American Teen seems as fake as a $3 bill

Posted by Chris

August 4, 2008

I almost went ahead and wrote up an MMM column on American Teen, the documentary that purports to follow a handful of high school students through their lives in rural Indiana. I balked mainly because of time, but if I had felt at all inspired by the movie I would have figured out how to do it.

My problems with the movie are multitude and, I should be honest, completely based on its marketing. The campaign seemed to too easily try to pigeonhole the five main “characters” in the movie in the easiest of stereotypes, positioning them as ciphers for the kinds of personalities and characters that are commonplace throughout fictional films because those films were written by people whose primary understanding of teenage culture is comes from a cover story in Newsweek. The goth chick, the jock, etc. All nice, easy labels to attach to people that are likely much more complex than that and all labels used in American Teen’s marketing to make the movie as friendly and accessible to those suburban-dwellers who found even The Dark Knight too intellectually challenging.

My other major problem with the movie is that I think we may be entering a dark period for documentaries and this is the leading indicator of that time. Teens today, regardless of whether they live in rural Indiana, Manhattan or anywhere else, have never known a world without a “Real World.” And so their notions of opening up for the camera and having their lives followed are different. They’ve been raised in a culture where intimacy is a performance and where the most outrageous – and stereotypical – personalities get the most screentime.

So I worry that getting an accurate portrayal of this and future generations will be all but impossible. We’ve media trained an entire population through the media, making future media that much more inauthentic.

Add to that worries that the film’s director might have done more than a little coaching of responses, or done extra takes in order to capture a recreation of something she might have missed (everyone play in their minds the scene from Broadcast News where William Hurt does just that during an interview now) and you have a movie that has little to no credibility, at least not to anyone who pays that much attention to the media world or to the genuine documentary market.