Wednesday, November 22, 2017 // The Statement
7B
The picture stays in the kid: Lives I didn’t quite live
by Daniel Hensel, Daily Film Editor
I
was never much
of a teenager. It’s
not as if I wasn’t
a student; it was
that I was absent so much
—
literally
away
from
Northbrook,
at
debate
tournaments once or twice
a month, over the weekends
— that I never felt as if I
was really a member of my
community. After all, when
you spend your weekends
in San Francisco and Dallas
and
Washington,
D.C.,
Northbrook just seems kind
of lame.
That’s
the
story
I’ll
tell myself to explain my
(perhaps
purposefully)
spotty memory of high
school
engagements.
Oh
sure, I hazily recall the two
dances I attended, many of
my high school a cappella
group’s performances and
I unfortunately remember
the
may
weekends
not
spent
at
debate
tournaments literally, but
living vicariously through
refreshing the debate wiki
pages to see what teams
were reading in rounds.
Between the travel, the
social
absentia
and,
to
put it mildly, the social
ineptitude, my high school
years feel barely sketched
in. There were classes and
there was debate … and not
much else. That’s where
movies have helped.
I wasn’t much of a film-
watcher in high school
(coincidentally, I discovered
Netflix streaming roughly
a half hour after my last
debate
round
ever),
so
much of my experience
with the cinematic high
school arrived post facto, a
bit too late for any sort of
groundbreaking behavioral
adjustments. But these films
helped not only fill in the
gaps of my experience, but
understand the struggles
I faced and contextualize
my high school years in
the fabric of our collective
cinematic projections.
That sounds like a load of
gobbledygook, but hear me
out. Films, especially those
over the past ten years or
so, have by measure been
pretty kind to teenagers.
That is, they seem truly
respectful of their views
and
of
their
behaviors.
No one in these films is
perfect, but no one in life is.
They have their faults, and
so do we.
I watched “Superbad” in
my junior year of college,
expecting a raunchy romp
but was delighted to find (on
top of the aforementioned
raunchy romp) a delicate
tale of male friendship and
separation anxiety. I don’t
miss high school too much,
but I miss my friends, I
miss the evenings we spent
driving down to Evanston
or up to Highland Park
for ice cream or barbeque.
When the older students in
choir and debate graduated,
I
missed
them
too,
uncertain of what how our
groups would fare without
them. At the start of Terry
Zwigoff’s “Ghost World,”
Enid and Rebecca note how
sad it is that they’ll never
see one of their classmates
again. It’s not as if they’re
all friends or anything, but
the notion that a person
whom you spend every day
with over 12 or 13 years will
just disappear is quite sad.
Last year’s “The Edge of
Seventeen” and this year’s
“Lady Bird” tell similar
stories
from
different
perspectives. “The Edge of
Seventeen” follows Nadine,
who ignores the funny and
nerdy Erwin while she
crushes on Nick, the sort of
moody and enigmatic “bad
boy.” Meanwhile, Nadine
quarrels with her mother,
develops a sort of offspring-
like relationship with one
of her teachers, and drifts
away from her brother and
her friend, Krista, after the
two start dating. “The Edge
of
Seventeen”
contained
for me many familiar beats
of high school — especially
Erwin,
whom,
to
my
pleasure, I saw as a stand-
in for myself.
“Lady Bird,” which is
playing in the Michigan
Theater currently and is
easily the best movie of
the year as of yet, also tells
a story of a high school
student,
Christine
“Lady
Bird”
McPherson,
whose
relationship with her mother
is the central focus of the
film. Lady Bird’s mother
is still trying to figure
out parenting, and, in one
telling scene, seems to avoid
telling Lady Bird that she
likes her. In school, Lady
Bird discovers her love for
theater and starts to date
one boy (Danny … huh), then
she turns to a more popular
crush, Kyle, and drifts away
from her friend, Julie.
Nadine and Lady Bird are
both deeply flawed people.
We may begin with sympathy
at the start, but by the end,
we start to side more with
their mothers and friends.
The films are comforting
because they allow me to
fill in the gaps of what I’ve
missed in high school —
“Lady Bird” especially is
a wonderful distillation of
senior year — and they let me
know that, honestly, I may
have been a terrible person
then and, at this point, it may
be better to just let go.
And yet, both are still
uplifting and engender some
perhaps misguided nostalgia
for my days at Glenbrook
North. That’s the power
of movies: to stir emotions
beyond
the
rational,
to
supplement our own lives
with curated stories, often
with a point, in the hopes
of imparting some wisdom
on our forever-malleable
minds.
I
received
the
message.
ILLUSTRATION BY HANNAH MYERS