I am not even out of my teen years, and yet I already feel there are some films that I have grown out of. And, because I like to address any snarky caveats right away, no, I am not asserting my intellectual superiority over the Transformers franchise or Pixar's filmography; the latter of which I think many of us can agree age like fine wine.
The films to which I am referring are ones I first encountered when I was just coming into secondary school: the truly precious time that produces the most horrific combination of you knowing extremely little but you thinking that you know absolutely everything. I find those years even more foreign to me than my primary school years, and definitely try and revisit the cringe-worthy moments less frequently.
The three films I am focusing on for this article, 500 Days of Summer (Webb, 2009), Submarine (Ayoade, 2010) and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Chbosky, 2012) all had a profound impact on me when I first watched them in my early teens. And presumably, with good reason, they are all pretty solid films that had strong critical reception and did well enough at the box office; what's not to like?
500 Days of Summer, 2009
Submarine and The Perks of Being a Wallflower are both coming of age films while 500 Days of Summer is a romance drama, but what they all have in common is that they have something to teach you, the presumed adolescent viewer, about love and life. Submarine, the only British production in this article, is a tender look at adolescence where our protagonist Oliver Tate comes to grips with truths about sex and idealism. Wallflower is much the same, although through a glossier American lens, and also dabbles in heavy themes of childhood trauma, balanced with the greater highs of finding friendship and acceptance. And 500 Days' twist on the rom-com is well known, where young Tom Hansen must come to terms with his subjective view of his relationship with one of the original pixie dream girls, Summer Finn.
As previously mentioned, as a young un-emotionally mature man all these films were an utter revelation to me. And I owe them a debt to that, starting me on a positive journey that could have just as easily begun and ended with the hangover movies and Xbox 360 Call of Duty lobbies. But looking back, these films were not nearly as profound as I made them out to be.
The experience of watching Submarine now is like if you have ever had the displeasure of scrolling back to the beginning of a message thread with someone and seeing how you used to talk. Oliver frequently tries to get his on and off girlfriend Jordana to do romantic things with him and her emotional maturity only serves to make his floundering all the more cringe-worthy. It is wonderfully sincere, but almost none of the cheesy lines such as 'Jordana and I enjoyed an atavistic glorious fortnight of lovemakin' and ‘I have already turned these moments into the super-8 footage of memory' belong anywhere but the Instagram bio of a deep twelve-year-old.
Submarine, 2010
Wallflower has many of the same problems as Submarine, especially its central premise of the crew trying to find their 'tunnel song', the comically well known ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie, and feeling ‘infinite’; as if anything’s possible. While I do still enjoy the occasional meltdown at 3 am to sad music, normally by the next morning I have assured myself that no amount of listening to Belle and Sebastian is going to define life as we know it. In addition, the previously mentioned traumatic events that happen to our protagonist Charlie are not so much glossed over but given a strange 12 rating filter over them. As a result, the teenage coming of age story cannot really deal with the repercussions of the events in the way the original novel does, making the tone inconsistent and leaving the viewer slightly baffled as to how they thought it was that deep on subsequent viewings.
While 500 Days humour still manages to hit the right spots years later, the inclusion of the pixie dream girl archetype in order to teach the straight male protagonist a lesson has already been analysed to death by greater critics than myself. Unlike better examples such as the commentary on the trope in the graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim, 500 Days is happy to plod along through its emotional beats until we get the ending that broke new ground for its time, but has since become more of a baseline for filmmakers first commentary on relationships rather than the gold standard.
And it is for these reasons that I will probably not be revisiting these films that often from now on. But that doesn't mean I don't recommend them to any other adolescents who haven't already discovered that most teenagers don't look like Ezra Miller and Emma Watson, or that, as Chloë Grace Moretz character in 500 Days eloquently puts it, 'just cause some cute girl likes the same bizarro crap as you do, that doesn't make her your soul mate'. There is something special about a moment trapped in amber like these films seem to be. The naivety has its charm, but it's only a time I want to revisit intermittently. Also, all these films have brilliant soundtracks. Perhaps my teenage mind was too addled by original compositions by Alex Turner, Sweet Disposition by Temper Trap and Dear God by XTC to notice that these films were a bit shallow. But I would not trade my experiences and better self to go back for a day. And why would I, when I can do you one better.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 2012
Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson, 2012), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Hughes, 1986) and Heathers (Lehmann, 1988) are three coming of age films that have hidden depths to them that you may only get on your fifth or hundredth watch. On your first viewing, Kingdom is a sweet coming of age love story between two young people, but look just below the surface and there is a tale about the determination of adolescents to forge a life for themselves away from the complex world of parental relationships and realities. I'm not even a huge fan of The Breakfast Club or other Hughes films, but subsequent rewatches of Beuller show it to be one of the best demonstrations of hedonistic philosophy one could ask for, along with just being the film most likely to put a smile on your face. And finally, I can't sing the praises of the teen drama meets societal commentary that seems to become more relevant with every passing day that is Heathers enough, but I’ll give it my best shot.
Even though I may have grown out of those films, I still appreciate them doing some of the heavy lifting to set me on the right track for handling my teen years when not even I was up to the challenge. Just like me at the time, they were rough around the edges, thought they were cleverer than they were and probably were also covered in acne.
Komentar