High School at the Movies

I finally saw Mean Girls for the first time (I knooow) and it got me thinking about what the movies told me that high school was supposed to be like. According to the movies, it's full of cliques, wild house parties, having sex, crying over boyfriends, vicious gossip, and I guess the kids go to class once in a while.

The first "high school" movie that I remember watching was The Breakfast Club on TV when I was a kid. I remember my mom telling me "Don't think that detention is REALLY like this. You don't get to sit around and talk to your friends and dance around. This is just a movie." There were two things that stuck out to me about that film. The first was the cliques: jock, troublemaker, nerd, popular girl, freak. I wondered where I would fit in when I was older. The second was how unhappy they all seemed. I didn't know it then, but that film captured a big part of what being a teenager was like for me: I don't know what I'm going to do and I'm really freaked out.

Other high school movies taught me that love conquers all and prom is VERY important (Pretty in Pink), or that bitchy girls will totally not be bitches if you're true to yourself and that prom is VERY important (Never Been Kissed), or that high school computers are really easy to hack into (Ferris Bueller's Day Off), or that if life is hard, you can join the choir and make something of yourself (Sister Act 2...wait, what?). Oh, and you will ALWAYS get the girl/guy! I may sound a little cynical, but I actually really enjoy some these cheesy high school movies because they're so different from my actual high school experience.

I went to OCHSA (aka the Orange County High School of the Arts), and there were no jocks, brains, goths, etc. Well, I suppose they were there somewhere, but we had very different cliques. The production design kids who wore all black. The dancers. The musical theatre crowd. The hipster kids in visual arts. The nerds in instrumental music. And the two and a half kids in opera. I was not exceptionally popular, nor did I attend wild parties and I definitely wasn't having sex. Hell, I didn't even drive until I was 19. Oh, and guess what? I didn't go to prom. Maybe it's not interesting to make movies about what high school was for a lot of us.

I guess overall the high school experience is about trying to have fun (some might say "surviving") while feeling anxious about the future, and trying to figure ourselves out. I think many high school movies capture at least a teensy bit of that. If it's more interesting to throw wild drinking and super elaborate school dances in there too, I guess that's that!

PS. REALLY looking forward to The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, coming in limited release in September. High school lives on!