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.
Zing! I'm not overly fond of the soundtrack, but I appreciate the presence of Garbage and Neve. I like the idea of immigration, though I'm uncertain if it was a big concern at the time the film was made. Could be something interesting for someone to look into
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