Hey! Turns out I go to school

So in reality, I'm a college student who writes things sometimes. Here's a 2000 word treatise on how we're being treated like idiots.

EDIT: You know what, here. Here's a playlist to listen to while you read this.

Beat on Repeat:

Why we're still partying like it's 1959

In 1957, Miles Davis released an album called "The Birth of the Cool," a compilation of tracks from 1949 and 1950. And brother, when it comes to prescient album titles "The Birth of the Cool" cannot be beat. The title ostensibly refers to the "Cool Jazz" style of the record, but I could care less about Jazz. The fifties are where Cool was born. Cool, the essential teenage life-fluid that every single advertising agency in the world has been trying to bottle and sell back to the young. The difference between owning a leather blazer (ugh) and a leather jacket (rad). The 50's were when all the swirling influences from history coagulated and the first miners of its ideals like Brando, Dean, and the early Rock 'n Rollers came together to make up the trends that cool people are still following today. With the help of smash hit movies, the standards were set. But once the floodgates of teenagers with disposable income were open, they were hard to close and studios played have played to the same exploitative styles for decades since, with varying degrees of success.

Understand first where the idea of cool comes from. This, Miles Davis and his contemporaries definitely had a hand in. The idea of "Cool" is actually far older than the 1950's. African tribes at least as far back as the 1500's have revered the characteristic that they called "Itutu," which closely resembles the basis of coolness, namely an almost otherworldly detachment from reality. While western cultures valued sang-froid, or a "coolness of blood," the african concept embraces a more creative nonchalance¹, as opposed to aristocratic demeanor and composure. And that's where Miles Davis and the rest of Jazz crew come in. Black bebop musicians jump-started the bohemian beatnik revolution of the fifties and, like Rock 'n Roll, it filtered down through until white postwar suburban teens. Clearly, the longstanding ideal of making people like you by not caring if they like you has its roots further back than anybody who used the phrase "Daddy-o."

Rebranding the Man

It has been done to death, but Brando and Dean's continuation of this ideal and they way they have been continually imitated cannot be overstated. In a time when a huge portion of the population was young, they became the defining faces of rebellion and messy, cocksure attractiveness. The prototype they created can be found in every corner of media, from blatant imitators like Robert Pattinson to spiritual successors like 15 year old androgyne Justin Bieber. In the same way that every blonde from Madonna to Gaga has a little bit of Norma Jean and Mansfield in her, anybody who's ever put on a leather jacket and taken a moment to admire himself owes a little to these two pioneers.

Brando's tumultuous post-50's career when he turned into a mean, pretentious pile unfortunately mars some of this status, so instead let's focus on James Dean, who unfortunately ended up burning out rather than fading away. The most important film to analyze when it comes to Dean is obviously Rebel Without a Cause², one of his three major film roles and the one that cemented him in place as the standard by which all other prematurely world-weary badasses would be measured. It's almost eery how influential this movie and Dean's performance is. Consider this: James Dean was in three movies before his death fifty years ago and on this campus alone, half the girls' dormitory rooms have a picture of James Dean in them. On the other hand Robert Pattinson, despite his place in women's hearts as mentally abusive undead statutory rapist Edward Cullen, was cast aside as soon as Taylor Lautner took off his shirt in New Moon. The influence even pops up in places one wouldn’t expect- Philip Fry, the hero of Futurama spent the entire show wearing the same outfit that Dean wore in the movie.

The power in Rebel comes from the distinctly teenage point of vew that it favors and. Consider the differences between John Wayne and James Dean. Wayne constantly played characters of irrefutable morals, (though he received the most acclaim for playing the complex character of Ethan in The Searchers³) and was personally known to reject movie roles on grounds of the roles being "Too Un-American." He was a staunch republican and as such a perfect representative of the old guard. He had lines on his face and he was proud of them. Compare that to James Dean, the soft-faced classically-trained actore who dabbled in car racing and bullfighting while wearing the same half-puckered expression of sensitivity and depth that you can still see at wal-mart on every Michael Bublé album cover⁴.

Even comparing their seminal roles yields interesting results. Consider Ethan Edwards, the grizzled civil war vet who ostracizes himself from the people around him due to crimes that only he truly knows. On the far side of the scale is titular causeless rebel Jim Stark, who is ostracized by his peers for doing nothing in particular. To the children of war vets, Stark is a perfect character to relate to. The parents of 50's youths lived through the depression and WWII, two of the toughest times in American history, but bore children who were afforded every benefit society could give them. As a result, adults have no idea what to do with these privileged youths and they end up in chickie races or reading comic books or making crystal meth. Heck, the gap between traditional manliness and the new, cool anti-hero is summed up perfectly when Jim asks his father "What do you do when you have to be a man?" Ethan has returned to a world he doesn't know, Jim is in a world that doesn't understand him.

Rebel stands out as a movie about teenagers that isn't dumb, doesn't pull any punches and has lasting value cinematically. In Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause⁵, authors Weisel and Frascella go as far to suggest that Rebel invented the modern teenager, and that the sales of blue jeans, white shirts and ace combs after its release tell the story. Film critic Chris Fujiwara says that its success comes from its contradiction, it’s two-sided portrayal of conformity and rebellion-

“The film is neither a pure paean to youth's unbridled self-expression nor a conservative tract on the need to shore up the patriarchal nuclear family. Instead, it's a film in which the urge to rebel and the longing to conform coexist in a state of peak tension.”⁶

The same obviously can't be said for Dean-alike Robert Pattinson's portrayal of a troubled but creative youth with neglectful parents in this year's positively dreadfulRemember Me- but that hasn't stopped hollywood from trying to shove him down our throats as a serious actor.

The Monster Inside

Though itself something of a more sympathetic take on The Wild Ones (Which dean loved enough to buy a replica of Brando's bike from the movie), Rebel spawned imitators like The Cool and the Crazy, and as far as blatant rip-offs with a horror twist, you can't get much better than I Was a Teenage Werewolf⁷.

Or worse, actually. IWaTW is a loud, stupid romp in the grand tradition of movies that weren't made so much to be watched as to be made out during. The whole thing stinks of teensploitation, with Michael Landon playing an aggressive young man with no real purpose- You could almost call him a rebel without a cause or something- who seeks corrective hypnotherapy and finds himself turning into a murderous wolf-man. Simultaneously grabbing youth attention with a loud title, the promise of horror and the ability to live vicariously through a teen who has completely cut loose, Werewolf made money hand over fist. It's a camp classic for certain, and the out-of-sync musical number slapped in the middle of a party scene echos throughout the halls of time to today, when we're subjected to six tracks of Green Day in Transformers 2. And here we thought we'd made it so far.

If I can make a brief aside, the hollywood game when it comes to new, hip trends often means that one sleeper hit makes a mold (Rebel Without a Cause, Juno) and then it is filled more and more sloppily (Teenage Werewolf, Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist) until you're left with something vaguely resembling the first hit, but without any of the heart (The Blob, Youth in Revolt). There really is a pretty direct correlation from movies about handsome juvenile delinquents of the 50's to movies about quirky outsiders with cutesie "Hand-drawn" logos of today. This is a result of one of the most basic ideas about cool: If you think you've captured it, you're automatically uncool and the trend moves on. Talk about a catch 22.

Anyway, Teenage Werewolf achieves brief, if accidental, brilliance for making the werewolf a great metaphor for puberty. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to make the connection. A boy starts feeling more sensitive, gets more aggressive, growing hair in places where it wasn't before, gaining strange new appetites all at once- Mind you, these appetites are for the eating of human flesh, but I think the connection stands pretty well. Think of it as a hairier version of Carrie. It's a connection that's been done since and done better- Funnier in 1985's Teen Wolf, and with more emotional depth in 2000's Ginger Snaps. It's a facile bit of symbolism, but certainly a step in the right direction. Teenage Werewolf does end up a lot like a horror version of Rebel, and film critic Jason Jones notes “You didn't get Jimmy Dean feeling like "You're tearing me APART," you got Michael Landon tearing someone else apart - with his bare hands.”⁸ As usual, horror is a way to make an idea literal.

Once again, it's easy to dismiss a movie like Werewolf as a simple, kitschy, campy romp. A product of the times, it couldn't get more 50's than that, huh? But Hollywood has continued to make the same mistakes when pandering to teen demographics. As much as it hurts to bring up Twilight again, it's a contemporary example of a great-selling movie with terrible acting and plot that managed to pander to teen demographics very successfully. Just as we're seeing a million vampires invade every facet of media, after Teenage Werewolf's success, the market was flooded with teen scare films like I was a Teenage Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula, which is basically "I was a teenage vampire."

Worse Than Zits

I Was a Teenage Frankenstein⁹ on the other hand treads slightly different water casting actor Whit Bissell, who played the wolf-obsessed hypnotist in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, as a maniacal doctor who accidentally recreates the origin of a famous public domain monster. This time, Bissell uses the body of a teenager who was in a horrific car wreck- who I imagined was Buzz from Rebel Without a Cause- to blah blah blah bodies back to life. Monster escapes, society misunderstands him, he murders, the mad doctor has crocodiles, etc. There’s a reason why all the old clichés are clichés, if you know what I mean.

In another feat of symbolism that I’m inclined to believe was purely accidental, the monster/doctor relationship in the movie portrays what sounds almost like the duality inside an adolescent. The monster’s first face is hideously scarred but his body is incredibly strong and his mind is making progress in assembling a moral code in leaps and bounds. Still, the Doctor won’t let him leave the laboratory, citing his hideous face and the fact that nobody in the outside world will like him. As a result, the monster compromises his own loose moral code and murders another young teenager to use his face as his own. Grim? Yes. But actually a great parable for the way that we sacrifice bits of ourselves to be satisfying to others. Again, I’d be pretty surprised if that parallel was made on purpose.

Always Crashing in the Same Car

Hollywood loves sequels, remakes, reboots, reimaginings and any other trendy euphemism for not really producing anything new that they can still make money off of. And make no mistake, they make money, almost no matter how dumb and exploitative they are. To quote the creepy old guy from behind the thrift ‘n sip, “You know what the best thing is about teenagers? I keep getting older and they stay the same age.”¹⁰ In Hollywood’s case, it means there are always going to be young, hormonal kids with disposable income who are just looking for a dark room to do gross teenage things in like watch Wayans brothers movies. How many Scary Movies (the film that dared to parody a parody) is it going to take before we realize that the age of teensploitation kitsch and camp isn’t over? We’re living in it.

Whether it’s the timeless value of Itutu or the media constantly recycling old trends to keep the idea of “Cool” the same for over half a century, the values and production techniques of these movies must have done something right because they keep popping up. So the next time you wonder why half of America tunes into stupid shows that are just contrived musical revues with paper thin characters,¹¹ keep in mind: If it ain’t broke, they won’t fix it until it stops making money.

(I'll post things that actually rock sometime soon)