Teenage Fanclubs
There are two types of films and TV shows about teenagers. There are shows about teenagers for teenagers. There are also shows about teenagers for adults.
The former make a lot of money and, more often than not, terrible. This is because teenagers are susceptible to advertising, buy frivolous things, and are, as a rule, lame. And if you don’t believe me, please walk into a high school. Take a look around. Listen to the conversations.
The latter tend to make very little money, but are uniformly, wonderful paeanes to a time and place that never actually existed. They are operatic in their heightened sense of emotion, imagined worlds where love is free of responsibility, hopes are free of consequence, and before the characters is the promise of endless possibility.
This imagined world is highlighted by lovely, rose-colored gazes into the adolescent dream. By Randall Pink Floyd, on the 50-yard line in the Texas Night, ignoring the rules they are trying to get him to follow. By the eternalness of Matt Saracen and Julie Taylor, Seth Cohen and Summer Roberts, and Lila Raybern and Arthur Parkinson, whose love is never tempered by the possibility of growing apart. The simple question of “won’t you let me walk you home from school?” in the song ‘Thirteen’ by Big Star becomes ever so filled with meaning. The less context the better, it’s only important that it’s being asked.
Everything has such…heft. Little moments. A sweet smile from a bespectacled girl in Spanish class, the awkward shuffling of a teenage boy’s feet on the way to school, driving past a row of mailboxes at night in stuffy car and a mother picking up the laundry off the floor of a messy room. Everything either breaks your heart or fills it with joy.
Everything is so important because it’ll never happen again and it never happened at all. You will never be that young again. Your life was never that beautiful. All your dreams faded and your hopes were, for the most part, unfulfilled. Your hopes and dreams never had a chance anyway. She’s never coming back. You didn’t love her as much as you thought you did. Neither did she.
Yet we indulge the fantasy. We need to be reminded of the possibility that possibility was there, even if it wasn’t. We need to believe in the infiniteness of the future, even as it grows more finite by the day. So we indulge and imagine, pausing for just a moment, our rage at the dying of the light.
