The Strength of the 90s Teen Movie Was In Community

One of the things that makes 90s teen movies so unique is the way high school social groups become a microcosm of larger culture. At heart, great teen films are about identity and exploring your options before deciding who you want to be - which means high school is often the time when kids are put into boxes and see each other as belonging to separate boxes. Tearing down those barriers often results in a feeling of holistic belonging. The Breakfast Club is enduring because it places the main characters in strict roles and then plays around with tropes and expectations until everyone ends up far away from how they viewed themselves and others at the beginning.

The structure and interplay of the high school society, though, also serves as a way to depict a tight knit community in a very small space, allowing dramas to play out in a heightened space. 90s teen films have a very strong sense of ensemble and community - thinking specifically of 10 Things I Hate About You, Can't Hardly Wait, Clueless, and later throwback Mean Girls - that gives the films life beyond classic rom-com tropes storylines. This may be in part because many of the films are based on classic pieces of literature that have an extensive cast of characters, bu there is also something particularly 90s in the way these adaptations are handles. In early teen films, there were cool kids and nerds, sure, but the 90s really honed in on the outlandish types: the cowboys, the potheads, the white Asians, the AV club kids.

A made up community feels real when you can imagine going to the grocery store or book store and can know who to expect to see there. Peyton Place and Twin Peaks are very small towns but you know where everyone works and the regions of town become clear. (Eventually Peyton Place started spending a significant amount of time in the lower income area of the wharf as a secondary place in town where Ada's Tavern, The Shoreline, and Rod's repair shop all reside.) As a result of that, the secondary characters can bring life to story that would otherwise only seem to care about its central characters. The asides in 10 Things of ruining Bogey Lowenstein's party and contributing to the school counselor's smut novel invoke that the lives of others matter and continue even when we're not paying attention to them. It melds the general with the specific - we get a snapshot of a specific time and place and how culture, subcultures, and counter-cultures functioned within them.

I'm hosting 10 Things I Hate About You this Thursday, February 27 at A Baked Joint in DC.

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