by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

With all the new changes at MovieJawn (hi, everybody from Cinema76!), I thought it would be a good time to start a new column! And, since Clueless is literally going to be in my top five films for the rest of time… teen flicks seemed like a great place to start. 

You Can’t Sit With Us: Cinematic Lives of American Teens is going to be a year-long series where I look at American teen cinema through specific genres, comparing and contrasting two films per column. I’m aiming to take a look at the history of teenagerdom in America and how it’s been translated to film. I want to explore what I think these genres, and the popular films within them, say about the teens they’re meant to represent. As well as the adults who made them. 

 So, has film helped change what it means to be a teenager in America? Yeah, probably! So, let’s spend the next year looking at how and why. It’s widely believed that “teenager” as a spending demographic came about after World War II. However, two big innovations in American culture helped it along: cars and compulsory public education. 

One-room school houses were no longer the norm. Instead, buses and cars took teenagers to their education, often further away than before. This created the new social environment of high school. Which, as we all know, is a very important place to teenagers and their stories, both real and imagined. All those hormones in one place, with adults controlling their every minute? Shit’s gonna get weird, that’s for sure.

So, for this first column, I wanted to talk about two films that were majorly influential to my teenage life, but also to the last 30 years of teen culture at large. Two films that each have a lasting impact that I, personally, think is undeniable. 

Heathers is a 1989 dark comedy written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehmann. It’s about a girl named Veronica (played by the truly iconic Winona Ryder) who’s one of four girls in the most popular clique at her high school: the Heathers. She also happens to be the only one not actually named Heather. When a dark and mysterious new kid named JD (Christian Slater) arrives at their Ohio high school, Veronica’s life starts to go off the rails before she even realizes it. 

The film deals with a lot of themes, including murder, suicide, and school violence. There’s bullying, homophobia, eating disorders, and sexual assault. Not to mention toxic relationships (both of the friend and romantic variety). Heathers truly has it all, and it does it with quippy dialogue, astounding production design and costuming, and the absolute lack of fear in regards to teenage darkness. Teenagers behaving badly, sure, but it’s more than that. It’s the darkness that adolescence practically requires if you want to make it out alive. 

And all of those things combined is what made it one of my sister’s favorite films, eventually one of mine, and a cult classic that spawned a musical, a (failed) TV adaptation, and numerous mentions and homages in other media. The legacy of Heathers is unquestionable, regardless of how it does. For instance, the musical did well, but the show was an abject failure. It didn’t actually air as it was intended to because of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018. A few other shootings that happened in 2018 (a sentence that I hate) ultimately caused the Paramount Network to pull whatever episodes hadn’t finished airing and cancel the show all together.

Many critics lamented that you can’t make a Heathers adaptation today. There’s simply too much violence in the United States school system for it to not feel grotesque and out of line. Especially coming from adults who are aiming their shows at the very teenagers who are experiencing that violence first-hand. 

However, dear reader, I don’t think that’s true. I think that the continued cult status of Heathers means more stories like it could be told - they just aren’t doing it right. It’s not like Veronica and JD’s “murders that we stage like suicides” spree isn’t a big selling point of the story, even with the rise in actual violence modern teens face. It has the joy of getting back at your bullies, the thrill of dating the “bad boy,” and then the stark realization that it’s all actually horrible and destructive.

n fact, it feels like JD set the mold for moody, often manipulative, white boys with trench coats and a pension for violence, school-centered or otherwise. But teens who grew up on the film, and the current generation who love it now, seem to recognize that Heathers thinks JD is a fucking loser. And it’s a lesson every story after it, that featured a boy like him, has failed to realize. Being edgy just to be edgy is a JD move… not a Veronica one. What’s the point in being like JD? He trash and we all know it. 

(Also, Yhara zayd did a great video essay on “Killer Cliques'' and their appeal, as showcased in Heathers and my best friend’s fave Jawbreaker. Check it out, it’s properly amazing!)

Now, the other film that’s undeniably baked into my pre-adolescent, teenage brain and now adult self, is the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Written by Joss Whedon and directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, it tells the story of Buffy (not Summers, because that’s from the TV show) who’s a typical Los Angeles high school cheerleader played by Kristy Swanson. Donald Sutherland plays the also wildy named Merrick, an older man who comes to tell Buffy that she’s actually the reincarnation of a vampire slayer and he’s there to guide her. Dope, dope, dope!

The 1992 film is fun. It’s got some really great villain performances by Rutger Hauer and Paul Reubens (the latter gets probably one of the most quoted/pantomimed bits of the film’s legacy and it’s truly fantastic). Not to mention how fun Luke Perry is as Buffy’s outcast love interest, Pike. While Buffy the Vampire Slayer is now a genuine cult classic, it would be lost to the sands of time, by all accounts, if Gail Berman hadn’t approached Joss Whedon when she moved from Dolly Parton’s production company Sandollar, who owned the film rights, to Fox. 

I could cry just thinking about it. This film was a staple in our household. My mom’s the biggest vampire fan I know, a trait which she passed enthusiastically to me, and she’s happy to consume all vampire media, regardless of tone. The mix of comedy, darkness, and magic that’s presented in this super tight hour and a half film enthralled her, and therefore we watched it a lot.  

However, the actual legacy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer belongs to the small screen. The film didn’t do well critically, and Whedon hated what happened to his script, feeling they’d made it too broad a comedy. However, Berman liked the story, so she gave him a chance to make it again - a shot that seems so rare I can’t even imagine the odds. 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an important teen film because the effect the TV series had on media, specifically teen media, is truly incalculable. Certainly, there are many shows we either wouldn’t have, or that wouldn’t sound the same, without it. This is because the ultimate legacy of the film, and show, is “Buffy Speak.” Whedon helped create a dialect for his teens, one that permeated across all of media. Diablo Cody’s Juno gets an Oscar nomination and you can hear Buffy’s influence all over it. Same can be said for Lady Bird, or Booksmart, or literally any Marvel film after the first Avengers where there’s quips and jokes. Not to mention all the alums who went on to create or write on some of the other shows that defined a moment, like 24, Lost, and Game of Thrones. Like I said: incalculable.

Two of the most important people in my life, my older sister, Nickie, and my mom, filled it with stories like Heathers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Stories about teenage girls finding the strength to overcome whatever came their way. Sometimes it was supernatural, and sometimes it was a charming sociopath, but these were the highly stylized teen films that filled my imagination and helped shape me into who I am today. 

I’m excited to dive into not only more films that made me, but more films that have helped define 70 years worth of teenagers. We’re gonna go from awkward sex comdies, to abject violent horror and we’re gonna learn something along the way. I think it’s gonna be a wild ride, and I hope you’ll continue to join me on it!

Next month, I’m diving into teen flicks about entering high school! I’m also trying to gather data outside of my own experiences with these films and teenagerhood, so if you’re interested please fill out my Google Form!