By: Katelyn Chang, Editor-in-Chief
As a teenager, the transition to young adulthood is usually marked with classic Hollywood movies including Mean Girls, Clueless, and Bring it On. This, combined with more modern takes on teen movies, specifically To all the Boys I’ve Loved Before and the Kissing Booth, all of them have one specific theme in common: High School.
Being a junior at Mills, I’ve hardly had a complete High School experience, even with COVID-19. However, even then I can come to recognize the blatant falsehoods of what it means to be a high school student featured in mainstream and Hollywood media. The parallels that can be drawn between the movies and reality are almost baffling. The issue with the frankly fairytale style depictions of High School is that it forces this narrative that being a student is a one dimensional experience focused only on one’s social life. Taking for example “Mean Girls”, the iconic lunchroom clique scene is a trivial and entertaining depiction, but unrealistic in real life. In reality, while groups of people may be divided based on interests and friend groups, it’s not as serious as having a real life “Plastics”.
As for life as a high schooler in the real world, it’s much less entertaining. There isn’t a lot of free time to hang out with friends 24/7 or plan something like a kissing booth. Rather, students are sleep deprived, stressed, and focused on success rather than their wellbeing. In American society high school is portrayed in part by these movies as a dream like four years of your life where you can live out your teenage years. Even believing this fallacy myself, once I was thrust into high school, I began to see the differences in reality. Freshman year was the most similar to what is depicted in Hollywood, but later as an upperclassmen, I feel what many of my classmates do regarding the actual lifestyle of a high schooler. For the majority of upperclassmen students, and especially those in their junior year, free time is spent studying, studying, and even more studying. While living the perfect high school moment can be a part of student life, the bigger impact is that there is simply more to it than that.
While I can understand the way these movies are meant to be marketed as something comedic and entertaining, it’s still important to address how it can warp reality. To someone young and impressionable with no prior knowledge of what high school is actually like, it can leave an impact for the right or wrong reasons. At the end of the day, teenage, coming of age movies are meant to be lighthearted films meant for our amusement. And while there may be misconceptions that can arise from them, the knowledge of reality and its contrasts to fiction can only be learned with time and experience.
