Movie Doubles

Sometimes you can only talk about movies in relationship with other films. This may be because you saw two films together back to back; or it may be that the 2 films cover the same terrain; or for that matter, the very same subject. I thought I should quickly jot down a few combos I've seen recently that can only be appreciated as movie doubles.

Teenage Wasteland, It's only Teenage Wasteland - 'Brick' & 'Superbad'

The big myth in teenage-hood is that it is anything like a Hollywood movie. As a good friend of mine Case once pointed out, we never get to say the lines we wished to say in our teenage years. Yes, we know what they are, but we only get to say them years afterwards when maturity and self-assuredness sets in. However we die for that line in our school years. The clever riposte, the profound insight, the cutting remark, the praise of the sparkling beauty of a girl in your year - all those lines escape us, one after the other and pretty soon, you're at University talking to entirely different people, working on your witty lines. It's all too late.

So if there is one thing that is ultimately fake, it is the clever lines we see in movies about growing up. Whole movies are littered with brilliant lines written by screenwriters who are imbuing and imparting so much life wisdom on to characters, who simply cannot exist.

So what are we to make of 'Brick', a film entirely spoken in Hard-Boiled Dashiel Hammett-style dialogue? It's brilliantly preposterous, and wonderfully sanguine; all the same, if you ignore the entirely false proposition that teenagers could have the mature insight of a 40year old, then it's great.

Ironically, I can remember the time I went to watch 'Hammett' with my high school friends on the 6th August 1982 at the Glebe Valhalla cinema when it reopened. How do I remember this? It was Walk-Off HBP's 16th birthday. I still have the Valhalla poster from that occasion. We were smart kids, but I can assure you, *none* of us had the kind of maturity or insight to speak like Hammett characters. Maybe it's because we were simply Australian and therefore a lot less nuanced as American teenagers. Really, our Australian teenage-hoods were totally devoid of such machinations and meaning.

The tongue-in-cheek humour then lies in the witty way in how the whole story is set up to be a High School drama about cliques and reputation; much like a 1940s city with mobsters and their reputations. What's truly interesting is how animated the kids depicted in American high school films are about their cliques. 'Napoleon Dynamite', 'Rushmore', and even 'American Graffiti' paint a despairing picture of the cliques, but in 'Brick', it becomes the central device which allows the story to flow.

Similarly in 'Superbad', the very existence of cliques prompts the central drama: how to get laid in High School. Where in 'Brick', dialogue almost becomes opaque with half-formed meaning, in 'Superbad' it becomes coarse to the point of pure perspicacity. Perhaps the best line in the film is:

"Look, you know how some chicks say, 'Oh I got so drunk last night and slept with some guy.' right? Well, this is our opportunity to be that guy."

Indeed, this is the central premise of the film. Because the cliques are so well established, the boys believe that there is a clique of guys out there who get laid all the time - and if they could only procure alcohol for this certain party, they could join that secret society of boys who get laid all the time. The rest of the film is simply a hilarious working out of this problematic - if it can indeed be given such a self-important word, but yes, it is a problematic, and that is all part of the fun.

The net effect of watching these two films is that you begin to understand the untenable nature of being a student in an American high school. Language doesn't help you. Logic doesn't help you. Looks, money, reason, good grades, none of these are worth anything next to the whims of how cliques are run. The grinding, brutal social mechanism is crippling and dictatorial; it creates alienation faster than it allows for bonding. The world is crumbling system of signs that actually have no deep meaning, just a bunch of dead ends,which is what both these films elaborately point out and illustrate. The parties, the sneers, the prejudices born of fear creates a tapestry of fear and loathing that makes your hart sink. And when scriptwriters give these characters lines of pristine dialogue, the effect is miasmic and a little disconcerting, but you do find yourself rooting for these characters.

Also in favor of these two films is how they capture the anxiety of youth. The incredible yearning, the feelings of inadequacy, the desire to explore sexuality at full throttle, the guilt, the shame, the boredom, all of these things are fully expressed in both these films. They're standouts in the genre. They seem to say to us that we only live that moment once, but if we only understood it better, maybe we could all sublimate it into art instead of squander it as misguided passion. Alas, that is not to be in most of our lives. But with most things, that may be a better thing for one's mental health in the long run. Each of these films are fine films in their own right, but their effect is multiplied when watched back to back.
Try it some time.