Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  The Class is a wonderful, important film. So, when the inevitable happens, and Stranded At The Drive-In becomes the most celebrated and discussed international best-seller of its day, and I am suddenly thrust into the media spotlight as an expert on youth, and David Cameron invites me on to the government anti-looter task force, and, at the first meeting, I’m asked for my opinions about youth and social exclusion, I shall, of course, be humble. I’ll decline to make a speech and instead whip out a laptop and show them a DVD of this film. And when it’s finished and they look at me, and say, ‘Well . . . thank you, Garry. That was a most enjoyable contemporary update on the French tradition of neo-realist classroom movies with many haunting and credible things to say about schools and ethnic minorities. But you’ve surely missed the point. We need answers. This film doesn’t have any. At least, no easy ones . . .’

  Then I will smile sagely, pack my laptop away in my spiffy retro Gola bag, sigh, say, ‘Thank you for your time,’ and walk out of the room, swishing the tails of my long black coat behind me glamorously but tastefully, leaving them to ponder my meaning. Which will be that you can’t wave a magic wand and save us from marauding gangs of feral youth if your only agenda is sticking your pasty tongue up the back passage of anyone stupid enough to vote for your worthless public school arse, you cunt. You have to do the hard and thankless work of beginning to get to grips with generations of capitalism’s fuck-ups concerning imperialism, colonialism, social inequality and an obsession with state education as nothing more than a mechanised production line spitting out obedient and terrified wage slaves. And it won’t be solved in your lifetime, never mind in time to win you the next election and a post-politics advisory seat on the board of News Corp, but if you start now then maybe our great-grandchildren might live in a better world than this one.

  And that, of all the movies in this book that have something to say about the not-at-all-new phenomenon of juvenile delinquency, The Class is the truest. Because no one really wins the day. It’s not a game.

  TWILIGHT

  2008

  Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke

  Dir.: Catherine Hardwicke

  Plot: ‘About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him, and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be, that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.’

  Key line: ‘What if I’m not the hero? What if I’m the bad guy?’

  Twilight is a nigh-on perfect example of the teen movie genre. On the surface, it is about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire. But it’s really about how teenage girls cope (or don’t cope) with sexual awakening, divorced parents, distant fathers, moving to a new area, small towns, settling in at intimidating new schools – and the irresistible allure of the weird but beautiful outsider boy that your parents warned you against.

  It also, like much contemporary teen fiction and all contemporary teen horror, owes much of its scenario to the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV show. As with Buffy, we are immediately introduced to a pretty, witty but slightly strange teenage girl – Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan – who has moved to a small town with a single parent, appears to be suspicious of her new schoolmates, and seems to be guarding some kind of dark secret. Admittedly, there is no (in)convenient ‘hellmouth’ in the wet Washington State community of Forks and, this time around, the vampires are sitting next to our heroine in class and treating her at the local hospital rather than hanging out in the local cemetery. This allows screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, director Catherine Hardwicke and the author of the Twilight novel Stephanie Meyer to play so successfully with the universally understood phenomenon of the deathlessly pale goth/emo boy who fills every girl at his school with either fascination or repulsion that Twilight became a global teen obsession and its star, the improbably cheekbone-alicious Robert Pattinson, an international pin-up.

  But, unlike Buffy, Twilight is not interested in many of the stereotypes – jock, nerd, rich bitch, bully – that have defined the teen fiction genre since Carrie (see here). In Twilight, the key conflicts are within the wan and colourless Bella, rather than inflicted upon her by Bad Kids or Nasty Authority. And the key conflict is: when gripped by first pangs of uncontrollable lust for someone obviously dangerous – does a nice girl do it or not? It’s the dilemma that dominates every young woman’s growing pains, way beyond the loss of virginity. Twilight goes all out to make the dilemma as exotic, erotic, terrifying and beautiful as it can.

  So who cares if all the boys at school fancy Bella despite her sickly demeanour and obvious shyness, and the girls are too sweet and friendly to mind? The movie wastes less than ten minutes on this irrelevant stuff before Bella and Edward are being hit by tidal waves of metaphorical sexual desire masquerading as supernatural bloodlust. Their first class together involves Edward holding his nose and glaring at poor Bella while she wonders if she smells – and if that isn’t a universal teen nightmare, I don’t know what is.

  But it isn’t long before Edward is saving Bella by stopping a skidding van with his bare hands, and now Twilight is making a strong fist of being the ultimate teen girl wish-fulfilment fantasy. The boy is tall, thin, beautiful, mysterious, deep, slightly threatening, seemingly obsessed with you . . . and he’s a superhero to boot!

  The direction is delightfully composed and elegant. The script and story spare and strong. The special effects occasionally magical. But Twilight’s success as a benchmark youth phenomenon is all about Stewart and Pattinson and a sexual chemistry that stands comparison with the old-school romantic leads of the Golden Age. As potential predator and willing potential victim, the pair have to get the tone exactly right to avoid questionable taste in paranoid times, and they do so, effortlessly, through finding an entirely recognisable kind of teenage awkwardness – an adorable fumbling towards the inevitable.

  I mean, forget being a teen; when the object of your irrational lust pulls you aside and mumbles into your ear, ‘If you were smart, you’d stay away from me’, isn’t that just red rag plus bull to the power of ten? Edward Cullen is a very wry post-occult obsession update of Brando in The Wild One (see here) and Dean in Rebel Without A Cause (see here) – the hot rebel boy who knows exactly how to make himself vulnerable enough to get the nice girl to fall for him.

  The most unusual thing about Twilight is its very deliberate, almost satirical contempt for conventional teen life. Whereas Buffy and movies like Clueless (see here) and Cruel Intentions (see here) use their high concepts to submerge themselves in the detail of real teen life, taking the warp and weft of everyday adolescence into the realms of heady metaphor, Twilight treats the predictable dating and prom concerns of Bella’s friends as annoying distraction from the supernatural life she has accidentally stumbled upon. When two of her friends go to buy dresses for the prom, Bella goes along so she can go to an occult bookshop and research the possible origins of her weirdo lust object. She barely manages to even feign interest in what, to her friends, is a clothing choice they’ll remember well into adulthood . . . a vital rite of passage. Edward makes a very knowing reference to the rite-of-passage thing in a prom scene that goes through every prom night cliché at hyperspeed before our altogether superior couple take one last look around at normality – and skedaddle.

  We never truly find out why Bella is so odd and distracted even before Edward appears, and it seems as if she has been waiting around her whole life for something undead to come along. While most teen fiction elevates teen obsessions to fall in with the preoccupations of its audience, Twilight sneers at high school life and normality, just like your average gothic youth. The fact that it struck a chord with so many suggests that we’re finally getting bored with high school stereotypes – and that many more of us want to identify with the left-field outsider than one might have imagined. It’s telling, at a time when assaults on goth and emo kids have begun to creep into Western culture again, that the fir
st threat Bella has to deal with isn’t from vampires or from the equally supernatural native American friends of her father, but from pissed white male lads – the American equivalent of chavs. No surprise that she’s saved by Edward . . . although it is a little disappointing that he rescues the damsel in distress in something as mundane as a flashy mass market car. At least Angel from the Buffy show would have swooped out of the sky, overcoat a-flailing.

  In fact, Twilight turns back many of the feminist advances that inspired Buffy. It’s men (or male creatures) that do the fighting here, and Bella is bashed about by blokes as much as she is buffeted around by her love for Edward. The heroine here spends much of the film literally clinging to her vampire boyfriend. The boys ask the girls to the prom and the girls talk about nothing except boys and clothes. Twilight may have some cool bands (and Muse) on the soundtrack and a whole goth-tattoos-and-piercing vibe going on, but its sexual politics is surprisingly old-fashioned when you consider that it was entirely shaped by women.

  But all quibbles get swept aside when, around 50 minutes in, the pair finally talk about what Edward is, and he suddenly grabs Bella, and runs with her at impossible speed through imperious trees. Twilight gets past the whole vampires-can’t-do-daylight thing by almost ignoring it (Edward just glistens, like an angel), and, when the gothic orchestral music rises up and pounds like blood, and Bella clings to her impossible man and leaves the rational world behind, it is one of the most beautiful wish-fulfilment moments in recent film. When Edward says, ‘I’m the world’s most dangerous predator. Everything about me invites you in. My voice, my face, even my smell,’ you wonder if he’s talking about vampires or pale and beautiful teenage boys.

  Twilight doesn’t go for laughs à la Buffy, but the scene where Edward takes Bella home to meet the vampire folks is the film’s subversively witty high point. It’s a rich twist on the I’m-so-embarrassed-by-my-family gag, as Edward grimaces through the awkwardness of his folks’ struggle to not eat his girlfriend, and takes Bella upstairs for a little Debussy and a quick leap through the surrounding treetops. Sex really would be a disappointment at this point and Hardwicke refuses to ruin the literal sweeping of Bella off her feet by having the pair do the soft-focus grab ’n’ groan.

  But Edward and Bella do attempt sex eventually, only to be thwarted by Edward’s symbolic impotence. This is a development nicked from the Buffy character Angel. Angel can’t have sex because he is cursed to lose his soul every time he experiences ‘a moment of perfect happiness’ – an orgasm, to you and me. Edward’s problem is that the intensity of his bloodlust for Bella means that he can’t ‘lose control’. Different deus ex machina, same metaphor: these perfect tall, dark, handsome and alien lovers can’t fuck . . . making them even more perfect idol material for young girls who are still frightened of sex . . . or frightened that doing it is the end of innocent, emotional love.

  And, like Angel, Edward is noble and self-sacrificing and doesn’t drink human blood. He fights ‘bad’ vampires. He listens to classical music and is cultured and somewhat taciturn. But Angel didn’t play superhero baseball with his family, mainly because he’d eaten them all in the 18th century. And, of course, Angel and Buffy were equally in debt to earlier teen horror classics, especially The Lost Boys and Anne Rice’s definitive Interview With The Vampire.

  Eventually there has to be some proper peril in Twilight, and the flight from and battle with psycho vamp James is exciting enough. But not as interesting perhaps, as the only part of normal teen life that Twilight does concern itself with. Bella’s struggle to connect with her cop dad Charlie (the quietly excellent Billy Burke) forms a moving parallel sub-plot, and the film is revealed as a metaphor about the young female’s struggle to understand men, especially men whose strength derives from a macho inability to show their feelings and expose their vulnerabilities.

  Charlie is also teen girl wish-fulfilment, a strong, silent man who adores his daughter so much he can’t express it, and is only vulnerable to his daughter and her fly-by-night mom, who is travelling America as a baseball groupie. He stays out of Bella’s life, but is handsome and adorable and generous and there. The perfect father.

  But even Dad and an unlikely dream prom can’t entirely save Bella. Stewart gives a memorable portrayal of a girl who is just too much in love. Murderous vamps are nowhere near as terrifying to her as the prospect of Edward leaving her. The sequel, New Moon, is on its way, and if it’s not about the true horror of losing yourself in impossible love, then it will be the most disappointing thing about a movie series that is going to inspire endless rip-offs, many of which will probably not be as good as the True Blood TV show.

  Twilight is a massively important movie, not least because its two female creators have found a form of highly sexualised teen fiction that doesn’t carry a hint of porn or bad faith. It treads a rare line between high school horror flick and art movie, and makes you remember how glorious, and terrible, your first love felt.

  DOGTOOTH

  2009

  Starring: Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Christos Passalis, Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Anna Kalaitzidou

  Dir.: Yorgos Lanthimos

  Plot: An isolated incident.

  Key line: (said by girl after sex with own brother) ‘Do that again, bitch, and I’ll rip your guts out. I swear on my daughter’s life that you and your clan won’t last long in this neighbourhood.’

  I should confess off the bat that I have no firm evidence that the young protagonists/victims of this extraordinary film are actually teenagers. The family in Dogtooth are not given names, nor a back-story, nor are there any details about age. At least one of the actors, Aggeliki Papoulia, is well into her thirties but, as we’ve seen, this has never been a barrier to playing celluloid teens. The kids look like young adults, but dress like children from Enid Blyton novels. They could be in their teens or their twenties.

  But Dogtooth is so explicitly concerned with the darker dimensions of ‘coming of age’ that, for me, it will always be a teen movie. And no entry in the latter part of this book so exemplifies how far the teen movie sub-genre has travelled from its roots in trashy exploitation cinema.

  In a leafy suburb in what we assume is contemporary Greece, three ‘teens’ live with their parents in a home inside a walled compound. Older Daughter (Papoulia), Younger Daughter (Tsoni) and Son (Passalis) have never seen the outside world. Father (Stergioglou) and Mother (Valley) have created an entire alternative universe for reasons that are never entirely clear, except that Father hates ‘bad influences’. The children are schooled at home and they and their mother stay within their all mod cons prison while Father goes to work. They have been raised to believe that they have an older brother living just outside the compound walls, in grave danger because he left. And that they will only be able to leave the compound once they have lost a ‘dogtooth’.

  The parents – or rather, Father, because this is a patriarchal world and Stergioglou is quietly terrifying – have convinced their children that this life is natural using various devious means. The most successful is their subversion of language. Any word that refers to the outside world has its meaning changed to refer to something domestic. ‘Phone’ becomes ‘salt’. ‘Sea’ becomes ‘chair’. And, just for surrealism’s sake, ‘zombie’ becomes ‘small yellow flower’. This is largely programmed into the kids using tapes recorded by Father and Mother.

  There are two things that Father cannot stop from entering his children’s world. One is planes flying overhead; he and Mother have got past this by convincing the children that they are toys. They then leave toy planes around the grounds and whoever finds them gets to keep them as a prize. The children are constantly forced to compete with each other at banal tasks, and the winner gets to do things like choose the evening’s entertainment, like watching TV. Of course, standard programming is a no-no; watching TV means watching home videos of the family being happy in the compound. Allowing video is Father’s first mistake.


  The second involves the other thing Father and Mother can’t prevent . . . sexual urges. At least, not in a boy, according to this family. Father deals with this by paying Christina (Kalaitzidou), a security guard at his factory, to come to the compound and have sex with Son. Christina may be so blankly amoral that she’s happy to be blindfolded on the journeys there and back and have the worst sex in cinematic history for money. But she has a name, and is from the outside world, and we know early on that she will be the maverick element upon which Father’s carefully constructed repression will founder.

  But then, this is Dogtooth’s speciality. The film is staged with a deliberate, documentary blankness that foreshadows horror and dread at every turn. The actors do not act at all. They move stiffly and deliver their dialogue, which was perfectly described by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times as ‘composed entirely of sentences memorised from tourist phrase books’, like robots. When they do move, Lanthimos uses his camera like a still photographer, finding an angle and a distance that looks beautiful but confounds the logic of conventional cinematic storytelling. There is no music at all. The film stock is as grainy you might expect from a movie that cost just [imgc]250,000 to make, and the bland interiors contrast sharply with the colourful splendours of the garden and its swimming pool.