Think of a High School Movie. Got it? Okay. Now, think of a College movie.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > Think of a High School Movie. Got it? Okay. Now, think of a College movie.

FilthyImp: Sep 30, 2002; Anime Deviant

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Think of a High School Movie

Scream.

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Think of a College movie

Scream 2.

glowing-fish posted:

And yet, because I have absorbed so much of the High School mythology through media, I still kind of depend on the shorthand of High School when I talk to people and learn their experience. "Were you a prep or a goth?" I've almost literally asked people, as if I was Ebony Dementia Raven Way.

so weird thing about that:
the Goth/Prep division is mired in a specific time period that most of us here probably fall into (late 80s through early 2000s). There just aren't any goths at High School anymore, and Ye Olde Gothe Temple (Hot Topic) is a mainstream mishmash of geek culture/band fandom and "counter-culture" knick-knacks. There's this weird homogeneity to teens now that makes picking out the archetypes harder.

Part of that is because (at least in L.A.) pressure to make schools leaner, better, and more responsive has pushed High Schools out of the model of One Giant Campus and into smaller learning communities. So the schools themselves are smaller and less anonymous, and the kids themselves are more alike.

I admit, I found a coworker attended the same high school as I did, during the same timespan, and a lot of the conversation was "oh what teachers did you have/did you hang out with [Group]/did you know [person]". We even talked about how weird it was that Leadership was this thing people joined when they had barely heard about it their senior year. A lot of that was shorthand to see what commonalities our two experiences shared, but we had two very different stories about High School.

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For these reasons, the "High School Movie", that started coalescing sometime in the 1980s, quickly became a genre that influenced reality, which then influenced it back.

There's also the (relatively, for the 20th century) novelty of considering Adolescence an actual phase in personal development, along with changes in education and instruction that placed more emphasis on individuality. Middle school is just a poo poo transition period, but High School is where a lot of exciting firsts happen, and when people start getting past being super self-conscious and begin developing personalities. Things like "Guy with a car is moderately popular" is shorthand for the rite of passage involving vehicles or the ability to travel independently -- even if it's on the metro -- that loops into that age range.

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I can think of lots of movies that are set, in whole or in part, in the college or university or early adulthood years, but they are not "College Movies". Most movies that might fit the category are either really High School Movies (Revenge of the Nerds, for example, is about high school students, and made for high school students) or else college is just a backdrop. . . In terms of cultural narrative, there is just not a consensus portrayal of what "College" is supposed to be.

Yeah. While HS movies are almost universally a "forge friendships, test yourself, learn a lesson, be a better person" deal, College films either tack towards "unfettered, explosive freedom", "First steps towards individuality and adulthood", or "hard reality of Not High School that turns into something new and scary/exciting".
I think it's hard to write for college because everything gets more atomized as you progress -- less common classes with random dorm-mates, more intense study into the field you want, presumably less random socialization and scary exploration. It's not terribly exciting to write about finishing your second to last term paper while holding down your part-time job. But it is easy to write about the first Big Adult Party a kid attends and gets washed away in. Or how the Big Man on the HS Campus is actually kind of mediocre or average in the College World. Those are really, like you say, just extensions of the HS themes.

Mandrel posted:

I thought of Superbad which doesn’t really fit this I guess

Superbad's a really great transition piece movie, though. Even though the characters are still in High School, it's just perfunctory setting to move along all the transitional elements. At the end, they explicitly talk about Senior Portraits or Grad Pictures while shopping for Dorm poo poo, but by then we understand that HS is done and that they're much different people. It does a great job of capturing that last week or two when kids are just kind of in Limbo and waiting for the graduation event to be formally done with all this poo poo.

skooma512 posted:

Also as an aside I love how the high school genre has plenty of story beats centered around lockers. Every school I’ve ever been to had literally thousands of the drat things, but they were never used for whatever reason. They were just decorative by the 2000s

I definitely used and shared my locker during HS. Part of the reason they're not used as much in some areas is due to litigation which requires schools to issue both a class set and a personal (at home) copy of all textbooks. Something like half of the use of the locker is to stow all the textbooks you were lugging to and from class, so that's gone when you have that poo poo just sitting on a shelf in class anyway. The socialization aspect is similarly impaired if you know your buddy/crush/whatever won't routinely hit their locker up before class.

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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > Think of a High School Movie. Got it? Okay. Now, think of a College movie.