80s Vs. 90s: The Teen Movies
by ron provine

     Sometimes, after a night of unusually heavy
drinking, I will stagger to wherever I am nesting for
the night (beds, couches, and dear friends' laundry
piles are all equally comfortable at these points)and
fall into a halting, intense sort of sleep.  And
during these sleeps, I sometimes have what a
psychoanalyst (if I could afford one) might call a
Sisyphian dream.  Sisyphus was this Greek guy who
lived long ago and pissed off Zeus somehow (nobody
remebers just how, maybe he castrated the bull Zeus
had taken the form of to make sweet love to a Greek
maiden who, judging from the forms Zeus often took to
screw them, apparently have been reincarnated as the
women on those XXXXXX Internet Bondage and Bestiality
Sex Sites).  As punishment for whatever it is he did,
Sisyphus was forced to roll a boulder up a very high
hill in Hades.  But each time just as the boulder
reached the top, Sisyphus would lose his footing and
the boulder would roll slowly but unalterably down the
hill like Al Gore talking to a crowd of high
schoolers:  slow, dull, but impossible to stop.  


    Well in my dream, I am sitting on a bed, wearing a
sweater vest, hair tossled and face full of freckles
and a couple of zits.  I am calling Molly Ringwald to
beg her to go to the Winter Formal with me.  In the
dreams, things go surprisingly well, she is just about
to say yes when I hear in the background on her end
the unmistakeable roar of a Porsche 911 engine, and
the line goes dead.  I know she is running downstairs,
to the front door, into the arms of the cool, nice
rich boy she has loved all along.  I awaken from these
dreams frustrated and rattled and only some more vodka
and a few valiums will calm me.


     The unabashed, naked romanticism of 80's teen
movies has thoroughly permeated my consciousness. 
Where others hear satanic messages in rock and roll
songs, I hear references to John Hughes movies and
Brat Pack Lore.  That song by Sponge called "Molly" is
obviously about Molly Ringwald.  Come on, 'Sixteen
Candles down the drain' is a line in it.  And sometime
after 16 Candles, her career really *did* go down the
drain.  Now she does Liftetime made for TV movies and
instead of an audience of lust-struck teenage boys her
audience is bitter housewives and their disinterested
daughters.  Now that he landed the coveted role as
Bill Gates in Pirates of Silicon Valley, I hear
Anthony Michael Hall won't return *her* phone calls. 
And if you play the Safety Dance backwards, I am sure
it says "NOW IGON, NOW".


     So when it finally became obvious that the new
wave of late 90's teen films were little more than the
classics of my youth slightly repackaged, I had hopes
that the kids today would turn out alright after all. 
You know, like we did.  Minus the substance abuse, and
the slacking, and the whole grunge thing. 
(Soundgarden still speaks to us...it says Change the
Fucking Station").  But who am I kidding?  The kids
these days are all fucked up, so are we, so were our
parents and our children will be too.  The most I was
really hoping for was a synth rock revival, maybe a
Tears for Fears reunion tour.


     My girlfriend and I spent a couple of months
painstakingly researching these new teen movies by
going to them, sitting through them, and then
painstakingly avoiding any contact with any of the
actual 90's youths in the theatres to see the same
movies on our way out for fear of catching whatever
the hell it is the kids nowadays all seem to suffer
from.  Nothing some synthesizer music wouldn't solve,
or more to the point a few good solid whacks to the
head with a Hancock keyboard.


     After our research I regret to inform you, the
90's teen movies suck.  They suck hard.  They suck
harder than Reese Wittherspoon does to Ryan Phillipe
on the rare occasions they both take off their makeup
long enough to have any fun.


      The problem is, there is no sense of fun
anymore.  At least not like we had.  You know, the
right sort of fun.  Look at movies like Real Genius,
Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club,
Weird Science and the like.  These movies taught us
valuable lessons.  Smart kids are going to rule the
world, if they just stay true to themselves and their
ideals, and if they find a nice man who lives in
secret catacombs just beneath their college.  There is
a girl for every boy and a boy for every girl and the
girl or boy of your dreams can be yours, will come and
rescue you if you just have faith.  People are people
and bad people can be converted, changed for the
better, or at least changed so as to be tolerable.  Or
if not, they can be left to themselves while everybody
else goes off in triumph.  I am not so naive as to
claim these are lessons about how the world actually
is....they are lessons about what our characters can
be like, our internal lives and personalities, the way
we can *try* to be.  


     The movies of the 90's seem to boil down to wish
fulfilment.  The cool oppressors are tortured at the
end in loving detail, in Cruel Intentions the
antagonist is humiliated in front of her entire prep
school, which is actually very much the way you might
expect John Hughes to end a movie.  Except that the
humiliation is not merely implied, nor is it done
quickly and then replaced with scenes of happy
gloating victors, rather the humiliation lingers, is
fauned over, and indeed the villain rather than the
'victor' (she has lost a boy she loved, the victory is
Pyrrhic at best) is the focus of the ending.  And when
the victor finally is shown again, she seems to have
been altered for the worse, or at least turned more
jaded and vicious.  In the 90's, it seems, to win one
must first lose one's innocence, whereas in the 80's a
victory entailed a return to innocence.


     Similarly in Jawbreaker, the humiliation of the
antagonists is brutal and brooding and the celebration
at the end is a celebration not of having achieved any
sort of ideal, but only of having destroyed the
enemies.  Even in Revenge of the Nerds, the heroes are
so loveable and inept that the real focus is on how
the hell these guys won, rather than on celebrating
the destruction of the evil frat boys.


     There is a dark, pouty streak that runs through
the 90's movies, they are brutal wish fulfilment on
screen.  And the protagonists are still cool for the
most part.  The 80's movies often came down to dorks v
cool kids, and then in the end everybody realized they
were all the same, or at least similar enough to nod
at each other in the hallways.  In the 90's, only the
cool kids even show up on screen.  It is the nice cool
kids v the mean cool kids sometimes, the misunderstood
but still objectively cool kids agains the established
order, but geeks just don't get sympathetic roles
anymore.  And that's a shame.


      I miss the romanticism, the optimism, the
fundamental cheer of the 80's movies, and it is too
bad that the 90's so warped our collective unconscious
that it is now profitable to appeal to dark, sinister,
worthless motives within us that cry out only for
blood.  Sixteen Candles down the drain indeed.  A
decade gone to shit.