Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging + Love Simon

[osprey_archer]

I watched both Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging and Love Simon last weekend: an accidentally pairing, but one that got me thinking, largely about the fact that I often find current teen movies - not just Love Simon but also movies like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before - more relatable and closer to my actual high school experience than movies that came out around the time I was in fact in high school.

Does anyone else feel the same way? My high school experience was weird and probably shouldn’t be taken as representative of The Way High School Was in the 2000s. But Simon and Lara Jean share an essential good-heartedness and desire to do the right thing (even though the right thing sometimes eludes them, and they make terrible mistakes) which was very characteristic of the kids I hung out with in high school - and not at all characteristic of, say, Regina George.

Or Georgia Nicolson, the protagonist of Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging, who begins the movie resolutely self-absorbed and becomes… well, maybe a little less self-absorbed by the end. (To be fair, Georgia is fourteen to Simon’s eighteen & Lara Jean’s sixteen or seventeen - and this is an age where the difference of a couple of years really matters.)

But she doesn’t grow up so much that she has, say, any compassion when her rival Lindsay gets publicly humiliated on-stage at Georgia’s birthday party, and then one of Georgia’s friends yanks out the breast-enlarging inserts that Lindsay wears in her bra to make the humiliation complete.

Incidentally, the guy they both like has just confessed his love for Georgia onstage, in the form of a song that he plays with his band (he has the most 2008 hair ever, oh my god), so Lindsay has already definitively lost. And it’s not like she’s been tormenting Georgia for years or anything: literally all she did was go on a few dates with Band Boy and wear low-cut tops.

At least in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, when Megan Fox completes her public humiliation by falling into a fountain, Lindsay Lohan offers her a hand up, you know? Georgia just laughs as Lindsay runs off stage, presumably on the way to drown herself in the sea, because how is she ever going to live this down?

It’s not that these rivalry storylines are dead in more recent movies - but in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, it’s enough that Lara Jean wins the battle over the boy. The movie doesn’t feel the need to make sure the entire school is looking on and laughing at her rival as it happens.

Comments

[missroserose]

I was actually discussing just this phenomenon with Brian last night—we were watching an episode of Riverdale where Love, Simon was prominently featured, and I commented on how I wasn't surprised, because tonally they felt very similar, and both very dissimilar from most of the shows aimed at teens when we were teenagers. I feel like it took popular culture a while to catch up to the idea that teenagers are fully-formed people with real and complex emotions and motivations. To this day, one of my pet peeves is entertainment/cultural attitudes/legislation that assumes that (say) sixteen-year-olds are basically still children and shouldn't be allowed any measure of autonomy. How are they supposed to become adults if they can't make their own decisions and experience the consequences?

So I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how happy it makes me to see teen-oriented fare that's unafraid to portray its protagonists as people with complicated emotions going through a difficult transition, and actively trying to maintain relationships even in the face of deep and fundamental change. I hope that it's presaging a change in how we look at teenagers culturally, too.

[osprey_archer]

It's funny that you say this, because one of the other things that struck me in Love Simon and To All the Boys I've Loved Before is that the characters seem younger than their counterparts in many teen movies from the eighties and nineties and early 2000s: they're less sexually experienced, less sure of themselves, and closer to/more dependent on their parents than many earlier teen characters.

But on the other hand, I think in a way this actually chimes with what you're saying. These characters seem younger because the narrative is paying more attention to that difficult transition aspect of teen life, rather than treating teenage characters as basically like adults - but adults who are out of control and possibly a little evil.

[missroserose]

That's two very good points, actually. Earlier teen movies felt more like wish-fulfillment fantasies, like what the (adult) screenwriters wished their teenagerhoods had been like. The popular jock, the pampered princess, the loveable scamp, etc. Current ones feel much more like the characters might be actual people who exist in relationship to people around them.

[evelyn_b]

I'm about ten years older than you and I've noticed the same thing. I think it's like missroserose says: there's been a long, slow cultural shift toward portraying teenagers as people, instead of stock characters or bundles of adult anxieties about teenagers.

[osprey_archer]

Was it the fifties or sixties when Americans became so worried about The Threat of Teenagers? (It wasn't long after teenager itself became the new popular term, IIRC.) There's definitely a shift from books in the nineteenth century, where characters in their teens may be a little immature but are still portrayed as people, to the teens in movies and books in the second half of the twentieth century who are often bizarre monster aliens.

[staranise]

I think, pretty simply, it's that our generation grew up to write about our experiences, which are now hitting the big screen. Shows made now about teenagers are based on the experiences of people who were teenagers 20 years ago.

[asakiyume]

This is what I was going to say: it took until about now for people of you guys's generation to be doing the directing/writing.

[thawrecka]

I think teen characters in teen-oriented stuff now are a lot nicer than I, or anyone I knew at the time, was in high school, but I do imagine that depends on place to place, school to school.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I think that's very much dependent on the culture and what the culture expects of teenagers - and if books and movies are any guide, in between 1960 and, oh, 2010, the culture expected teenagers to be horrible to each other and have constant screaming arguments with their parents.

[thawrecka]

You must have watched much more tumultuous TV shows and movies than I did, then, because I didn't watch any where teens had constant screaming arguments with their parents. That would have been exhausting.

But I'm glad the teen films you watch now are more to your taste.

[skygiants]

The thing I like about Love, Simon and the book it's based on -- and also To All The Boys, to some extent -- is that it predicates a more complex and fluid view of high school friendships than I think we got in '90s films. Much less 'this is a CLIQUE, No One Leaves, Nerd Becomes Popular??? HOW!' and much more 'oh A is friends with B and C so B hangs out with C sometimes but they don't have much in common?'

And it's maybe as a result of that that, I think, The Rivalry becomes less all-encompassing, and so less cruel; Lara Jean's Rival is a footnote in her story, not the driving force. Being Popular and Winning the School is not the goal, as indeed it is not for most actual humans. Feeling comfortable with yourself and the people you do care about is.

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, that's a great way to put it - many newer films have a more complex and fluid view of high school friendships. And how many people do want to Win the School, anyway? What are you going to do with it once you've won it?