The Projector #38: Back to School? (Patreon)

If you’ve been on social media this week — and, honestly, it's totally okay if you haven’t — you’ve probably seen a stream of old photos. Twitter became overrun with photos of users at the age of 20 while old senior photos spilled onto Facebook. Why? There are official justifications, but the overarching reason seems to be that the mind tends to wander to the past when we’re cooped up too long.

It seems appropriate, then, that this podcast will soon be looking at a pair of high school movies, which have a tendency to induce flashbacks to viewers’ own teen years. To that end, I asked my fellow podcasters which cinematic depictions of high school rang truest. Here’s what they said:

Genevieve Koski: I’m tempted to cheat and say either Freaks and Geeks (not a movie) or American Teen (a documentary, so possessing an unfair advantage in the realism department), but since I now already have by mentioning them in passing, I’ll do the assignment: One of my favorite things about Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is that it depicts a high school scenario that acknowledges the existence of popularity and social privilege among students, but it doesn’t lean on the idea of “cliques” as an organizing principle. (For the opposite of this, see Mean Girls, a movie I like well enough, but always strikes me as a little too pleased with itself for being so “real” about the high school experience.) It’s not that cliques don’t exist in high schools, but teen movies have a tendency to turn them into an extremely rigid hierarchy for the sake of story/character shortcuts, whereas Lady Bird’s protagonist moves through her Catholic school’s social strata with — well, not ease exactly, but a lack of pushback from other students based on her and their “place” in the school. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Lady Bird is in her senior year, when some teens begin to see beyond the confines of high school society and toward something approximating the real world, or maybe it’s just because she’s the type of person who will insert herself into whatever situation she pleases, regardless of what anyone else thinks or wants. But whatever it is, it’s a relief to see an “unpopular” high school character who is not particularly stressed about her own popularity in relation to others.’

Scott Tobias: I struggled badly with the answer to this question, because so few movies about high school seem all that authentic. They’re heightened and stylized, super-charged by the emotional turbulence of adolescence. So my contribution is more a movie around high school than about high school: Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. Dazed and Confused only gives us the last day of school, and it transitions into the shenanigans after school and into the dusk-to-dawn timeframe of Linklater movies like Before Sunrise and SubUrbia. Yet it feels so absolutely correct in evoking high school at a specific time and place: The types of students and the various cliques they form together, the rituals imposed on incoming freshmen, the relationships between boys and girls of various ages. I don’t know what high school was like in 1976, when I only 5 years old, and the high school in Dazed and Confused wasn’t like either of the schools I attended in my youth. But it persuades you, in extraordinarily vivid detail, that it’s right on the money.

Tasha Robinson: I'm with Scott in thinking that high-school movies as a class don't tend to be authentic about the whole experience — a lot of them go in-depth in accurate ways about one person's very specific experience, or about the experiences people might face under specific circumstances (say, coming-out, or being bullied, or struggling with addiction). Others, which take place outside the U.S., are fascinating but I can't speak to their accuracy, since I grew up here. (I recommend this thorough, enlightening IMDB list for a crash course in the entire school subgenre.) But broader movies tend to be heightened and usually comedic, the product of older people looking back on their experiences through satire-colored glasses. With that in mind, I think The Breakfast Club may be unique in trying to sum up the whole high-school experience by breaking it down into categories, and using them to represent the broad picture. The theme — that teenagers may fall into different social categories and see each other as alien and unapproachable, while still having a lot in common — still feels truer than most things said about the high-school experience. The film takes place in a very specific white suburban privileged setting, the characters are archetypes first and people second, and the ending, which suggests tenuous romances as the be-all and end-all of high school (except for the nerd, who's stuck doing everyone else's homework), is also a little too precious. But even given all that, the movie still feels fundamentally real in a universal way — it essentially says it can suck to feel young, powerless, and full of emotions that aren't safe to express, and that it feels much better to make a personal connection with someone else.

Strong arguments all! But the correct answer is obviously Rock ’n’ Roll High School because: a) Rock ’n’ Roll High School is always the answer and b) it reflects my experience at a repressive school with a vibrant black market run out of the boys’ restroom that was later destroyed during a visit by the Ramones. 

Anyway, if you haven’t already, now’s a good time to brush up on Election and set your DVRs (or whatever) for the HBO premiere of Bad Education. (Spoiler: It’s good!)

Meanwhile, here are some pieces to read:

• This week saw a number of American Psycho-at-20 pieces. But if you haven’t read our own Scott Tobias’ take for The Guardian, give it a look!

• Missing baseball? Yeah, us too. But if you want to take some time to explore baseball history via the movies, Keith Phipps compiled a list for Vulture.

• What does COVID-19 mean for 2020 movies? What does it mean for the future? For Vulture, Chris Lee talked to some experts.

• For Vox, our friend Emily VanDerWerff watched Trolls World Tour — with some help from a 4-and-a-half-year-old companion.

• At Polygon, Noel Murray considered the podcastization of documentary series.

• For Uproxx, Keith Phipps looked back Porky’s and the teen sex comedy wave it unleashed on the ’80s.

• At Vulture, Alison Willmore talked to Daniel Waters about the strangely prescient Demolition Man.

• For Criterion Current, Nick Pinkerton considered Philip Baker Hall’s performance-of-a-lifetime as Richard Nixon in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor.

• Need to watch some Looney Tunes? Of course you do. At Vulture, Donald Liebenson offers a guide to 90 you can watch right now.