Perhaps High School is Not Always a Relentlessly Brutal Nietzschean Hellscape

high school movies are weird man

legitimately great movie btw

Does anyone else find it weird that 90% of movies and shows about high school portray it as this utterly cruel site of unrelenting social competition where rigid cliques exist on a transparent popularity hierarchy, a hierarchy which determines whether individuals within it experience school as a place of privilege and prestige or of loneliness and misery? Where the starting quarterback dates the head cheerleader and they go on to be the prom king and queen? Where sensitive and quirky types are universally ignored, if lucky, and bullied if not? Where every student is sorted into one and only one clique, never multiple at once, largely because those cliques are determined by everyone having one overarching style or interest or archetype? Seriously, those tropes are found in so so much of high school media, this one particular read on what it’s like, a conformity of portrayal that’s hard to find in any other genre. And I don’t get it!

There’s The Breakfast Club, obviously, which is sort of the 80s Platonic ideal of this sort of thing, and She’s All That, the 90s ideal. (Also He’s All That, the recent Netflix remake, which is surprisingly not bad.) For Heathers it’s the heart of the text, as it is for Carrie. Plus the “Molly Ringwald unlucky in love” movies, several adaptations of the Spiderman story, Hocus Pocus, The Faculty, 17 Again, the Lizzie McGuire series, Cruel Intentions, Varsity Blues. Certainly Mean Girls (which, shameful confession time, I can’t stand) fits the bill. The Perfect Score seems to have cast people with the most obvious labels in mind. Romy and Michele's High School Reunion shows this condition in retrospect. Brick in neo-noir, Sky High for superheroes, Karate Kid for kung fu, Freddy vs. Jason, slasher. Easy A, The Princess Diaries, The Craft. I’m always told that Freaks & Geeks is a more realistic high school show, but it seems to fall into the same old tropes as the rest of them, and the title is something of a tell. Jennifer’s Body, I think fits, as does Disturbing Behavior and Teen Wolf.

In some of the preceding movies the dramatic growth is for the popularity hierarchy to be in some sense shaken up or reverse, but they still establish that as the reality of high school. A movie that initially establishes these dynamics but later complicates them is Clueless. The conformity of social groupings is essentially the key conflict in the original High School Musical, but it’s too wholesome to portray bullying. Typical high school movie themes are suggested but not established by American Graffiti. Dazed and Confused is an interesting case - there are, without question, jocks and nerds and stoners and mean girls, and we do see some of the typical power and popularity dynamics, as well as the cruelty. But that movie’s such a low-key vibe, and it takes pains to demonstrate the permeability of cliques. Welcome to the Dollhouse would be archetypal but I think she’s in middle school in that movie. Ferris Bueller's Day Off treats the titular character’s popularity as a nexus of happiness. So there are complications and exceptions. But it’s clear to me that these tropes are as common as any conventions are in any genre.

I know I’m an n of 1, but I get the impression that most people’s high school experience was far less rigid and miserable than all that. A lot of people suffer during that time, no doubt, but there’s no stage of life that you can’t say that of. “High school” is this big, capacious category of life, with immense diversity within it, in terms of the composition of the student body, the available resources, the local culture, and more. I see no reason that high school movies should be so remarkably uniform in their portrayal of the preeminence of popularity, the superficiality and vanity that determines it, the misery of those who don’t have it, and the joys of those who do. Of course popularity can be a nexus of cruelty. But I think many people find it just a mundane site of normal human social activity, which means that it’s not always fun or happy or pleasant but is also not often misery, just average, a little boring.

To head off an obvious rebuttal, my school was quite diverse by American standards, or suburban American standards anyway.

There were certainly racial dynamics in terms of who socialized with who, but these again were looser and less obvious than people would expect. We also had a vocational-agriculture program that allowed students from smaller surrounding towns to enroll, and so there was a pretty interesting mix of the diverse suburban college town I grew up in and the dominantly white rural communities nearby. Plenty of economic divides to be found, too:

So I don’t think you can just say that everyone was the same and that’s why people got along. (Funny and a bit dark story: a Black friend of my little brother, who he played on the football team with, was the son of a successful and affluent engineer. But he would get free lunch anyway, as such a high percentage of the Black kids were eligible that the cafeteria workers didn’t bother to check their names.)

Honestly, I think maybe the dynamic is that people who go on to have the power to make movies and TV shows tend to be people who were themselves unhappy at high school. I’m not trying to traffic in any stereotypes - I’m sure many screenwriters etc. were very popular and successful in high school - but maybe you’d expect such people to be more prone to be bookish, quiet, reserved. More than actors, anyway, who are almost all very hot people. But the screenwriters and producers? I could buy that they are disproportionately likely to be people who didn’t enjoy high school. Still, it’s weird. Probably the biggest part is just inertia, laziness, and an unwillingness to defy expectations. It feels like “high school as Lord of the Flies popularity nightmare” is so well-worn that a movie has to explain itself when it doesn’t do that.

Look, it’s a tough age, tough but also wonderful, if you’ll forgive the cliché. Certainly the combination of rapidly changing bodies, sudden interest in sex and romance, and hormone-induced heightened emotions can be tough. But I think teenagers in general are like people in general: most of them have no desire to inflict psychic pain on their peers and would mostly like to treat others the way they would like to be treated. As a general rule I think human beings are rarely motivated by malice, but rather hurt each other due to ignorance, often motivated by self-interest, and through callousness and the inevitable conflicts of competing interests. I suspect most high schoolers just want to get along, even the popular ones… maybe especially the popular ones.

Here’s what may be the most controversial statement I ever make in this newsletter: I think popular people usually (though far from always!) are popular because they’re friendly and kind. The most popular person in my graduating class, bar none - crushed every student council vote, ran unopposed as class president, was welcomed by everyone - was not the head cheerleader or voted most attractive or a queen bee sitting on top of a gaggle of lieutenant bees. She was just an exceptionally good person, someone who went out of her way to include everyone and who was accepting of others without fail. Did she have a core set of friends she hung out with more than others? Sure. She and I were both editors on the paper as upperclassmen, and that was a central node in the large interconnected network of friendships at school for both of us. But there were also other spokes for us and for everyone else, and no two people shared the exact same friend tree. And thank God! Yet our culture industry insists that the boundaries between various groups are rigid and obvious and enforced with gusto by everyone within those groups.

I also had a high school experience where some of the most popular kids I knew were also some of the weirdest. From my perspective it was much more advantageous, socially, to be interesting than to be attractive and well-groomed but bland. And of course unpopular kids can be was cruel as any other. It all depends. It just depends.

I write this piece with some trepidation, as it has the potential to be so sensitive for some. When I have thought out loud about this stuff with people in person, occasionally they think that I’m somehow minimizing the pain of those who were bullied in high school. That isn’t the case, at all. I’m sure it’s really really hard to endure that. What I am saying is that the intensity of that pain doesn’t mean that it’s a universal experience. High school forces people into social experiences, and social experiences always carry the possibility of bullying. Some time ago I wrote a post in which I argued that people don’t really understand why they were bullied. The argument was that, while you may think they bullied you because of your love of Star Wars or similar, that was just a tool for your bullies, a lever, something to fixate their aggression on. What they bullied you for wasn’t Star Wars or your red hair or your uncool clothes. What they really bullied you for was the fact that you were vulnerable, in some way that was obvious to them. If you didn’t like Star Wars or have red hair or wear uncool clothes they would have found something else. It’s the vulnerability they target, your susceptibility to harm.

Some people who identified themselves as the victims of bullying really liked that piece, and some really, really didn’t. But whether I’m correct in that theory or not, I think the simple fact of the matter is that if we’re going to gather unalike people together into one place, some are going to be mistreated. We should endeavor to reduce that amount as much as we realistically can, obviously. But as I’ve been saying here, I think in high school it’s much less of a universal experience than how it’s portrayed. As hard as it is for those who do endure it, the costs to society of not bringing diverse groups of people together in their youths would be much higher.

For me middle school was the pit of hell. I was dealing with a lot of shit and I was chubby and had greasy hair and acne and my father never once told me to bathe or brush my teeth. (My adolescence really was an object lesson in the advantages of raising children with unusual levels of freedom, and also in how close that approach can come to neglect.) But I know many people who really loved it. Because human experience is varied, and so movies and TV shows should be too. Besides, conditions change. High school was very challenging because of stuff going on in my home life, but at school itself, in terms of social life, things just got better as time went on. And I think that was principally because we were growing up together. People matured, they outgrew some of the awkwardness and self-criticism that drives so much of social cruelty, and they became attached to each other. Of course it wasn’t all butterflies and light. Certainly some people hung out together and some didn’t, certainly there was some insults and some bullying. But by senior year people really were just far more chill and accepting of each other, and it was pretty sweet. I would love to see that experience better represented in the stories we tell.