High school confidential
American Teen tracks the angsty lives of modern adolescents
Last Updated: Monday, August 11, 2008 | 4:32 PM ET
By Katrina Onstad, CBC News
High school senior Hannah Bailey, centre, is one of the four students whose lives are traced in the documentary film American Teen. (James Rexroad/Paramount Vantage)In the new documentary American Teen, high school circa 2007 looks a lot like high school always has: bells and hallways and social trauma and bad skin and bad dates and joyful moments of sounding barbaric yawps. When filmmaker Nanette Burstein followed a group of senior students at Warsaw High in Warsaw, Ind., for a full school year, it was exactly that familiarity that struck her the hardest.
“I feel like this generation is very much the same as my generation and my parents’ generation,” says Burstein, sitting in a Toronto hotel room, heavily pregnant with her first child. “The biggest difference is just that the technology has taken the cruelty in high school and amped it up.”
Amongst all the old-school betrayals, two are made much worse via advances in cellular phones: a topless photo of a girl meant for one guy is forwarded throughout the school to the epic mortification of the sender; and another girl receives an I’m-dumping-you text message, which is clearly in violation of every international dating convention.
But otherwise, things in the high school world look eerily, uncomfortably, the same, which is to say, they look a lot like The Breakfast Club, an image cleverly evoked in an early ad campaign for the film. The archetypes are familiar, but given fuller back stories that mark the film as a documentary. There’s Megan, the blonde-bitch princess living down a family secret; rebellious Hannah, whose arty instincts keep getting sublimated by boy trouble; Jake, the acne-ridden video game nerd with an obsessive drive for companionship; and Colin, a jock who needs a basketball scholarship or else his dad will ship him off to the army.
Director Nanette Burstein, right, films at Warsaw High in Warsaw, Ind. (James Rexroad/Paramount Vantage)To find these kids, Burstein and her staff cold-called 100 schools across four Midwestern states. “I wanted to shoot in the Midwest, because it’s a large portion of the U.S., and there’s a timelessness about that part of the country,” she says. “I wanted to do it in a town that only had one high school, because I thought there would be more social pressure, and it would be economically mixed. I was hoping for a town with racial diversity, but that turned out to be hard to find in small towns in the Midwest.”
The package Burstein mailed out to schools included her Oscar-nominated boxing documentary, On the Ropes, and a treatment of American Teen, fleshing out her intentions with photos. Ten schools followed up, and then Burstein travelled, interviewing hundreds of kids until she found the Warsaw group. At Warsaw — a big, generic box of a school — she initially followed 10 students entering their senior year; after three months, she narrowed it down to the key four. (There are occasional appearances by Mitch, a class heartthrob who seeks and destroys Hannah’s heart.)
“Each of them had something they were trying to achieve for the future. How it was going to turn out, nobody knew, but there was some kind of dramatic arc there,” says Burstein. “Initially, we had kids whose stories were about social interactions, but those would change on a dime, so we dropped them.”
In the age of The Hills and Gossip Girl, it’s rare for entertainment about teen-agers to attempt to break the surface of their dating and grooming habits. “I wanted depth,” says Burstein. In American Teen, animated sequences — designed in brainstorming sessions by the teens themselves — bring their innermost fantasies to life. Burstein kept her tiny crew of a sound person and a camera crew deliberately youthful; she didn’t want anyone reminding the kids of their parents. For nearly a year, the filmmakers earned the teens’ trust by turning the camera on and off, and respecting the subjects when they didn’t want to be shot.
But why would teenagers, those most self-conscious of creatures, consent to see their most intimate, not always flattering moments projected 12-feet high on the screen? It’s a question you ask yourself when you see Jake get dumped for the thousandth time, and again when Megan is caught spray-painting homophobic graffiti on a classmate’s house. Do they want to do it because they are the babies of the reality-TV age, deeply in tune with their own exhibitionism?
“Each had their own motivations, and it wasn’t the 15 minutes of fame. You recognize those people right away, and they tend not to be very interesting,” says Burstein. She ticks off her cast’s reasons for participating, as she perceived them: Jake, the nerd, loves any kind of attention because of his social invisibility; Hannah, the punk, wants to be a filmmaker; Colin hopes it will help his basketball career. The only one who never seemed entirely committed to Burstein is, naturally, the popular girl, Megan.
“She was always most on the fence because she didn’t have clear-cut motivations,” says Burstein. “I think she thought it would be cool, and she liked me, but there wasn’t a clear defining thing, and I think that’s why she was the most difficult. She would blow me off, say ‘I’m not doing anything tonight worth filming,’ and she was totally lying.”
Video-game nerd Jake Tusing, left, has an obsessive need for companionship in American Teen. (James Rexroad/Paramount Vantage)The very phrase “totally lying” sounds — intake of breath here; therapist on speed dial — a lot like high school. Frankly, the thought of spending a year living in a small town, hanging out with teenagers at basement drinking parties, might make a weaker woman (i.e. me) queasy.
“I learned a lot about myself,” admits Burstein. “Definitely, moments from my own high school life would emerge and resonate, and I would understand how they continue to resonate in my adult life. For most of us, there’s trauma and insecurity that happens in high school that subconsciously comes up in interactions we have. The movie helped me understand where that comes from.”
The Warsaw teens are now in college, and true to Burstein’s protective instincts — “I do feel like I want to take care of them” — they’re spending the summer in Los Angeles helping to promote the film, working at various internships and doing the red carpet. (In the spirit of their generation, you can read about it all on their blogs.) After American Teen’s success at Sundance, studio executives are clearly hoping to bring the reality-TV audience to the theatres. For Burstein, the film is a chance to resuscitate the teen movie, a genre she sees as flailing.
“With the exception of Juno, most teen fiction films are very one-dimensional. In the last 10 years, they’ve continued to spiral that way, so as a result, a lot of teenagers don’t want to see them. So now they market to tweens and become even more cliché,” she says. “I think with a doc you can make a film that’s poignant and very real and complicated. It’s a universal topic. Either you relate to American Teen nostalgically, or as a concerned parent, or as someone who’s going through it.” And for those who just barely survived, it’s a horror movie worth enduring.
American Teen opens Aug. 1 in Toronto, with other Canadian cities to follow.
Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.
