High School Sucked - Death by 1,000 Films - Week 5
Death by 1,000 Films
There are a lot of things in my life that I thought were real and ended up being fake. Why can't the opposite be true?
In my travels as a sportswriter, I see t-shirts, sweatshirts and varsity jackets with the HS logo displayed at every game I attend. Where I don't see them is out on the street or in the grocery store, or at the movies. Why?
Has school or hometown pride evaporated in America? Was it ever really there?
I thought about that while I watched American Graffiti this week. Kids were cruising Main Street in their 1950 cars, wearing their high school letterman's jackets or talking about how they are going to live and work in the town. That doesn't seem to happen anymore, at least for me.
I grew up in Norwich, NY, home of the 1993 and 1994 Boys Class B state championship basketball team. We were the Purple Tornadoes, not unlike the Watertown Cyclones, whose colors are also purple and white. I played sports. I even won the “Most Dedicated” award after a baseball season. My coach said of me, “This kid bleeds purple.”
Not three months later, my letterman jacket was hanging in a plastic bag in my closet, traded in for an Ithaca College hooded sweatshirt. I haven't worn a Norwich thing since.
And my parents have been to few Norwich sporting events since. I don't remember a fan from the town in attendance at every game simply because he loves the high school.
My grandfather, who lives in NH, went to every local high school game, even away games for basketball. He was awarded a letterman's jacket a few years ago when the basketball coach retired for “seeing nearly all my 300 wins.” He even traveled with the team.
That certainly doesn't happen now, does it?
Current movies seem to agree. All high school dramas or teen comedies are about getting out and moving on. It's about how high school sucks, the town sucks, college is the answer.
My dad says town and school pride from the community never really existed. I don't know. I grew up in the 1990s, graduated high school in 2004 and college in 2007. I'm well past the generation that experienced it.
I watch these teen comedies from the 60s-80s and it looks like communities cared about their kids and their local sports. What happened to all that? I blame the Internet.
It is our industrial revolution. We've had the luxury of travel for a long time. Our desires to visit faraway places were fulfilled. The Internet let us see and feel how much fun people have living there. The immediate knowledge of how successful and happy people always seem in these places gave people the desire to leave for good.
That's why, for the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in rural areas. And cities don't foster community pride. They're cutthroat, and most people living in them came from somewhere else and don't care about the high school.
Movies reflect that, and also inflate the expectations of immediate success for our youth. My graduating class all thought we were going to be on national television or winning Pulitzers immediately out of college. The “wait five years” then move up attitude was gone.
Movies like Julie and Julia, where a nobody becomes a somebody within a year, give us the idea. That's not how it works. Movies, for my generation, are slowly melting into reality, not fantasy.
The idea of “born and raised” still exists, but the addition of “and died” is gone. Those who stick around their hometown are now considered “stuck.”
Two generations ago it was an expectation, today it's a sentence. I miss what the loving communities in movies, and I didn't even get to experience it. What did I miss?
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THE MOVIES
All That Jazz. Rated: R. Year: 1979. My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. A brief thought: It's fun, exciting and very crazy toward the end. I enjoyed it a lot and see why Bob Fosse was considered a genius. It's the semi-autobiographical story of a theater choreographer obsessed with sex and death.
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All the President's Men. Rated: PG. Year: 1976. My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. A brief thought: Just brilliant from start to finish. The true story of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, journalistic heroes who exposed the Nixon administration.
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American Graffiti. Rated: PG. Year: 1973. My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. A brief thought: I thoroughly enjoyed this romp through 1950's teen culture. It felt accurate, yet distant. My dad calls the era, “When the world was black and white.”
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American Beauty (Already watched). Rated: R. Year: 1999. My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. A brief thought: This look into the hidden lives of suburbia is disturbing, funny, haunting, and sad. It's a masterpiece.
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An American Werewolf in London. Rated: R. Year: 1981. My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars. A brief thought: At the time it was revolutionary. Today, not so much. It comes across a bit dull, slow and not at all scary. I remember watching it as a kid, terrified. I re-watched it because I didn't remember much, but with more seasoned eyes, I can tell you it's not as good as how I remembered.
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An American in Paris. Rated: UR. Year: 1951. My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars. A brief thought: Slow, boring and pointless. The only thing worth watching is the final, epic dance number. Otherwise, pass on it... unless you like ballet.
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Amores Perros (Already watched). Rated: R. Year: 2000. My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars. A brief thought: I watched this in Spanish class with English subtitles in college. It was very good, but not something I would watch again. It's a very emotional and difficult film to watch more than a few times. The images on screen are sometimes at the level of American History X, but the film on the whole is nowhere close to perfect.
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