Return of the Teenager

LESSON 9: The Scream thing is so over. First, we must thank Kevin Williamson. This is the guy who came up with Scream. The winking, self-aware horror flick loaded with young stars and young attitudes made $100 million and launched the wave of films leading to the New Teen Cinema, the fun, semi-ironic slaughterfests of I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, etc. Williamson was the first to recast a classic genre (bad slasher flicks) with the new faces, but the look-at-me! look-at-me! self-reference thing that made Scream so lively and original is now, immediately, over. It's annoying. It's old. It's Gen-Xish. It's time to be serious about ourselves, the new on-screen teens are saying, because we have to take over the world here. It's time to demonstrate how smart and determined we are. It's time to be earnest, romantic, and upbeat.

So Williamson is also the guy who came up with the antidote for the Scream thing: Dawson's Creek. He brought us fresh (if sappy and overwrought) weekly teencasts, and drafted a young fantasy world to replace the vacancy at Melrose Place. His breakthroughs, while not quite the artistic achievements of My So-Called Life or Clueless, hit at exactly the right moment. But moments move fast these days, and Dawson's Creek has already started to slip behind the curve, its sincere introspection replaced by something faster and smarter and perhaps much harder to peg.

LESSON 10: Reality is what you can get away with. As the exceptionally unmotivated couch-dwelling teen hero of Idle Hands flips through the channels, he stops on the news for a second. "I hate this show," he decides, and moves on. As well he should: The alarmist, fear-fed frenzy of daily TV journalism is less relevant to the modern teenager's life, real or fictional, than the nutritional info on the side of a box of Trix. A few weeks ago, the average American male between the ages of 12 and 35 turned on 20/20 to see the Littleton shootings blamed on two of his favorite pastimes: Marilyn Manson and Doom. And so he changed the channel.

The students of the New Teen Cinema, like their real-world counterparts, have better handles on the melting, surreal landscape of emerging 21st-century media than those who broadcast and program the stuff, and they "get it" in ways those who demonize their culture will never comprehend. The rapid collision of all things blinking has occurred before the eyes of today's teenagers, and the boundaries between entertainment, advertising, news, and high school have merged into a new, higher (from their perspective) understanding of the world. It's natural and tangible.

It's no surprise then, that MTV's The Real World serves as a sort of allegory in the New Teen Cinema, a parallel universe in which life is better, but only just barely. In She's All That, one of the main characters dumps her boyfriend for the Puck-like oddball from The Real World ("The dyslexic volleyball guy?"), while Bianca in 10 Things ... takes solace in watching five strangers argue in the comfortable surroundings of their Real World Seattle apartment. The characters of the New Teen Cinema understand their media, and feel a part of it, able to walk back and forth between its world and reality. If high school were as easy to manipulate as the nail gun on Doom or the Next button on a CD player, there'd be no real problems. So long as everyone finds a way to get along and you've found your one true love by the time you graduate and the credits roll, so long as you can drive away from high school with no enemies and a cool car, life is good.