American Teen

[August 6th, 2008]

Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen begins, tellingly, with a falsehood. “All we have to do,” high-school senior Hannah Bailey says in a voiceover, “is figure out who we are. Holy shit!” This is only glancingly true—Hannah and her classmates will be figuring out who they are for many years to come—but saying it makes the movie’s narrative that much more exciting. Also more troubling.

American Teen purports to be a report from the front lines of adolescence in Everytown, U.S.A.—Warsaw, Ind., to be exact—and a real-life parallel to The Breakfast Club, with its subjects pigeonholed into the roles of the brain, the athlete, the basketcase and the princess. (Burstein apparently couldn’t locate a criminal.) The premise is immediately contradictory: a documentary with the characters already established by stereotypes. It’s also self-fulfilling, because Burstein would rather make a small-town equivalent to the TV reality-show soap operas Laguna Beach and The Hills than work in the tradition of documentary filmmaking, which requires perspective, distance and judgment. Burstein’s goal may be to reveal the mindset of teens, but she’s actually abetting the youthful urge for self-dramatization.

You’ve perhaps heard the saying that, however bad it might feel, high school is not a life-or-death situation. American Teen is not familiar with that idea. Take, for example, its treatment of Colin Clemens, the star basketball player seeking an athletic scholarship to college. His father informs him that he needs to average 12 rebounds a night—“otherwise, it’s the Army.” Burstein instantly cuts to a display honoring the Warsaw alumni currently serving in the military. In Iraq. Where they might get blowed up. See? Life or death. Better grab those rebounds, Colin.

The movie is overflowing with such panders to its subjects’ ideas of themselves. Geeky Geoff Haase says the most important thing in his life is getting a girlfriend? The only context in which we see him is when he’s trying—and failing—to do that. Hannah Bailey suffers from depression? When a boy breaks up with her, we get a montage of her staring despondently into bodies of water. It’s impossible to imagine that this behavior isn’t aimed for the cameras.

American Teen is only valuable as a confirmation that you were right to hate high school, because it is filled with horrible people. The worst of the lot is Megan Krizmanich, Warsaw’s reigning “queen bee,” who comes across as a combination of Molly Ringwald and Satan. In a typical act, she emails a topless photo of a rival to the entire school, then makes harassing calls to her victim: “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” she breathes into the phone, “but you’re sentenced to be a slut for the rest of your life.” Well, I hate to break it to you, Megan, but the only person whose fate has been determined is you—you’re now the girl who let herself be filmed mid-barbarity for a national audience. So, congratulations.

But what of the person doing the filming? Nanette Burstein may have won herself Sundance laurels for directing, but the prize she deserves is for creating what I’ll call The Hills-enberg Uncertainty Principle. Which goes like this: If, for the sake of your teen drama, you at best allow and at worst encourage your subjects to commit acts of cruelty, you are guilty of complicity and exploitation. And what’s your result? Wholly shit. PG-13.