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

