Teenage dream
BEYON D CLU ELESS Filmmaker Charlie Lyne writes for Agenda on his new doc celebrating teen movies.
Istill remember the illicit thrill of seeing EuroTrip for the first time. As formative cinematic experiences go, it doesn’t make for much of a story, but in 2004, perched on the brink of adolescence, I could hardly imagine a more transgressive act than sitting down to watch this soon-to-be staple of the HMV bargain bin.
As I watched Michelle Trachtenberg and her male cohorts frolic around Europe in various states of undress, I felt the excitement of peering into an adolescent world that was at once terrifying and undeniably alluring. Critics didn’t think much of the film (this very magazine called it ‘a heavy slog’ full of ‘patchy comedy’) but to me it was a revelation. If they catch you at the right moment, teen movies can embed themselves into the DNA of your adolescence, regardless of their critical reception. No other genre explicitly takes aim at such a remarkably impressionable age group. Whether its a revered classic like Clueless, an under-the-radar gem like Bully, or a widely reviled straight-to-DVD release like American Pie Presents Band Camp, a teen movie in the right place at the right time can achieve a strange sort of immortality in the minds of its young viewers.
As I advanced beyond my teens, I found myself drawn back to EuroTrip, and the countless other movies that had established themselves among my teenage favourites. While my affection for these films was largely undiminished, I soon began to see them in an entirely new light. Suddenly, I recognised EuroTrip not only as a remarkable satire of American exceptionalism but also a boldly homoerotic character study. (If you haven’t seen the film, it’s basically the story of a teenage boy who travels around the world in a state of constant panic after accidentally falling in love with his male penpal.)
Before long, I found myself revisiting everything from She’s All That to Final Destination in search of new revelations about the viewing habits of my teenage self. This strange act of cinematic self-analysis eventually resulted in my directorial debut Beyond Clueless, an essay film about teen movies narrated by one of my own adolescent idols, Fairuza Balk. The film is constructed entirely from a library of more than 200 teen movies, so it’s not just EuroTrip that reappears to simultaneously delight and disturb its former fans. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ one woman told me after a recent screening, ‘I’ll never look at 13 Going On 30 the same way again’. CL