Beyond Stereotypes
From a press release that just hit my inbox (emphases mine):
AMERICAN TEEN is the touching and hilarious Sundance hit that follows the lives of five teenagers – a jock, a popular girl, a heartthrob, the artsy girl and the geek – in one small town in Indiana through their senior year of high school. We see the insecurities, the cliques, the jealousies, the first loves and heartbreaks, and the struggle to make profound decisions about the future.
…The result is a film that goes beyond the enduring stereotypes of high school to render complex young people trying to find their way into adulthood.
No, no stereotypes here. Obviously not.
Well, the poster is an homage to “The Breakfast Club.”
— Maureen · Jul 2, 03:48 PM · #
Maybe they posit the stereotypes only to subvert them later. You know, the jock realizes his inner artsy girl, while the real artsy girl murders the popular girl with the help of the geek, but the heartthrob is sleeping with the geek so the artsy girl’s only other option for lovin’ is the erstwhile jock. But now that the jock’s embraced his inner artsy girl, the real artsy girl realizes how damn cliche that is and spends the last act of the movie in deep self-loathing, only to find out at the end that she’s the popular girl, the jock, and the geek all rolled into one — shades of Donald Kauffman’s The 3 — so she can relax after all because she’s been sleeping with the heartthrob the whole damn time!
— JA · Jul 2, 04:27 PM · #
JA, did we go to high school together?
— Wrongshore · Jul 2, 07:51 PM · #
Well, it’s a documentary, so JA’s Fight-Clubby ideas probably won’t prove true.
My guess is that the documentarians show five kids who superficially fit into the stereotypes (or who run with those cliques, anyway). then use increasing detail about the kids to challenge some aspects of the stereotypes.
— J Mann · Jul 2, 09:08 PM · #
JA, did we go to high school together?
I like to think we all went to high school together, which, come to think of it, makes a lot more sense than it should.
— JA · Jul 3, 04:56 PM · #