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There is nothing of the teen movie in there, nothing of any real substance anyway, instead what we get is a bunch of teenagers spouting stylised dialogue for no discernible reason, other than, you know, it's a bit novel.
No high school students have a lingo this deep or poetic, nor are they capable of plot intrigues this complex.
I dunno, it might be a while for some of us, but I’m a bit tired of the assumption that teenagers are a shapeless mass lacking individuality and poetry and wit. Not all of them at any rate. I thought that it was incredibly refreshing that we weren’t presented with the usual stock characters from your typical teen movie, and who weren’t concerned with the things we’re told typical teenagers care about.
While it might have a perhaps not unproblematic element of wish-fulfilment, the main character’s often successful reliance on bluff and calculated violence felt perfectly suited to the noir genre, and felt more “real” than the traditional interaction of archetypes like jock and geek, because that’s all those titles are – archetypes. I don’t know what difference it would have made if they weren’t teenagers, but as said above, I don’t see why the fact that the characters are teenagers makes the dialogue more ridiculous, and I think it adds to both the slightly unreal nature of the film and the exaggerated melodrama of that age. The confidence and cool assessment of the main character actually made me think of the GM quote about art being made for consumption by the hypothetical hyper-intelligent 14 year-old. Which I think to some degree this is, with a twist of noir. Which I think is pretty cool personally.
Also, and this might or might not be a British thing, but the absurdity of teenagers running around selling drugs and constructing convoluted schemes doesn’t seem that far from my idea of reality. The stylisation obviously is to some degree, but my conception of the American West Coast is surreal enough that it doesn’t take more than a nudge for me to believe in most of the events of the film as plausible, and while the idea of drug-dealers targeting ever younger kids and there being a reciprocal increase in teenagers being involved in the drug trade (while retaining teenage characteristics) seems really strange to me, it also doesn’t sound like it doesn’t happen, and I think the film goes some ways as to addressing that. That might be different for other people with different viewpoints of course. |
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