How the teen movie is getting a well-needed makeover

Every iconic teen movie I grew up watching had its own Cinderella moment, whether that be Clueless, Mean Girls, She’s All That…or even The Lizzie McGuire Movie (it’s a classic, don’t fight me on this). The mousy outsider takes off her glasses, slaps on some make-up and suddenly she’s a cookie-cutter hottie, the most popular girl at school and gets the guy. Some point down the line she might learn something important about friendship or authenticity, but to be honest by then no-one’s really watching — it’s all about the metamorphosis. All I wanted was the “it gets better” wish fulfilment to help me imagine that I too could one day shake off adolescent awkwardness and become a beautiful butterfly.

But looking back, what exactly was it that these films were teaching? The inherently flawed notion that “beautiful” means white, cis, skinny and able-bodied? Where exactly were the women of colour in any of these movies, besides occasionally popping up as the best friend? Regardless of whatever our heroine had going on in her life, more often than not it was the pursuit of heterosexual romance — whether it’s the tryst with the heartless jock or the happy ending with the best friend — that really drove the narrative. You don’t need a degree in Gender Studies to see that teen girls aren’t in need of a boy to complete them and you can just as easily see why queer people (myself included) would also find this tendency more than a little disappointing.

Maybe the teen movie is best kept back in the ‘00s where it belongs, filed somewhere next to Lancôme juicy tubes and low-rise jeans, but in this age of endless reboots, where pretty much everything is up for grabs, that just isn’t realistic. With To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, Dumplin’, Eighth Grade, Booksmart, Little and Love, Simon all hitting screens in the past year or so, there’s no denying that the genre has made its comeback. If you haven’t recognised the teen movie revival in our midst, it’s because the genre has had a pretty dramatic transformation of its own.

Films like To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, one of the few romance films starring an Asian-American lead, as well as body-positive pageant comedy Dumplin’ , and queer romance Love, Simon have been groundbreaking in terms of representation, putting the narratives that have too long been left untold at the front and centre of the screen. However, there’s also a different sensibility to these films — they’re a million miles from the rich girl fantasy of Clueless or the facile humour of the Hilary Duff/Amanda Bynes/Lindsay Lohan films that dominated the ‘00s. In these later efforts, there’s an attempt to go deeper into the teen experience and explore issues like the erasure of the Asian-American experience in the romance genre, fatphobic beauty standards or coming out.

In many ways, this shift is part of the thirst for authenticity currently impacting our expectations of media and advertising. With social media and influencer culture progressively closing the gap between celebrities and “real people”, as viewers and consumers we want to feel like what’s on screen is an actual reflection of the world around us — and not just an assemblage of things plucked from a mood board. Teenagers are no different. The experience of growing up on social media and the access this gives to celebrities’ real (albeit curated) lives has created a hunger for representation that blurs the lines between reality and performance.

Few directors know how to translate today’s social-media saturated culture into film, which is probably one of the reasons Eighth Grade — released by A24 in 2018 — received such universal praise. Following 14-year-old Kayla as she struggles with anxiety that makes socialising an ordeal, leading to her being voted as “most quiet” by her classmates, and to a perpetual feeling of unease. As she poignantly puts it in one of her YouTube videos that, broad-casted to a non-existent audience, serves as a diary of sorts; “It’s like I’m always in line for a rollercoaster, but I never get the feeling you get after you’ve been on a rollercoaster.”

The film, directed by Bo Burnham, documents the agony of her amplified emotions as she navigates coming-of-age milestones. As someone that struggles to connect with her peers, Kayla looks for community and stimulation in the world of social media, only to find that it isolates her from the kinds of experiences she so desperately wants to have. For any young people that are experiencing similar issues to Kayla, the film does important work in showing that there might be other people out there who know what they’re going through. In mainstream cinema it’s common for directors to fall into the trap of trivialising serious conditions — like in David O. Russell’s treatment of bipolar disorder in Silver Linings Playbook — but Eighth Grade gives Kayla’s emotions room to breathe, encouraging the audience to share some of her pain without stigma or sensationalism.

This yearning for a different life is something that Kayla shares with the protagonists of Booksmart — recently released in the US and UK. Overachievers Amy and Molly realise that they’ve spent their adolescence relentlessly studying when they could have also made time for partying; at least that’s what their peers, who’ve managed to combine jägerbombs and Yale acceptance offers, have done effortlessly. Desperate to make up for lost time, the two embark on an odyssey of drunken mishaps that culminates with some inopportune vomiting, a murder mystery party, and a spell in a jail cell.

But the gross-out shenanigans pale in comparison to the film’s exploration of the intense, and undoubtedly codependent, friendship between the two female leads. A relationship that involves a safe word (“Malala”, after Malala Yousafzai) and matching party outfits, the two girls have known eachother so long that they’ve almost become the same person — and Amy increasingly longs to forge her own identity. Encapsulating the intensity of the friendships that help us through the toxicity of adolescence, it doesn’t flinch before the pain of having to loosen these ties to progress to a new version of you.

A lot has been made of the film’s importance for LGBTQ+ representation, with Amy being an out and openly queer character. To this I can say that, whilst I’ve yet to meet any queer woman that was convinced by that sex scene, it admittedly is refreshing to see an onscreen portrayal of the clumsy flirtations and pointless pursuit of straight girls that emblematises the baby dyke experience. But let’s get this straight (pun intended): it’s not exactly Carol and it’s not supposed to be.

It can be easy to lose sight of how far we’ve come, but ten years ago it would be hard to imagine a teen movie tackling social anxiety or queerness as anything but a punchline. While these films too often continue to centre on white protagonists, they are progressively taking a more inclusive and in-depth approach to the kinds of stories that they’re telling. This might indicate that “authenticity” and “diversity” have become hot marketing tools for a film industry eager to tap into the Gen Z market, but this doesn’t necessarily undermine the value which these films might have in the real world. Responding to its younger consumers, the film industry is rapidly changing and we’re seeing a flourishing of representation which, when done well, can only enrich our understanding of the world around us and allow more of us to connect with and feel seen by the characters on our screens.