GUEST COLUMN: 5 Top Movies About the High School Experience

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5 Top Movies About the High School Experience 

by Devin Caldwell

High school is a rite of passage throughout the world. Not everyone has the exact same experience, but everyone experiences high school, which makes a movie about it instantly relatable. For some people, high school represents the glory days; for others, it was a complete horror show. Nevertheless, no matter what your experience was like, there is a movie that accurately represents it.

Spider-Man: Far From Home

Peter Parker is a high school student who goes on a class trip to Europe, no doubt arranged to teach the students something about global citizenship. However, because Peter Parker is secretly a superhero, he gets drawn into an international crisis while trying to navigate normal teen problems. There have been some criticisms of superhero movies and IP exploitation, which are valid. Nevertheless, many high school students feel as though more is demanded of them than they are able to give and can see themselves in Peter Parker. One of the prevailing themes of the Spider-Man saga is that having superpowers doesn't automatically solve all your problems.

Clueless

Without having seen it, dismissing Clueless as a vapid comedy about privileged Valley Girls and their first-world problems seems easy. However, this perennial favorite actually has roots that run much deeper. Clueless is a modern-day adaptation of Emma by Jane Austen, a tale about a hobbyist matchmaker who has to learn a lesson about how meddling in other people's lives has consequences, especially for the meddler. Jane Austen was well aware that she was a privileged girl with first-world problems and had the sense to satirize the society in which she lived, revealing it for how ridiculous it was. Clueless attempts to do something similar.

10 Things I Hate About You

Like Clueless, this is a movie with a literary pedigree, this time sending up The Taming of the Shrew. What better way to get high schoolers to relate to a work than to set it in their own time? Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeare's more controversial works, and the movie plays with this by gently making fun of the ridiculousness of the premise of an overprotective father refusing to let his younger daughter date until his older daughter starts going out. 10 Things I Hate About You features the late, lamented Heath Ledger as he was finding his voice as an actor and Julia Stiles in one of her best roles.

Mean Girls

Mean Girls could have turned into just another Hollywood high school cliché about cliques and bullies. However, in the skillful hands of screenwriter and co-star Tina Fey, it turned into something more, something unexpectedly profound and profoundly unexpected. The movie flips the traditional trope on its ear, and the bullied girls seize power and become the bullies. While this may be a triumph in other films, Mean Girls shows that it is neither a healthy nor sustainable situation and ends the movie in a complicated exercise in conflict resolution that manages to be both entertaining and believable.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Ferris Bueller is a rogue hero, the type who would eventually be known as brilliant but lazy. He is clever and resourceful, with enormous reserves of wit and cunning. If he were to apply all that practical intelligence, you get the feeling that he could have become the Mark Zuckerberg of the '80s. Yet he doesn't apply all that cleverness towards pursuing fame or amassing fortune. All he wants is one day to spend with his friends. Why? Because life moves fast, and if you don't stop to look around you could miss it. Ferris Bueller's Day Off is an exercise in vicarious wish fulfillment for teenagers and adults alike.

Conclusion

Teen movies are eternal because they are cyclical. Teenagers watch them as teens and then look back on them with nostalgia as adults. Remembering how much they enjoyed them as teenagers, adults make more teen movies for the new generation to watch and enjoy.