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#Post#: 14402--------------------------------------------------
The High School Genre Cliche Thread
By: Chiprocks1 Date: December 4, 2012, 11:08 pm
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Another Genre Cliche thread that will focus on High School. What
are the most common scenes that appear in the majority of films
set in and around High School? This thread will get large pretty
fast is my guess. As with the Horror Genre thread, be sure to
high-lite your scenes in Yellow so it's easier to pick them out
at a quick glace.
The Cliques - There always seems to be a scene where the "Rebel"
or "Nerd" is giving a running commentary about all the Cliques
that populate the school: The Burnouts, the Jocks, The
Brainiacs, The Dweebs, etc.....and it usually takes place during
lunchtime in the cafeteria or the quad.
'Genius as Idiot' - Another trait found in High School Flicks is
that the main character is incredibly smart, but decides to dumb
down in order to fit in with the other kids.
The Dance - You can't have a High School movie with the always
in demand school dance.
#Post#: 14407--------------------------------------------------
Re: The High School Genre Cliche Thread
By: Neumatic Date: December 5, 2012, 12:35 am
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Worse than the Dance, it's always the big dance, it's always
prom. I'll grant you that my school had a lot of dances but
they can't be small ones, I like the idea of big things
happening in a smaller arena, it's the emotions that are big
(especially for teenagers since it's the first time), not the
locales. I guess it has something to do with the fact that prom
is the most glam of school dances and it looks good on screen,
but I think that's even more reason to do something different.
My fave dance at school was in the new cafeteria, a low
ceilinged place with almost no decor.
#Post#: 14408--------------------------------------------------
Re: The High School Genre Cliche Thread
By: Chiprocks1 Date: December 5, 2012, 12:40 am
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Ditching Class - What self respecting High School movie doesn't
have a scene where the main character, along with friends
ditches classes?
The Big Game - There is always a big game in this genre and its
usually football. As a matter of fact, I can't recall any other
sport with the exception of Basketball and never is it Baseball.
I do think it adds to the excitement having people beating the
crap out of each other on the field.
#Post#: 14413--------------------------------------------------
Re: The High School Genre Cliche Thread
By: Neumatic Date: December 5, 2012, 12:59 am
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Didn't they have lacrosse in American Pie? Or was that just the
American Jedi parody, which is the only one I can remember.
My school never had a football team (undefeated!), so I never
got the whole appeal. One Tree Hill was, I think, Cain and Abel
on the basketball court, but yeah, baseball... unless they
remake a Japanese high school movie we probably won't get that.
Which is so strange since it's the American pasttime. Heck, the
last baseball movie, Moneyball, barely had any actual baseball
in it.
I now wonder what extra-curricular activities could be
interesting spines for high school movies, we've have school
papers, cheerleaders and glee club, but there's tons more. And
not just the crummy school has exceptional kid in unlikely field
becomes a symbol of hope type stories, like the inner city kid
is a chess whiz and goes to a chess tournament and brings pride
to the town type of thing. You could have a foodie club (like
the Breakfast Club) or something like that.
One trope I'm guilty of is the "new guy in the middle of the
school term." Never joins school at the start of the year. And
in the incredibly unlikely chance it IS the first day of school,
you never see them buy their textbooks or put all their junk in
their lockers for the first time (or empty their lockers) or pop
open a fresh lock...
#Post#: 14415--------------------------------------------------
Re: The High School Genre Cliche Thread
By: Chiprocks1 Date: December 5, 2012, 1:06 am
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The Fight - There is always a big fight scene, usually it's in
place of the Big Game, since it's really about the "Nerd" going
up against the 'School Bully'. This is in essence the 'Big Game'
when the entire school is there to witness the beat down. When
done right, it's My Bodyguard
HTML http://pennycan.createaforum.com/dvd's-blu-rays/my-bodyguard-(1980)/msg11266/#msg11266.<br
/>When done wrong it's Drillbit Taylor
HTML http://pennycan.createaforum.com/dvd's-blu-rays/drillbit-taylor-(2008)/msg14197/#msg14197.<br
/>Ugh.
#Post#: 14419--------------------------------------------------
Re: The High School Genre Cliche Thread
By: Neumatic Date: December 5, 2012, 1:11 am
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I was trying to remember what I said in the Drillbit Taylor
fight in that thread, but I'll just repost:
I'm trying to remember if Drillbit was their muscle or just
their consultant, teaching them to fight and being their
lookout, like the CIA guy in the van. That seems far more
plausible. Was he mirroring their plight with his own problems,
they teach him while he teaches them, cause I sure as heck don't
remember it.
Well, to be fair, what credible threat could bullies in school
pose to kids? In one script I was toying with the bullies were
going to mutilate the main kid character, but no movie...
especially a comedy... is going to put that in. If they had a
sub-threat like blackmail or something, that would be
interesting (and make the kids far from innocent, so they'd have
something more to own up to themselves)... it would be the
leverage they have to treat the hero kids like garbage. Then
you could get away from the whole "violence solves everything"
approach (which I greatly dislike) and have the kids turn the
tables, own up to their issues and take power away from the
bullies, THEN the physical thing would be the icing on the cake.
#Post#: 26228--------------------------------------------------
Re: The High School Genre Cliche Thread
By: Neumatic Date: February 14, 2014, 5:53 pm
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(I didn't realize that this was one of the first threads we
posted here).
More than a couple of high school movies have crossed my eyes in
the last two weeks or so and I've made a couple observations...
The lack of homework
First, I don't know when you all went to school, but when I did
we were just weighed down by books. Think how big a school
textbook is, then you have them for every class, then you have
notebooks, then you have all this supplemental stuff, now some
kids have their laptops... ti's back-breakingly heavy (so I CAN
see the reason why the actors don't do this). But every school
movie I see, the students are casually carrying one textbook and
one notebook. It just hurts the reality of it all a little bit
because it doesn't match up to experience. Perhaps a way to get
around this is that they have slightly too much to carry, or
they need to shift it in their arms because it's a bit too much.
it doesn't have to be too big, but it should be slightly more
than they can handle.
This also makes me realize how little I see people do homework
in movies. Now I grant you that movies cut out the boring
parts, but on the rare occasion that you do, it's usually one
book open and one notebook or something instead of what's more
likely: a giant, disorganized mess. School is so messy, and a
lot of that mess comes from what's required of you. And even if
you slimmed all that down, even if it was all computerized,
you'd still have a mess and more junk than you'd think. And
homework takes a LONG time. Again, it's not something we want
to see, but it's one of those things that, when you omit it,
causes a big part of the "reality" to go missing. It seems less
true to experience.
Teachers are losers
Not really, I mean that... well, society treats teachers as
losers, we certainly don't pay them enough or give them proper
respect or even trust them with educating our kids (they really
don't get input into curriculum and so on, that's all taken care
of more and more by private companies). They just have this
burden on them that's really crushing, and we go through them
like tissues in real life. Being a teacher sucks. Most of the
times this little element is ignored, one thing I really liked
about Mean Girls was that Tina Fey's teacher character just had
bad luck, had a crummy job, she just... there was this sense of
patheticness to her that just unfortunately rang true to life,
*I* thought. Now, of course I want our teachers treated better
in the real world and we need serious education reform (and
probably a new way of educating our children), but this isn't
the real world we're talking about, it's movie world, where we
gotta reflect reality. So ideally all that unfair pressure and
stress should come out in a teacher character in the way they do
things.
Cliques
It's not that I hate or am tired of cliques, or even see them as
unrealistic, the thing about them is... that becomes an easy
category to put all the characters into, and most importantly it
takes away attention on something I think is almost always
overlooked in HS movies: each class has their own personality.
Mine did. My sisters' did, and she was just a year under me,
and we had some of her classmates in my class, but still, there
was something there that made us different from them, and not in
a good way/bad way. It just was. It was an identity thing.
And I almost never see that in movies. A class isn't just the
groups that make it up, it's the gestalt personality from all of
them combined. And I can imagine it's real tricky to write, but
if you can, it's an interesting thing to consider.
Something I loved about Say Anything is that not only did that
class seem to have it's own personality, everyone in it was
unique, and so they all stood out, but they also felt like
people you might run into.
Adults as teenagers
I recently had a revelation about this, and now I'm totally cool
with adults playing teens in certain situations: that's how
teenagers see themselves. Teenagers see themselves as older, as
adults, they have this weird perception, so when we have adult
actors as teens, it's like an unreliable narrator in a way,
we're seeing how they see themselves. Sort of like Quantum Leap
where we see Scott Bakula but everyone else sees whoever he
jumped into. So I'm cool with that now.
And of course, there's the added benefit where having adults
means you can work longer days and go into more delicate subject
matter and get more nuanced performances (it helps to have HAD
the HS experience before looking back at it), acting is
experience, after all. The other side of that is when you have
teenagers playing teenagers, they seem younger, more
inexperienced, and more real, and you can do things that you
just couldn't do with adults. The documentary Bully was
heartbreaking because it was actual kids, and after all the
adults-as-teens movies, they came off as babies so it was even
more powerful. Of course, if you wanted to fictionalize the
events in that movie, you'd probably need young adults to do it.
Prom
Carrie really got me thinking this, b/c prom/homecoming are the
two "big" parties that HS movies tend to center around. I don't
know how popular the trope was before the original Carrie but
since then it's everywhere, I kept thinking She's All That when
they were talking about the prom when really, if anyone's
entitled to use the prom, it's Carrie, particularly because it
gets her on that stage. But the truth is that there are TONS of
parties and social events that kids throw. I quite like how
that never came up in Charlie Bartlett, where the big party was
just held at a venue for... I don't even remember the reason. I
know you need adults to book a hotel or proper venue, but kids
are totally capable of having their own fun and throwing their
own parties... and those can have their own identities and their
own culture of anticipation around them that could be really fun
to play with.
#Post#: 26233--------------------------------------------------
Re: The High School Genre Cliche Thread
By: Chiprocks1 Date: February 14, 2014, 7:09 pm
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All great observations on your end. I will addressed a couple of
them from my own perspective. In Jr. High, I always carried my
books in a oversize backpack because for whatever reason it was,
my classrooms were always at the tail end of the school. I never
had two classes anywhere near my locker and it was just added
work...and pressure of getting to each class on time in the span
of 5 minutes between periods. In High School though, all my
classes were pretty much in the same vicinity of my locker and
that afforded me the option of keeping all my books there and
all I needed was the one book per class. So, I can and will give
any HS movie that actually has students carrying just one at a
time since it's not totally out of line of reality.
When it comes to proms and / or dances, I also give them as
pass. As much as sex is a right of passage, the same can be said
about School functions like dancers or parties. It's a part of
the school culture and I think for a school movie not to have
one would draw too much attention to itself. The Breakfast Club
and Ferris Bueller's Day Off do in fact get a pass because of
the unique situation they are in. Both are about High School,
and yet they really aren't if you think about it from a typical
point of view of the characters as one is more or less a Group
Therapy session and the other is about playing hooky.....far
from school grounds.
The same goes for Cliques. You can't have a HS movie without
them. I will point to The Breakfast Club again as a prime
example. You have 5 kids each representing a specific 'Type'.
There is a reason why TBC is tops in my book because they take
cliches and make it about something so relatable while being
totally original for the genre itself.
#Post#: 26238--------------------------------------------------
Re: The High School Genre Cliche Thread
By: Neumatic Date: February 14, 2014, 7:46 pm
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Your comment about carrying all those books and how far your
locker was reminds me of just how horribly designed lockers are.
They don't make any sense to me, they're too skinny or too
small, there's not enough shelf space... I just feel like
there's a better way to do that.
I really don't have anything against cliques in general, I just
think they become an easy excuse to avoid complex side
characters or motivations... it makes it easier for the writer
to think they can get away with stock characters. "Oh, they're
the mean girls because they're rich" or something. A little
more exploring can give you not just interesting motivations but
interesting actions and reactions.
I almost never went to parties, never went to my prom or
anything like that. I went to a few side concerts but that
wasn't much. One thing that I'd definitely want to see more of
is the splinters that any gatherings like this create: everyone
breaks into small groups (not cliques) and have their own things
going on, which are usually more interesting. I think when it's
prom or something like that, it's easy to get trapped in the
structure of it, and I think the elements on the side are where
the magic can happen.
You know, thinking of hooky, it's confession time, I used to
sneak off campus in high school and go to the comic shop, it was
a couple blocks away and definitely beyond where we were allowed
to go, and I'm sure everyone knew but I never got in trouble for
it. I'm sure that was one of those karmic rewards I got for
being an overlooked loser in those days.
Maybe this is one of those things where... I think that the
reason people write HS stories is they want to address and "fix"
their own experiences, get some sort of closure on all that, but
at the same time, they're fearful of opening those old wounds
(which would actually HELP if they wanted closure), so they fall
back on the standards instead of really going in (I'm sure that
the assignment work is also on a strict timetable, so there's no
time to really dive into all of that). That's just my guess.
#Post#: 26242--------------------------------------------------
Re: The High School Genre Cliche Thread
By: Chiprocks1 Date: February 14, 2014, 8:17 pm
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I've got a couple of my own High School stories that I've
written over the years (need to find what external HD they are
sitting on as it's been awhile since I've actually read them)
and I will be the first to say that they pretty much follow the
same tried and true genre cliches. It wasn't a conscious thing
on my part to do that. It's just what I know and what I
experience firsthand in my own years in school. They say 'write
what you know' and that's how it came out on the pages. Sure,
they are cliches for a reason because everyone has the same
experiences and no one really tries to do anything different
with it (TBC being the exception in the genre). I may write
another HS story and be more mindful of trying something
different with the knowledge of this discussion.
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