Teen Movie Times

By Karen Healey

Award winning author and pop culture critic Karen Healey likes teen movies. A lot. In this collection of essays, she brings together her celebrated (and occasionally profane) musings on Bring It On, Clueless, Easy A, and many more.

The collection includes revised and updated content, along with very silly new material, and a very serious exclusive essay on The Craft, available only to ebook readers!

Karen Healey is the author of young adult novels Guardian of the Dead, The Shattering, and When We Wake. Guardian of the Dead won the 2010 Aurealis Award for Best Young Adult Novel, and was a 2011 Morris Award Finalist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karen Healey
• Release date: Dec 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301382156

Karen Healey

Karen Healey is the author of several young adult novels, and a complete dork. She wrote the urban fantasy adventures Guardian of the Dead, The Shattering, and the forthcoming sci-fi adventure When We Wake. Guardian of the Dead won the 2010 Aurealis Award for Best Young Adult Novel, the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best New Talent, and was a finalist for the 2011 ALA William C. Morris Award for Best Debut Novel. She technically lives in New Zealand, but mostly on the internet.

Book preview

Teen Movie Times

Karen Healey

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Karen Healey

Cover design by Melanie Reese

Discover other titles by Karen Healey at http://karenhealey.com

Foreword

I really like teenagers.

This shouldn't surprise anyone; I write books about teenagers, for a primarily teenage audience, and I'm selling this collection of essays so that I can raise some of the funds I need to train as a secondary school teacher. But there's this perception that teenagers are difficult people to be around, that they're dumb, or vandals, or bullies, or reckless, or needlessly rebellious.

From my actual experience, teenagers are people. Like all people, they have the capacity to do great things and terrible things, often in the same day. They're people who are in a difficult position - no longer children, not quite adults, reaching for personal power and independence, but still under the control of their guardians and the state. It's not that teenagers are difficult to be around, but that it's often really difficult to be one!

Teenagers are trying to do all the work of finding out who they are and what they want, with brains that haven't finished growing and hormones zooming around their bodies. And on top of that, media and culture are bombarding them with a zillion messages about what they should buy and who they should sleep with - or not sleep with - and what they need to wear and how their bodies must look and what they have to read and watch and enjoy or hate.

I've got to tell you, that constant stream of cultural instructions is exhausting enough for a confident, educated, relatively privileged adult woman who has already been through adolescence and its aftermath. Actual teenagerhood involved a lot of very painful, necessary lessons. I completely flipped out and screamed at my parents and sulked in my room and played the loud music and all that stuff, and I turned out fine. Great, even! And I don't laugh at teenagers who are doing the same thing, because when they turn out to be great, I don't want to be the person who laughed at them while they were working through that whole growing up thing.

As I shouted at my mother once, Adults should understand us better! We were never you, but you were all us!

What book did you get that from? she asked.

IT'S NOT FROM A BOOK! I CAN THINK OF THINGS BY MYSELF! OH MY GOD!

It was The Story Girl, Mum, by L.M. Montgomery. I'm sorry about the lie, but not the sentiment.

Teenagers! I like them, I like their stories, and I like movies where, even if they're played by adult actors, teenagers get to shine. Every movie, of whatever genre, no matter how puerile or mindless it might seem, has a message or two, even if that message is farts are funny or women are so dumb, you guys or men! Total horndogs, am I right?. Teen movies deliver messages to teenagers - and to me. Here are some of my thoughts, on these teen movie times.

Chapter One: Clueless

Introduction

I'm a Jane Austen nut. But before I read a word of Austen, I saw the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and Amy Heckerling's adaptation of Emma. They both came out in 1995, the year I turned fourteen. Clueless was my very first teen movie experience, and it did in fact change my life.

I was not alone. Clueless was almost effortlessly influential on teenage fashion and vernacular for years to come.

Hahaha, what am I saying, effortlessly? Amy Heckerling, who wrote as well as directed and is not incidentally a massive role model for me, sat in high school classes for weeks researching teen interactions, not to mention the literal years she spent on vocabulary. But she didn't like the mid-90s grunge fest that was the fashion of the time, so Mona May, the costume designer, worked her ass off designing a specific colour palette and style chart for each major character, taking inspiration from European catwalks, rather than American sidewalks.

Those costumes were awesome, and suddenly every girl at my school with pretensions of cool was wearing knee-high socks. That was about as much as we could get away with, given we were all in uniform, but at least our skirts had plaid.

What Happens

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her...

Like you don't all know, although I tended to shock people when I told them I hadn't seen Heathers, so there's probably someone.

Valley queen Cher is fifteen years old, and, along with her best friend Dionne, named after singers who used to be popular and now do infomercials, rules her Beverley Hills high school. Chic, rich, and beautiful, Cher is ready to make anyone do what she wants, despite the sardonic commentary of ex-stepbrother Josh, who keeps suggesting there might be more to life than being charming and popular. As if!

Cher successfully argues her way to better grades, matchmakes her teachers, makes over a slobby new girl into a valley princess, and manages her father's eating, but she can't charm her way into a gay boy's bed nor out of a failed driver's license test. She's losing her grip on popularity, and she's starting to think that maybe... just possibly... she's clueless. Worse, she has fallen majorly totally butt crazy in love with Josh! What if she's lost his good opinion forever?

Whatever! All is revealed, a happy ending results, and Cher has finally found the boy to whom she's going to lose her virginity. You can't be too careful about these things – she's way picky about her shoes, and those only go on her feet.

The Message: Other people are real.

It's worth noting