Imagine being forced to spend five years of your life in an intellectual rat-race, judged on your ability to recollect useless trivia. Now imagine that you’ve got some kind of horrible skin condition, oversized limbs, and everyone else in the race is your exact same age; so day after day, with the clinical certainty of a eugenics study, you get to gauge how much of a genetic monstrosity you are. Finally, imagine all the contestants in your race being so pent-up with anxieties and hormones that during the one hour of the day you’re allowed to talk to each other, you all erupt in a hypersexualised drama-bomb of back biting, fist fights, and humiliation.
Yeah, high school fucking sucked. Like being born, it’s a universal trauma; unlike birth, we get to remember all the gory details. It’s no surprise that cinema spends so much of it’s energy running down these acne scarred corridors of our collective memories. What is surprising is that a new archetype has been added to the mix of this psychosexual pressure cooker: the Quirk.
The Quirk is a close relative of the Freak. Both are total misfits within the high school social hierarchy. Though where the Freak actively assumes a combative stance towards ‘the norm’, scorning it for its triteness and venality, the Quirk seems either completely unaware of it, or barely affected by it. Take the blissfully ignorant Napoleon Dynamite or the unflappable Juno ~ call either of the kids a ‘loser’ and they’re not going to care (or remember) for more than half a second. When did our high school freaks and eccentrics become so safe, so self assured?
High school, least according to the defining teen films of the 80’s and 90’s, is supposed to be a war zone. The Breakfast Club, Heathers, American Pie, She’s All That and Cruel Intentions all centre around characters pre-occupied with exploiting, attacking, or gaining status within their respective social hierarchies. The hierarchy was always the psychological engine room of these films; you either wanted to gain validation in it (by losing your virginity), maintain your position in it (by acrylicly clawing the eyes out of your competition) or see it burn to the ground.
The desires of the jocks, nerds and princesses were pretty linear with respect to the pecking order: move up, survive. Things were a lot more confusing for the rebellious Freak, who was caught in a double bind. If the freak refused to take part in the hierarchy completely, they would simply be dismissed as a ‘defective’ by the popular kids, and in turn become fuel for the chain of domination by tacitly validating the superiority of their tormentors.
If the freak tried to escape this bind by proving to the popular kids that they were superior to their petty and superficial judgments, they’d be paradoxically trying to earn the respect of the people they purportedly didn’t give a shit about. It’s a Catch 22 that has proved the tragic flaw of many wannabe high school rebels (including myself). Some, like Veronica in Heathers, engaged with the popular kids in a guerilla capacity; pretending to enjoy their company, only to find themselves being forced to engage in the same petty predation as their enemies in order to maintain their cover. Others, like John in The Breakfast Club alienated themselves through self destructive machoism, in a doomed attempt to prove their superiority to, and disregard for, the jocks (this particular tragic formula runs a celluloid trail all the way back to Jim Stark of 1955’s Rebel with out a Cause) . In the 80’s, 90’s and the decades preceding, the hierarchy was there and you had to give a shit about it, even if your only desire was not to become social cannon fodder.
Somehow, the Quirk of the years '00 has managed to short circuit the double bind of the Freak, and truly distance him/herself from the social shitstorm of the high-school hallway. Napoleon and Juno don’t really seem to care in the same way. For Generation Y Grandpa’s like me, the immediate inclination is to assume that kids these days have it easier. It’s gratifying to think that these pampered young rapscallions will never endure the school of hard knocks that we survived (all of 5 years ago).
I even critically validated this imaginary rise in schoolyard tolerance by correlating it to a shift in our society’s treatment of difference in their consumption habits. Once, while the western market was expanding, we were told to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ and buy the same newfangled, lifechanging gizmo that everyone else was buying. Then when the market was saturated, capital was forced to turn in on itself, and re-categorize existing markets into niches. Now we consume to differentiate ourselves from the Joneses, rather than keep up with them. Difference, once a threat to capital, has become a commodity, just like everything else. Consequently, the cultural differences in music and clothing that a Freak would once have been ostracized for, are now cool (or at least tolerable).
I was feeling very pleased with myself for mincing out this highfalutin theory. Then some geometrically fringed fucker plunged a mascara smudged thumb in my eye. Fucking Emo kid!
Now, Mods, Goths, Hippies and Punks have all copped their fair share of shit, but surely, none have experienced quite the same degree of damnation that our generation has heaped on Emo culture. There is no way that Generation Y could be said to be more tolerant than past geberations when we unleash such incredible scorn upon such a harmless subculture. Eclecticism in our globalized consumption might have taken the edge off our xenophobia, but the inherited desire to degrade and dominate is still alive and well amongst us youth. High school is still a battlefield; a fact that is attested to by the endurance of the old style of teen flicks alongside the fledgling ‘Quirk’ subgenre. Seth of Superbad still has to cope with being spat at, and is obsessed with shedding the stigma of his virginity. Mean Girls is pretty much a remake of Heathers, following the guerilla warfare that Cady wages upon a haughty clique of ‘Plastic’ girls.
If you look closely at Napoleon Dynamite and Juno, past the whimsical coziness, you’ll find the hierarchy is still in operation. Napoleon has to put up with some jerk smushing his pocket full of potato tots, and Juno endures derision from the jocks (who she knows are secretly in love with her, none the less). The high school food chain is still grinding away in the background: it’s just totally periphery to Napoleon’s passion for dance, martial arts and time travel or Juno’s interest in The Stooges and Paulie Bleeker. It is not high school that has changed, but the freak. But what was it about the noughties that made it possible for the Quirks to achieve this superhuman level of disinterest in their high school politics? I couldn’t figure it out.
Despondent, I mooched over to my computer and sank into the internet. I must have spent at least an hour dicking around on obscure Facebook communities before I realized the answer was glowing at me from my profile page.
Back in the days before the internet (or the days when the internet hissed and spat at you before you could connect) the only community you could realistically interact with was the arbitrary cross section of teens you found yourself lumped with in school. You had to make do, and socialize with this slice of anxious hormonal rage, for they were the only crowd you could really speak to and build a reputation with. Quite often you had no choice but to band together with people you had very little in common with, simply in order to survive - you had to wait until uni or grow stubble/breasts enough to walk into a bar before you could spoilt with the choice of selecting friends who appealed to your passions and interests.
Such is no longer the case for a teenager who’s wired up to Facebook or MySpace; on a daily basis these networking utilities can provide them with a constant stream of people,events and advertising that correspond to their particular fascinations. Being able to actively choose ones peer group is a choice that presents itself much earlier now. What does Juno care if the popular girls mock her for listening to The Stooges while they bust a move to Timbaland’s latest reggaeton abomination? She knows there’s a legion of people out there who think her shit rocks. This is what separates the eighties and nineties Freak from the noughties Quirk; the agony and fear of alienation isn’t so keenly felt, the drive to find ones place with respect to the hierarchy isn’t as pressing because high school is no longer the be all and end all of a teenager's social life.
This trend could be criticized for further atomizing our communities into isolated niches based around arbitrary consumption preferences, and this critique would not be without weight. However, the simple fact is that this new era of connectivity significantly reduces the horror of the schoolyard. Juno can become sub-culturally savvy without relying on the induction of an older peer, and craft herself into the eccentric gem she is without being pathologically concerned about total social rejection. And Hell, if accelerated social networking can open the space for personalities as sparkling as Juno’s, I’m all for it. Although the fact that Myspace is a giant Newscorp data-mining enterprise still scares the shit out of me.
Published in Voiceworks # 73
www.expressmedia.org.au/voiceworks.php
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