Nanette Burstein’s American Teen has become ubiquitous since its Sundance premiere, both on the festival circuit and, thanks to a poster carefully calibrated to target Gen X nostalgia, online. Its title suggests a wishful universality, as if to say, “This is it! This is an unfiltered portrait of averageness!” Certainly, its semi-rural Indiana location was chosen for its middleness, both geographically and demographically––or, at least, to conform to a coastal idea of what that looks like. Certainly, in choosing to focus on a cross-section of subjects playing into our media-fed concepts of high school stereotypes, Burstein manages to show life at the same high school from a variety of different angles, whilst simultaneously playing up the idea that all American Teens are––really––hopelessly insecure dreamers stuck in a variety of systems and strictures that they’re desperate to break out of. But everyone prevails, because that’s what totally mythic average Americans do –– it’s, like, rugged individualism!
Much has been made in regards to Burstein’s alleged “manipulation” of her subjects and their lives: did she recreate email/text message exchanges or the reactions they caused? Does it matter if she did? I’ve seen the film twice, and neither time did these shot-reverse shot depictions of near-instant communication seem to get in the way of a larger truth.
But there are other elements of American Teen’s construction which are troubling––not because they came after-the-fact and weren’t produced organically in real life, but because Burstein either isn’t aware of or has made a conscious decision to ignore the very fact of “non-fiction” filmmaking that her subjects and their peers are likely most exposed to: MTV’s various reality shows, including True Life, The Real World, and, especially, Laguna Beach and The Hills.
Check out this Burstein quote in a recent story on the film, by Mark Olsen for the L.A. Times:
“I think it’s unusual to have a very narrative documentary, so people aren’t used to it,” she continued. I think people have a hard time believing teenagers are willing to be that intimate on camera. So sometimes I feel I’m being criticized for what the film’s achievements are.”
This is a bafflingly solipsistic statement coming from a filmmaker whose work has been criticized for being too “glossy” and “mainstream.” Her “achievements,” this “very narrative” form of documentary that she apparently thinks she’s pioneering, looks an awfully lot like the “non-scripted” content that MTV has been producing for 15 years or more, which has evolved from teenagers and young adults being actually, naively “intimate” in front of a camera––which more often than not meant exhibitionism in lieu of real intimacy (have you watched the first season of the Real World lately?)––to teenagers delivering a rote, practiced version of what television has told them looks like intimacy.
Of course, this transition has reached its apex with the stunningly successful The Hills, a reality show in-name-only that miles more stylish and satisfying than most scripted media about Americans of the same age. That Paramount Vantage would acquire American Teen is a no brainer: it accomplishes many of the same things, stylistically and thematically and atmospherically, that have lured a massive audience of eye and brain candy hungry youth to the other “non-fiction” products of Viacom––whether Burstein is ready to admit it or not.
There are scraps of voiceover in American Teen that come across as every bit as hollow (if not scripted) as the narrative catch-up which opens most episodes of Laguna Beach, suggesting, at the very least, that Burstein’s subjects have internalized the cadences used by “real” people on television. Formally, the film’s use of comic cutaways––such as talking head testimony about Megan (aka: The Bitch, aka My Favorite) laid into footage of Megan shooting guns––seems borrowed from the countless reality shows where we see visual irony used to subtly and not-so-subtly mock the contestants; if this is one of Burstein’s “achievements,” it’s one she shares with Flavor of Love.
But ultimately, what really pisses me off about American Teen is the way Burstein––following countless mainstream non-fiction productions before her––privilieges the female victim at the expense of asking difficult questions about the psychology of victimhood and its roots in social constructs like high school. American Teen propagates the same, modern-day martyr, constant victim-as-star bullshit that L.C. plays out season after season on The Hills. And even that, it gets wrong.
There’s not a single scene featuring American Teen victim/hero Hannah that’s anywhere near as elegant, sympathetic and purely satisfying as the final shot of the recently-released trailer for the next season of The Hills. As frequent watchers know, L.C. wears a lot of eye makeup –– grease paint armor against a camera primarily concerned with collaging her every eye roll out of context. But here, in a fight with a female friend, the poster girl for the cool, enigmatic eye twitch allows a single tear to carry a stream of mascara down her cheek. It is the moment that Hills fans––nay, the entirety of the culture––have been waiting for for three years. Nay, the entire decade!
Burstein clearly has a fondness for certain for her subjects, which allows her to present them sympathetically, even when their behavior is less than admirable. Unfortunately, this leads to an almost total lack of interrogation of Hannah, an artsy girl whose “unlikely” Achilles’ heel is attractive men. Burstein privileges Hannah’s milquetoast heartbreaks over the exploits of “princess” Megan, which I think is a shame; for all her non-conformist posturing, Hannah reveals herself to be so easily led by the concept of traditional romance that you end up wishing that someone would just slap her with a copy of Sexual Personae and make her education compete
Meanwhile, Megan, who survives Burstein’s regrettable stab at “humanizing” her mean girl behavior through a gently montage describing a family tragedy, is clearly a great, natural villian who revels in her caste-based supremacy. She’s a wildly compelling and infuriating socio-sexual manipulator straight out of Dangerous Liasons (or, maybe more accurately, Cruel Intentions)––except, though comfortably upper-middle-class, she can’t quite hide behind the excuse that money breeds depravity. She’s just not a nice person, and that’s real. There is, I’m sure, an amazingly insightful film somewhere in American Teen’s discarded footage, purely about Megan and the social psychology of high school power. And I’m dying for it.
But as its title suggests, American Teen is shooting for a wider scope, which might be more interesting if Burstein wasn’t so complicit in reinforcing tired stereotypes in her unwillingness to cast her camera outside of them. In one of the film’s most egregious **** yous to objectivity, Burstein implicitly condones the scarlet letter outcasting of Megan’s rival for her male friend’s affections, by discarding that character from the narrative as quickly as Megan does from her circle. This girl, whose ill-advised willingness to send a crush a smutty photo resulted in her being ostracized from the cool kids table and, we are led to believe, more or less total shame from the community––if THIS girl is not an American Teen, who is?
Note: Scant portions of this review appeared in a piece previously published during SilverDocs.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth