Question about cliques in teen movies...

Maybe the size of the school has some effect too?

Dazed & Confused and Elephant are the best portrayals of high-school groupings, IMO.

(I sadly remember a lovely Norweigan exchange student that didn't say a word to anybody all year long. She sat alone at lunch, didn't go to dances, and didn't have any friends. I'm still aching with regret, but I was shy too.)

OTM. My high school was too small to have really definable cliques.

everyone liked or disliked one another based on personal interaction, not general stereotypes. if someone had a beef with you it was because they didn't like you, not because you listened to morrisey or rode a skateboard or played football.

wait, except for the musical-theatre wonks, i'm pretty sure they caught hell from everyone. probably even from the window-lickers and hockey helmet crowd.

Are you Steve Guttenberg?

At my school, the atheletes WERE the stoners.

well... did you go to my "brother" school, sd?

Sooooo OTM. I think the size of the school does have a lot to do with it - the smaller the school, the more rigid the cliques because people remember, even when you're a senior, the exact person you were as a Freshman, while in a bigger school, with more students, who can be bothered to even know let alone remember what everyone was?

"Unspooled" just started its second season, and while I'm not sure I can get on board with an entire season of essentially Our Favorite Films, especially from hosts I like perhaps more than I like their own personal tastes, the first film they picked (on a sub-list they're beginning with of I think best high school movies?) was "Mean Girls." I recall enjoying the movie at the time, once, but for some reason this is one of those movies that has hopped over with subsequent generations. Sure, the Broadway musical helped, but clearly the movie got something right that might have just gone over my head. And I think "Unspooled" nailed it: it came out in 2004, which is literally the same year Facebook is being born and the same year of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl snafu (which begat Youtube). Which is to say, more or less, right before the true ascent of social media. In fact, when you watch the movie you don't necessarily even notice that no one has cell phones; they're certainly not posting and texting. Yet at the same time the movie captures the "mean" impetus that drives a lot of the online shit that sprung up in its immediate aftermath. It aims for and captures a primal truth about teen/school behavior better than it could have known at the time.

Similarly, and this may also be key, I kept coming back to the "stop making 'fetch' a thing" dialog, and considered how little "Mean Girls" hinges on specifically trendy or fashionable stuff. Which I also didn't think about until I read the interview with Peyton Reed and the screenwriter of "Bring It On" in the AV Club, and Jessica Bendinger (the writer) says: "Yeah, Dan Waters who wrote Heathers had warned me, 'Do not use today’s language or you will be so mortified when it comes out. Just make it up!' And so I relied on drag queens and gay culture, I think, to kind of inform what they sound like, which is just more creative, funny, sarcastic, witty, bitchy vibes." And then the first comment below the article is someone observing, "I don’t know why it just occurred to me, but three of the most successful and iconic teen movies, that are still a thing today (Heathers, Clueless, Bring It On), invented their own slang." And that's a really good point, and probably partly why these movies *do* jump across generational divides. By not trying so hard to be hip they kind of invent their own hip language, allowing them to focus on these cliques and characters on their own terms - which is to say, as teen templates but also as people. They're recognizable as real characters who represent real cliques that we (of every generation) are all too familiar with.