American Teen
The screen has taught us a lot about American high schools.
Films and TV shows since the earliest years of the medium have been set on
high-school campuses, with the result that the arena has been highly
conspicuous in modern Western culture. Here we have a documentary approach to
the high-school movie set in what Hannah, our narrator, and one of the teens of
the title, terms “a typical Mid-Western town”,
American Teen follows the experiences of several
archetypes of high-school life - the jock, the geek, the beaty queen, and so on
- over the course of their graduation year in high-school. The old saw has it
that children should be seen and not heard, but these pockmarked faces and
nubile bodies are those of children on the cusp of adulthood, and catching them
at this stage in their lives, as they pass through, over or under, as the case
may be, what amounts to a rite of passage to adulthood in “the typical
Mid-Western town” is an interesting idea. A casting director is credited and,
as is often the case with documentary films, we’re not sure how much of the interaction
of the subjects is dramatised, but it all rings true, and might help us to make
sense of our own scholarly careers, and maybe of more general life-experiences
- for dynamics and traits evident in the scholarly arena can find analogies in
the workplace - as well.
Unusally for documentaries, apart
from the idiosyncrasies of the teens’ lives, there is not much here that we
haven’t seen before. Participation would seem to be a core value of the
American school. We see that the film’s subjects are encouraged by the system
to be self aware, to examine their strengths and weaknesses, and take
appropriate action, and in this respect most of the key landmarks in their
school lives is recorded on film (independent of the documentary itself),
witness the school’s star basketball player watching video tapes of his games,
and taking on board the criticism of those around him.
In their
home lives, this self-awareness does not translate into guardedness in front of
the documentary cameras and we get a good idea of the challenge that teenagers
often present to their parents. (Sometimes, arguably, this cuts both ways, and
when one teen’s Elvis-impersonating father exhorts his son to “live the dream”,
we must ask ourselves whose dream, exactly, is he referring to.) At the
conclusion, Hannah is given the chance to summarise and reflect on what we’ve
seen, and to look to her the possibilities in her life post high-school, and a
high-school yearbook-style epilogue updates us on what all the principal personages
have been up to in their first year since graduating.