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directed by Nanette Burstein
by Alex Jackson Real life is just like the movies, according to Nanette Burstein's American Teen. The film follows the adventures of The Brain, The Athlete, The Princess, and The Basket Case as they finish their last year of high school. By the end, we learn that each one of them is a brain, an athlete, a princess, and a basket case. In other words, they're all individuals while being pretty much the same. Burstein seems to have turned complete control of the film over to her subjects and resisted refining anything through her own perspective. The results are predictably excruciating to watch. Via the resources of the cinema (slick photography and editing, animated sequences), the teens are transformed into gods, a needlessly flattering notion to the adolescent ego. You're worried about getting into college? Your boyfriend broke up with you and you're depressed? These problems really are as monumental as they seem; it's substance enough for a feature-length film! Some reviews have complained that the fantasies that inspired the animated sequences are tired clichés: the jock dreams of winning the big game, the geeky kid dreams of getting a girlfriend, etc.. If the fantasy sequences don't have a whole lot of depth, that's because their originators don't have a whole lot of depth, either. What do you expect? They're only 17. The hilariously damning thing about American Teen is that it actually comes across as an accurate depiction of the high-school years. At 26, I think I have a certain distance from adolescence where I'm too young to be shocked by the teenage sex and drinking caught on camera but old enough to be shocked by the petty cruelty and hyper-superficiality that characterizes that age group. Most disturbing is the "Princess" character, who paints a red cock and balls and the word "fag" on a fellow student council member's window simply because she was angry that his "tacky" idea for a prom theme beat out her own. She's afraid that the resulting punishment will affect her chances of getting into Notre Dame. This strikes me as mildly sociopathic behaviour and it creeps me out that she's going to have the resources to blend in with respectable society. (The story of a nude photo e-mailed around school is even more chilling.) Of course, most teenagers grow up and are lucky enough to not have their misadventures memorialized in a feature film. Perhaps the only time I ever plan on seeing American Teen again is if there's a twentieth-anniversary edition where we can hear audio commentary from the now-older subjects as they watch the film. Now that would be redeeming.
