family of intellectuals who put enormous pressure on her to both get into and attend Notre Dame University, her father’s Alma Mater.
There is also Mitch, a jock and popular boy, who falls for the spunky, in-between artsy Hannah, but ultimately shies away due to peer pressure: they move in different social circles. Hannah is an artist who wants to study film and become a great filmmaker, perhaps why Burstein treats her with such tenderness. Hannah’s mother has clinical depression, her father lives far away, and she goes through a series of rocky relationships with various boys. She’s an outsider, but a real beauty, and marches to her own beat, unafraid to be herself, even if she is afraid of gossip.
Finally, there is the pimply band geek, Jake, who isn’t really geeky at all, he’s merely socially inept; he plays video games, has a bedroom full of dead animals, and isn’t particularly intelligent. Ultimately, all Jake wants is a girlfriend to love him, since if the movies have taught us nothing else, the solution to all our problems – self-esteem or otherwise – can be easily solved by someone warm to cuddle up with. I know geekier geeks than Jake. I know geeks that have read every science fiction book under the sun and can quote from them. I know socially awkward people that will tear apart every question with semantics until your brain hurts. I know geeks that would never agree to date someone because the individual is so socially inept. Those geeks would have been interesting subjects. Jake, on the other hand, is ultimately just a normal guy with no ambition and as such, he is really just a sad and somewhat boring character.
What makes all these characters ultimately boring,is that they have no interests. The jock is a jock with a pushy father. The prom queen is a social queen with a sister who committed suicide. The artsy girl just wants to make movies. Colin is so intent upon going to college, but what does he want to study? What interests him other than basketball? Megan, the bitchy prom queen, pours all of her energy into popularity and her acceptance at Notre Dame, but what does life after high school hold in store for her? Mitch is well-liked but subject to peer pressure; what does he like to do in his spare time other than sports? What sort of family does he come from? Most teen movies do not answer these questions because they don’t fit into the usual high school fantasy. I was hoping that since American Teen was a documentary Burstein might delve into these issues and show us that there is, as we expect, more to traditional high school stereotypes than meets the eye, even if people may decide to fit themselves into a stereotype as a means of fitting in at school. But Burstein never digs in beneath the surface.
Even if I accept the fact that Burstein is only going to look at stereotypes, I am disappointed that she missed out on some of what I would consider the quintessential stereotypes. Where is the real geek, who knows too much trivia about comic books or video games or movies or computers or science fiction? Where is the alcoholic, the drug abuser, the full-out emo kid? Hannah fills the role of the emo artsy but she does not seem to be into substance abuse, or suffer from anorexia/bulimia, or cutting, or at least the film never shows us that side of her. Where is the brain, the kid who gets straight A’s and goes to science fairs?
American Teen has nothing new to say about what it is like to be in high school. It has nothing new to say about how right or wrong stereotypes are. It makes little use of some of its intelligent subjects to delve into interesting, unanswered questions, and to have a real dialogue about these people.
Despite these shortcomings, Burstein gets major points for her technique as a filmmaker. American Teen feels like a teen movie and not like a documentary, for better or for worse. It may be shallow and it may glorify the high school experience, not to mention stupid stereotypes, but it’s also fun, with a solid soundtrack, though Cat Stevens’ “Trouble” didn’t quite work; it is too much associated with Harold and Maude for me. The film looks good with good photography and visuals, better than in most documentaries. There are no dry interviews and we never see or hear the director on camera, which lets us really focus in on the subjects. The film propels itself well, though I wonder to what extent it relies on the soundtrack for its momentum. Unfortunately, the movie does little more than to prove that with enough footage, and with the right editing, you can turn any high school experience into something that could have been pulled right out of a 1980s John Hughes film. Burstein knows how to find a story; I just wish she had also found depth.
