Nannette 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, but in fact, when looked at alongside two less-lauded films about American teens against which it screened here in Silver Spring, its document of five white high school seniors in a semi-rural suburb of Indiana seems as niche as it gets.
World premiering here on Friday before beginning a run on HBO Monday night, Hard Times at Douglas High is a fly-on-the-wall work of activism documenting a year in the life of an all-black Baltimore high school, as teachers, students and administrators struggle to comply with No Child Left Behind. Made by the directors of the seminal reality series An American Family, it makes visible the reverberations of blind bureaucracy on living and breathing institutions, making the home and personal lives of its students a spectre, but not a direct concern. Taking the inverse tactic, Going on 13’s intimate portrait of four girls passing through puberty (or, “puberey”, as one subject refers to it early on) over the course of four years in a barely middle-class Northern California community touches on the institutions that contain their lives only incidentally. Seen together in a single weekend, each of the three seem to say less about age than the variables of fate as played out through place and race.
It should be noted that these are films of wildly varying degrees of visual accomplishment and technical proficiency. American Teen looks as expensively and professionally made as the highest caliber of unscripted TV. Despite the impressive resume of its makers, Hard Times‘ camerawork seems, at best, less than deliberate, and at worst, absolutely amateur. Though its the only film of the three without a corporate production partner, Going on 13 fits somewhere in between.
The technical specs seem important, because that’s where the filmmakers’ hands in shaping these stories is most evident. Much has been made in regards to Nannette 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. I do think the trickier––and braver––aspect of American Teen’s stylization is the use of animation, wherein each major “character” is given a sequence through which the reality of their current lives is carried over into their dreams for the future. Bitch about the ethics of “construction” if you must, but this is where Burstein shows us that she’s on her subjects’ side, even as she later presents evidence that she doesn’t always condone what they do (and nor should the bulk of their youthful mistakes be condoned). Cynics should also take some comfort in the notion that if the marketing campaign has gone out of its way to recall the Breakfast Club, it stems from the fact that––again, like it or not, and for me it’s not all of a piece–– the director herself strains to drop her characters into achetypical boxes (the art freak, the jock, the rich bitch) that fit the poster’s references. At least the gimmick stems from the content, even if––spoiler alert!––that blonde boy at the top of the cluster doesn’t quite deserve to be represented by the black, fingerless glove in the end. As dreamy as Judd Nelson? Maybe. As obstinately anarchic in that way that only a boy with a warm, safe bed and a conviction that he’s nonetheless got nothing to lose can pull off? Hardly.
Going on 13 also makes use of animation, but less successfully; its notebook-scratch transitions are a distancing device which cut up the true meat of the story. But, refreshingly, its subjects defy easy typifying. Directors Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Dawn Valadez tracked four loosely-connected girls from ages 9 to 13: Arianna, a black tomboy living with a single mom; Isha, the daughter of a traditional Indian family whose intelligence and commitment to cultural traditions render her an outcast at school; Esmeralda, an overweight, sexually curious Mexican girl; and Rosie, a half-Nicauraguan child of divorce whose mentally unwell mother disrupts attempts at a balance between school and home.
The diversity of their cast makes for instant dynamism, but the directors truly impress through their evidently close relationships with the girls. In tracking their subjects from late elementary school through their entrance into high school, their cameras are able to become invisible enough to capture certain moments as if unawares (there’s an incredible shot where Arianna, serving as a bridesmaid at her mother’s wedding, approaches a tilted-up camera with her face first quaking in fear, and then melting into tears); other moments intriguingly betray the long-term effect of the cameras on the subjects’ lives, as when Esmeralda can barely remove her head from behind her arms whilst discussing her first break up. 13 touches more often and more deeply than these other two films, so if it stops short of offering a Grand Statement about The Way Kids Live Now, that seems okay––as a portrait of the inner lives of teen girls in a single community, its most complete.
Hard Times gives the sense that in an urban school in crisis, the students have no time for the personal developmental indulgence seen in the other two films. The richest, most popular girl in American Teen has ample time to torment her classmates; the students of Douglas High aren’t thinking about pettily evil agendas because, more often than not, they’ve got babies to raise––unless they’re out nurturing their criminal careers. As one of the school’s most on-top-of-it teachers inform us, something like three quarters of the incoming freshman class has “disappeared” by the 12th grade. Most teachers see less than a handful of parents at Back to School Night, and in spite of No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on tough love testing, teachers are encouraged to give seniors as many second chances as they need to qualify for graduation. The simple fact is, the school needs to get rid of them––a department head faculty meeting gives the impression that even with the school’s sorry state of matriculation, there aren’t enough books and desks as it is.
Hard Times has undeniably strong moments––a post-basketball loss pep-talk forms the core of the film and delivers its defining message: “Shit that don’t kill you, do what? Make you stronger!”––but in concentrating on the uncertainty of the administration and the helplessness of the teachers, it unavoidably colors the students as the roiling mass of Other. Though the bulk of the adults at Douglas High are, like the minors storming its halls, black and native-born to the community, the actual American teens on screen are rarely interrogated as people, and are in fact most often treated en masse as a problem to be wrangled, to which ultimately, with their apparently indifferent parents and almost total lack of respectable options, neither the filmmakers nor the school professionals seem to have any unsatisfying answers. If Hard Times is the messiest film of the three visually, you can’t say it’s unwarranted by the content; it’s the one film that leaves you with the impression that, in the current climate, the kids are definitely not alright.
Full disclosure: In 2004, I spent a weekend logging tapes for a documentary Nanette Burstein made about Marion Jones. I found the job on Craig’s List and never actually met the director.
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