Less Fun Than Being Dead

When I was fifteen, I wore out my pirated copy of Pump Up the Volume. My best friend at the time, now one of my daughter’s godmothers, had watched it on VHS, then copied it and gave the copy to me. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the movie. It’s on the Criterion Channel right now, in their ‘90s soundtrack collection, but I’ve always felt it deserved a proper Criterion release. So okay, it mostly spoke to a very small chunk of Generation X, but to those of us it spoke to, it really spoke to us. It calls us out as members of “the why bother generation,” but it called on us to bother.

The things that spoke to me when I was a teenager, and in media about teenagers I encountered as an adult, were ones that acknowledged that, yeah, being a teenager sucks sometimes. Your moment of triumph is not going to be “and now all of life is better.” It’s one moment that rises above the painful bits elsewhere in your life. You still have parents that don’t understand you and boring classes and are lonely and worried about the future and, okay, maybe you’re going to prison for running a pirate radio station. But you got the girl or won the competition or made a friend or told the bully exactly where he could get off. And that’s something, right?

That’s why, as a teen, I watched Pump Up the Volume and Heathers and The Breakfast Club and My So-Called Life. Why, as an adult, I got into Joan of Arcadia. Many of the problems in those movies and on those shows were bluntly described as just part of being a teenager. Your parents aren’t going to understand you. Your classes are going to be boring. You can look like Christian Slater and still be the weird outcast, because it’s not as simple as just looks. There’s so much that’s expected of you.

What never appealed to me was media where it was a single wacky misunderstanding. I like The Parent Trap, but it’s a kind of a sterile existence—once they’re out of the camp, they’re never around kids their own age again. Whereas in something like Freaky Friday, most of Annabelle’s problems won’t be resolved just with swapping places with her mother for a day. Yes, she will get along better with her mom, and her academics might be different and she worked things out with Boris, but school will still be school and her friends will still be her friends and don’t even get me started on her dad.

My son turned twelve last month. I’ve started him on Stand By Me, but one of the things we’re going to do is to make sure he sees the things that remind him that other people have gone through it and other people will again. I lived. His dad lived. Oh, J.D. didn’t, but Mark and Veronica and Angela and Joan did. You can survive, even when it feels like you can’t, because that, too, is part of being a teenager. Surviving to not be a teenager anymore. And, no, it’s not necessarily the best years of your life, either.