Teens and sympathy: Evolving a young genre for adult understanding

Ten Things I Hate About You may be Shakespearian, but it’s no sonnet on the vicissitudes of life. Teen movies have moved forward since then --- at least from the purview of the generation that forgave Clueless and The Hottie and the Nottie. Hollywood has pretty much squandered its high horse among teenagers and their parents for largely depicting adolescence as a squawky mess hall. But with wittier writers, like Tina Fey (for Mean Girls), teen concerns have gone valid. Bullies and crushes are elements of psychological thrillers, even.

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American cinema might not entertain the same illusions for teen movies, unapologetically pushing them into the genre of cheap laughs and publicity for new heartthrobs. The Twilight series attempted to imbue adult problems on teenagers the way defunct TV series Dawson’s Creek did, but these are tawdry nervous breakdowns compared to the more grounded Freaky Friday.

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Teen movies are in a genre of low expectations, and moviegoers forgive them easily. But it wouldn’t hurt to keep them more sensible by, in fact, scrapping the informal genre altogether. What sets teen movies apart from other film genres is their vagueness --- whether their classification is based on the ages of the characters, or they are strictly set in high school, or they just have to have jocks and cheerleaders --- and this keeps the genre more pliant. Teens coexisting with adults in films --- and having creepy enemies, like those from the Harry Potter films --- might be preferred by parents and guidance counsellors because these films have an inter-generational understanding about them and have dispensed with the old caricatures.

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Teenagers also make promising filmmakers. Samantha Pouls, an aspiring filmmaker, has advanced beyond teen movies in her repertoire of inspiration. See how a more mature lens about films gives her perspective.