The Kids Are All Trite

River's Edge represents the veritable apex of narrative sensationalism and exploitation, appropriating a then-recent shock crime to the end of making good old Hollywood feature fiction. And, yes, this is an independent production marketed toward adult arthouse audiences, but it's construction and presentation are unabashedly traditional—and while I agree with Marissa's assessment that it was probably not the director's intention to posit a "kids-these-days"-type argument, the end result is a film that demands judgment and scorn from its audience, inviting us to digest the act and its implications, drawing conclusions about the state of a)all youth everywhere, b)the parenting (or lack thereof) which quite obviously caused this degradation of the moral fibre of American culture, and c)the sum total of all social/cultural evils which contributed to the downfall of the decent way of life. River's Edge is satisfying because we get to cast judgment on others and feel better about own moral worth, because I (and, uh, my hypothetical children) would have clearly acted different. And, like, think of the children, because they're so far gone they don't even know that a dead body = a horrible crime.

I can't say I particularly agree about the assertion that River's Edge is some bold comment on violence against women or power struggles with regard to gender—as Anita proposes elsewhere—but I can see where this might come from. It's true the violent act in the centre of the film sees a man overcoming a woman, but I think it's maybe too easy to project meaning onto the gender relationship when that may only be incidental (or in the very least, significant but not deliberately or especially so—the case is based on a true crime, which crime itself may point to some more fundamental issue with gender power relationships in society at large, but I wouldn't necessarily read the film as being about violence against women so much as violence in youth culture and the apathy with which peers treat/accept it). Remember that there are several women in the social network involved in the coverup of the murder, and while both victims (the antagonist's and Dennis Hopper's recollected murdering of his girlfriend) are indeed women, so too are there women implicated in the crime by way of their silence and apathy when faced with the corpse near the river. Violence against women is a serious social issue, but its representation in River's Edge seems more symptomatic of its continued presence and significance rather than explicitly argued or critiqued; the film certainly involves the issue, but I'm not convinced that it is necessarily about the issue.

One of the more interesting sequences in the film for me—and Anita brought this up too—was the cross-cutting of Clarissa and Matt engaging in intercourse with the first time we actually see John murdering his Jamie. Cross-cutting is a traditional trope employed to suggest a casual or metaphorical connection between two narratively disparate actions—in this case, sex and violence. David Cronenberg's films often draw similar parallels between sexual acts and violent ones, but where his thesis usually revolves around how both are natural or primal acts innate within us, in River's Edge the implication seems less justifying and more damning: are we meant to see John's murderous impulse as somehow sexual/fetishistic, or is Matt and Clarissa's sex implicitly violent and taboo? Maybe the answer is that both acts show youth as flippantly and unthinkingly engaging in rash, inappropriate behavior, and that the jump from promiscuous (and presumably unprotected) sex to violence and murder is somehow negligible? It's not entirely clear, but I think it's worth further thought.

The Media: They, Uh, Say Things About You

Crispin Glover promoting River's Edge on David Letterman:



Huh.

Our Job Is To Replicate Hegemonic Power Structures And Shit

Some things to consider about Heathers:

HIGH SCHOOL = SOCIETAL SYNECDOCHE

If this wasn't made clear enough narratively, allow J.D. to elucidate: "I'm not blowing up the school, I'm blowing up society! [emphasis his]"

Uh, right. To recap: The Heathers represent the social elite, and the remainder of the school is structured in a sort of hierarchy of power. I know Joe warned about flippant/pretentious Foucault citations, but if you have a look at The History Of Sexuality, everybody's favorite French theorist tells us that contemporary power isn't propagated and maintained through threats of violence or force (as it was in the pre-modern period, where dissent would win you a one-way ticket to decapitationville), but rather through the promotion of health and sexuality—that is, it's in your benefit to acquiesce to institutions of power and be a model citizen, because you get to the reap the benefits of an orderly modern society. High School in Heathers works in a similar fashion; the power of the Heathers is maintained despite their being uniformly abhorred because students in the lower echelons of the social order desire their approval and respect, or as one Heather so nicely puts it, because "everyone wants to either be me or fuck me".

KIDS = BORN FOLLOWERS

Teenagers apparently don't think for themselves. The movie once again drives the point home:
Veronica: "If everybody jumped off a bridge, would you?"
Heather: "...probably."

The underlying joke in Heathers is that kids are so predisposed to trend-following that they're willing to go through with anything and everything in order to fit in, including, in this case, suicide.

On Tommy and Naomi Kline

I'm not especially fond of Naomi Kline's pedantic hyperleftist take on consumerism and alt-culture in No Logo, particularly given the degree to which this trendy culture-jamming took over in the late 90s/early 2000s—when everyone with a passing interest in politics gorged on Michael Moore and Adbusters like it was seriously blowing their minds!, oh dear—but she obviously has some things to say about consumer culture and the mass marketing of Cool that are relevant to our discussions of Heathers and, to a lesser extent, The Faculty.

In his post on The Faculty earlier today, So Sayeth The Watcher expounds upon the film's Tommy ad tie-in, noting the irony in a film about the pressures of conformity and the desire for individuality cashing in on product placement and character testimonials. Although I get that this move is amusing, I'm not sure it's as revelatory as people seem to make it out to be. As I observed in class—and which, granted, The Watcher concedes—marketing and product placement is standard operating procedure in Major Hollywood productions, regardless of themes or content (er, unless it's, like, Schindler's List or something). But where I most adamantly disagree with the Watcher is in suggestion that since it's "cool to sell out" (according to Naomi Kline), The Faculty's audiences obviously associate the protagonists' jeans-hawking with rebellion and individuality and hipness. We need, first of all, to distinguish between the youth culture Naomi Kline is writing about in that particular section of No Logo, teens coming of age in the late 80s and early 90s, or "the MTV generation", or whatever, with "today"'s teenagers, whose savvyness for marketing and product placement is slightly different, and maybe a little more sophisticated, than the kids of the generation prior. As Joe has noted numerous times in class, generations of kids and cool come in small cycles or waves, cycles are which are far more transient than the broader generations we associate with major time periods (baby boomers, Generation X, etc); the kids in the primary buying demographic during the hip hop boom of the late 80s or big brand revivalism of the very early 90s are importantly not the same major-demo kids of 1998, when The Faculty was released, nor are even close to the same demographic as the kids today, whose heightened involvement with social networking and myriad other technologies distinguish them hugely from previous niche markets.

Let's break this down a little, then:

THE LATE 80s/EARLY 90s KIDS:
Kline talks at length about the way kids were marketed to in the period immediately following the last recession, when big business realized that tweens and teens had buying power and a willingness to shell out big bucks for "cool" products. The focus from a marketing standpoint was to associate brands with the notion of cool, or to generally get kids to think whatever you're selling is a cool thing. We might call this the "naive" marketing stage: simple associations, like celebrity endorsements (a "cool" teen star wearing your product, for example) are effective on children and teenagers primarily because these teenagers do not have any previous experience with this kind of aggressive marketing strategy—straightforward ads appeal to their basic need to be told what is and is not cool.

IMMEDIATELY SUBSEQUENT TO THIS PERIOD:
Kline doesn't really get into this, but anybody interested in marketing strategies and the culture of cool in the early 90s would be advised to check out David Foster Wallace's essay E Unibus Pluram: Television And U.S. Fiction, which talks about the introduction of irony into television programming of the late 80s/early 90s, and how that affects audiences and vice versa. He cites an example of a popular and successful Pepsi ad wherein a guy driving a Pepsi truck stops by a beach of kids, and then sips his can of Pepsi loudly over a speaker system which projects across the area. The kids hear him drinking the Pepsi and rush over in swarms to buy one, before the slogan—"The choice of a new generation!"—is placed atop the scene. The ad is a sly parody of advertising strategies which presume that audiences will want to buy the product simply by seeing or hearing it, the irony being that the slogan, the "choice", clashes with the very idea of mass marketing and advertising and consumption. Like The Watcher notes, it's that old cliche: buy our product to be unique, just like everybody else. But not only is this a revelation and irony that was obvious in 1990, it's one that the ad companies themselves are so aware of being cliche that they work it into their own advertisements: the kids are no longer naive enough to just fall for ads and think something is cool; they now require the irony and sarcasm of new, smarter advertising to appeal to their more discerning sensibilities.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE FACULTY'S AD TIE-IN
I said it before, and I maintain it: People aren't totally stupid. Joe's right to say that many people fall for ads—right, that's why they still advertise stuff—but advertisers are smart enough to know that basic appeals to authority and figures of cool aren't enough to move units to kids who've grown up with exactly the kinds of naive advertising mentality we're here criticizing. Everybody's leery of the greasy used car salesman, the fake celebrity endorsement pitch, the voice over describing more side-effects than the product's meant to cure—these things have been drilled into our head so much for so long that to do one seriously and honestly would be unthinkable. Advertisers know that these things aren't effective, so for the last twenty years they've been making ads with that knowledge already worked in. You think Tommy Jeans and The Faculty aren't aware of the irony that their advertisement clashes with the theme of the film? Or that we're going to be aware of that? Guess what: It's not a revelation; it's part of the point. The ad in question involves a parody of movie-making, where the frustrated director repeatedly tells the actors to change until they reach a fever pitch of frustration—"Give me TOMMY JEANS!", he shouts, and suddenly everybody's cool and happy again. The ad is hip, it's nonchalant, it's meant to give you a "candid" look at the making of a movie, except it's obviously scripted and staged in advance—and we're obviously meant to know that going in.

Uh, so, anyway: I think you've got to give these advertisers more credit. This is, like, their job.

NOW THEN:
It's all about irony and disinterest. Kids are bored and dejected, they're hip and they don't care, and the only advertising that appeals to them is the advertising which seems "above" it. Designer clothes are more niche than before, with more "any-clothes-whatever" being the in thing. That's why you get this:

Instead of, like, tact and stuff. American Apparel ads are the great meta-ads of our generation, profiling sexy, skanky and totally disaffected youth in (some of) their clothing, but infused with enough pomo irony and self-awareness to prevent obvious mocking or parody. "Trite", you might say, "totally obvious". But then they say: "Well, yes, but it's not just an ordinary-looking hipster with no top on, it's a self-reflexive hipster with no top on—it's, um, subversive". And doesn't she look cool.

POINT BEING:
It's way too obvious to decide that "Selling Out = Really COOL!" and "Kids = Total Suckers", because this a far more complex system than that. And also: Naomi Kline breeds thoughtless pedantry.

OH, AND HEATHERS, I GUESS:
I'd never seen Heathers before but I liked it quite a lot. The hardlined "social satire" aspects were all well and good, its criticisms of social hierarchies and hegemonic power in high schools perfectly fair, but what I was most surprised by was the flippancy with which the movie treated the death of the students. I was expecting the narrative to go through the redundant motions of realism, excusing the murders in some totally contrived coverup way, but subordinating narrative realism to satire and humor was a good move.

More on this later, probably.

In Medias Res

Anthony Lane wrote an interesting review of J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek reboot in last week's New Yorker, and while young, goodlooking space cadets gallivanting across the Milky Way at Warp 9 might not be anybody's idea of a proper 'teen film', I maintain that the film strays from Sci-Fi and into post-O.C. territory frequently enough to warrant comment here. And, like, Kirk's causeless cocksure rebellion totally channels Jimmy Dean. Or, uh, Ryan Atwood.

Lane comments briefly on Star Trek's heavy-handed characterizations, particularly with respect to Kirk's catch-all "father dying whilst attempting to save family and crew" background, concluding that the film's reliance on conspicuous explanation is symptomatic of a larger trend in Hollywood cinema that emphasizes transparency over allusion. In Batman Begins, Lane notes, Bruce Wayne's fear of and fascination with bats is quickly reduced to a flashback of an adolescent Wayne falling headfirst into a cave of the winged icons. "What's wrong", Lane asks, "with 'Batman is?'"

Backhanded explanations such as these feel like preemptive rejoinders to questions and concerns an "average" Western audience might hypothetically have, as though the filmmakers feel compelled to curb confusion before it happens. I'm not sure whether this is indicative of a system that gives audiences too little credit or a society that really does need everything spoon fed to them—don't they have focus groups and market surveys for this sort of thing? And to bring this back to teen movies: The fallback characterization method in more "serious" teen movie fare has traditionally been to give your protagonist one easily identifiable fault or hang-up with a digestible explanation for it. If you're a troublesome rebel who refuses to do well, it's probably because you're just misunderstood—all you need is the cute new girl who really gets you to encourage you to open up and share your personal history. If you're, say, Donnie Darko, or Josh Hartnett's character in The Faculty, or the dude from The O.C. or Van Wilder or, hell, Abrams' Captain Kirk, you're only a juvenile delinquent clashing with teachers/parents/police/any authority figure whatsoever because you choose to, because actually you're an unprecedented genius with a 200-point I.Q. and "intimidating" standardized test scores, because, like, you're just too deep, and, like, nobody gets you, and obviously every fuck-up loser in backwater American highschools splits their school-skipping spare time shooting smack and reading dog-eared copies of Gravity's Rainbow. And delinquents who do badly in school are far less sympathetic for the audience. Or sexually desirable for the alternative chick who inevitable falls for him.

Also, if you're a genius delinquent with rugged goodlooks and problems with authority, you may be a vampire:

The Faculty: Some Thoughts

Yesterday evening we screened Robert Rodriguez's quirky teen monster movie The Faculty (1998), a pseudo-mashup of genres that's largely hit or miss (but mostly miss). Ostensibly a high concept combination of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and The Breakfast Club, the film begins to flirt with deeper concepts and thematic conceits—you might read the invasion and infection as an allegory for the AIDS pandemic, or perhaps a satire of homogeneous youth culture—before ultimately settling on superficial genre subversion and conventional action sequences. That's fair enough, but I would have expected the screenwriter of Scream to elaborate a slightly more sophisticated narrative.

Curious to consider is the film's continual anxiety over the introduction and initiation of the Other. This reveals itself most conspicuously in the form of the literal aliens, whose otherworldness is of course the ultimate actualization of Otherness, and whose plot not simply to destroy humanity but to overtake and assimilate it suggests a deeply-rooted fear of take over by some mysterious foreign source. Whether this is indicative of some hidden anti-immigration agenda is not for me to say, but when you consider that a)the film's primary antagonist is a student who has moved into town from elsewhere, b)this same antagonist nearly overthrows our heroes because she effaces her otherness for the sake of blending in with her new peers, and c)the major players in the film are white, middle class hometown Americans, it starts to get a little uncomfortable to talk about The Faculty's overarching thematic conceits. Huh.

Here's the trailer:



You'll note that 25% of this trailer is comrprised of footage of other movies, specifically Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Scream, which should give you a pretty good idea of how this movie was being marketed: it's a movie-lovers teen movie, endorsed via its makers' pedegree, and, like, whatever I guess. Seems odd to be marketing a teen movie by appealing to anything other than sex and violence, of which this movie has an ample supply, but then I'm not an advertising executive. Although it should maybe be noted that this movie kind of bombed, so perhaps they went down the wrong avenue for promotion themselves.

Oh, and also: What an awful soundtrack. I want my 90s teen movies to be scored by Pavement and My Bloody Valentine, not the Offspring.

An Introduction

This blog is maintained as part of an ongoing project for a Film Studies course on the production and marketing of Teen Movies. Seeing as how it's a blog and not, say, an academic paper, my adherence to any kind of grammatical/linguistic/remotely sensible format will likely be tenuous at best. In addition to some vaguely theoretical content, I'll also probably be using this blog as an outlet for creative meandering when I'm bored and have free time, or when I'm entirely intoxicated (see if you can notice a substantial difference in the quality of my writing during those particular periods).

If you're interested, you can also follow my (entirely unacademic) Twitter, or read my (slightly more academic) record reviews at CokeMachineGlow.

This is a surprisingly entertaining sequence from the otherwise-lame Not Another Teen Movie:



Satirizing genre films makes for pretty pedestrian comedy, doubly so when your target is the overwhelmingly banal She's All That. And while the observation that the 'ugly outcast' is quite obviously a knockout to begin with is self-evident, the execution here is terrific. It works. I like when trite Hollywood productions critique other Hollywood productions for being trite themselves, like when rap videos make fun of rap video cliches or when celebrities mock celebrity culture. These superficial "deconstructions" appeal to the viewer's desire to be respected for elevating themselves above mainstream material, to be congratulated for being in on the joke against the vacuity of popular culture. A teen enjoying Not Another Teen Movie is invited to pat themselves on the back for seeing through the contrived nature of the 'average' teen movie, and by extension the average popular culture artifact, the irony being that these congratulations of individual thought and liberation from the homogeneity of normative conventions come from the very production companies who rely on the predictable marketability of their audiences. In short, they sell you contrived shit and then sell you some other contrived shit that makes fun of the earlier contrived shit. Y'know, I think these movie moguls are smarter than we give 'em credit for.