Review: High School Confidential

High school—that rich trove of hormones and anxiety—has always had a kinship with television. It’s the microcosm of life, it seems, since everything is compared to it, and television eagerly exploits and glorifies this idea. Truthfully, however, most high-school themed shows are nothing like real life—even the ones considered more in vein with reality are dramaticized, with intense highs and crackling lows.

WE tonight aired the first episode of an eight-week documentary series that followed twelve girls for all of their high school years. Now I know when these girls were selected nobody knew the storylines, but how accurate can they reflect real concerns of teenagers when one quarter of them become pregnant? One girl even gets married. Come on. The teen pregnancy rate isn't that high! Where are the worries about grades, the cliques simultaneously forming and falling apart, the wondering why the girl who sits across from you hates you so much? What about the competition for the lead in the school play, the band politics, the vindictive teacher? SATs, college essays, the motivating coach? From what I’ve read about the show, it seems that the series is just one big pile of issues these girls face. Neither I nor anyone I know in high school dealt with an abortion, and all the sex talk seems like an executive’s idea of what the storyline should focus on.

At first I wondered if the fact that the kids lived in Kansas had anything to do with it; after all, the culture in a given place dictates attitudes and behavior. I assume that growing up in Southern California is quite different from suburban Colorado from rural Massachusetts, but hey, maybe that’s just my TV telling lies. Seriously, though, once people go to college or move to an area outside of one they grew up in, they realize that attitudes, tastes, and just life varies tremendously based upon the culture of the geographical region they are inhabiting. Obviously the differences vary to a degree, and a good portion of that is grounded in the individual’s own personality and interests.

I mentioned a few of my reservations to this show regarding its authenticity to real teen girls to some young female coworkers, and they retorted I’m too far removed from high school to know (and I'm the youngest). I took umbrage at this—apparently it’s way harder now to get into college, so I image all the bickering about grades and worries over extracurriculars to be magnified, not lessened. Social networking hadn't happened when I was in high school, so I'm not even including the MySpace and texting that is the virus that afflicts teenagers now. I’m also not discounting suicide, depression, or the usual mopey-teen afflictions, but a constant focus on these big stories misses the whole experience, and makes it less about a group of normal high schoolers than just a pastiche of teen problems.

Truthfully, American High did this story better back in 2000, and that series had boys. The PBS doc (the executive producer later went on to 30 Days) covered a cross-section of kids from different backgrounds and different grade levels in one high school for one year. It was absorbing, and showed the kids in action, but also their hopes and fears, their troubles, and how even though they were in the same school their lives were very different. I don’t remember anything particularly “dramatic” happening to those kids, only that I was very attached to many of them by the series’ end, and wished they weren’t so many years older than me.

High School Confidential is edited as a series of interviews of each girl over time, intercut with some footage of them trying out for a dance team or pictures of them at different ages. We rarely see any actual action. We are just told what’s happening, and the only other people to speak are the girls’ parents and boyfriends. No siblings or friends, which makes the narrative incomplete. The storylines feel far removed from actual teenage life, and that’s only highlighted by the editing choices made.

What feels most real is how young the girls look, especially comparing their ninth-grade selves with their slick hair and bangs three years later. The styles look the same, but some things don’t: Cappie goes on length about the distinction between the haves and the have-nots in terms of cars, but nowadays many young teenagers cannot or will not drive. I’m unfamiliar with Kansas, and I know the car conundrum is as old as high school itself, but the show did not bother to present any other argument, any sort of conflict regarding this decision, and this is huge for a teenager.

It's that same problem that runs throughout the episode: We don't see the struggles, the choices not made, the agonizing decisions that truly affect them. Things happen, they report. Their lives are not news. Maybe that's why things like pregnancy surface--because that's always news, that's always a shocker, even when it shouldn't be. These girls’ stories are allegedly true, but they do not ring true. If you want real drama, stick with the fictional kind.

I'm in the business of misery

I love “Misery Business”. I cannot remember another song that is just so gleeful, so damn gloating with every word. Maybe she never meant to brag, but she’s sure going to do it now, and I can’t blame her.

Although I’ve been rocking this song since the summer, it’s only been the last few months that it’s really done well, hitting radio where it’s on quick rotation. "Misery Business" is essentially the story of a girl finally getting the guy with whom she’s in love…and throwing this in his ex-girlfriend’s face. But the song is not about the boy at all. It’s about the girl—the girl who first stole her man, and how much she is disliked by the narrator for causing so much pain. It makes perfect sense that the song was written by a teenager—19 year-old Hayley Williams.

"Misery Business" is the perfect companion to Avril’s "Girlfriend", basically a continuation of that song. "Girlfriend" is bratty, childish, daring; "Misery Business" is defiant, confrontational, yet boils down the truth succinctly and eloquently. Both songs are rooted in a high school mindset and are loud, passionate, and candid, but it’s "Misery Business" that captures the frustration, the elation, the pure passion of the moment. I love the little details: "when I thought he was mine she caught him by the mouth", "she's got a body like an hourglass, it's ticking like a clock", how the narrator belts out “I told him I couldn't lie he was the only one for me”. It doesn’t matter that the other girl has it out for her—that line is delivered quickly, emphasis on how now she wears the biggest smile, a line that cannot be delivered without that gleeful, gloating smile.

Overthinking this song, one day I was struck by the chorus, how she was basically bragging that she had the boy wrapped around her finger now…the same thing that Avril said she could do, but “better”. This bothers me. It implies that the boy will be whipped, that she now would have the power over the boy that his previous girlfriend had. It cast the song in a darker, sinister light, and I was uncomfortable with it. She refused! She wasn’t going to be that girl! But I guess we all fall into that pattern once in awhile, becoming what we hate. Besides, she’s just trying to prove a point…and it’s against the woman who stole her man originally, so stealing him back is justice. Yes? Who also cannot help but wonder if they are among the millions of girls who have looked innocent but really weren’t? Maybe it wasn’t their modus operandi, but it could be still part of their psychology, a mode of behavior internalized knowing that if they act coy they can get what they want. That’s the kind of behavior I saw in high school all the time.

Although the video keeps the high school theme, it doesn’t use the story but the emotion of the girl who ruins lives. The mean girl in question just acts like a complete bitch throughout, doing hurtful things for no reason other than to assert her own power, something Hayley alludes to in her LiveJournal (June 27, 2007 entry) and in the second stanza: "Well there's a million other girls who do it just like you /Looking as innocent as possible to get to who /They want and what they like it's easy if you do it right/Well I refuse, I refuse, I refuse!"

It’s this part that especially feels very high school. The “I refuse, I refuse, I refuse!” is a knee-jerk, automatic reaction against this girl, whose every fiber antagonizes her, and so she essentially vows never to be a such a coldhearted person, without regard for others. But she does go after what she wants, and she gets it in the end, too--not caring about anyone else's feelings except her own. After all, she waited eight long months (which really isn’t that long) for the relationship to be over so she could pounce.

The video for "Girlfriend" also features Avril pouncing on her rival, this time her with a wig, intercut with performance shots and also partly set at a high school. Here the girls are reversed: the mean girl is the one who wins the guy in the end. She also gives a “yes!” at the end of it. It’s the innocent girl who loses, also in a comic fashion, of being dumped and knocked around, just like the bitch in "Misery Business" has her padding swiped from her chest and her makeup smeared. Paramore has been compared to Avril, because they sing in a similar pop-punk style, and because there are few girls doing that type of music that has hit the mainstream. Neither song, because they are speaking from the girl's point of view, explores how it is to be the new girlfriend of a guy who'd just been with someone else. They only focus on the winning.

Speaking of girls and songs, "White Houses" to me is another song all about girls and their relationships with each other. The first time I saw the video I was intrigued not only by the concept of one Vanessa Carlton dancing to another playing, but that they were both in some sort of standoff. BalletVanessa opens the video by giving PianoVanessa a smoldering look of dismissal and contempt, but she narrows her eyes and gets up and dances. PianoVanessa watches her, cautious and fearful. I wonder if they are actually watching each other, or if what they are looking at is a reaction to what they are thinking about, and the other is a manifestation of that. But watch PianoVanessa’s movements: She moves with the mood of the song. She is happy and fast when the character she sings about is in love and falling with the boys; she rushes through during the part when the narrator explains losing her virginity, but pauses on the last line about it being her first mistake. She’s thinking, and then she gets up to do more thinking, evidenced by her body movements and the way she walks away. She comes back as the piano starts again, and is filled with the memory of her friends, happy that she has, momentarily at least, found peace. Yet BalletVanessa continues moving, and in her last move she stumbles slightly. She stops and looks away from PianoVanessa.

The song is a synopsis, with few details, of a period in the narrator’s life: It starts with her moving in to a new apartment with five girls. They become tight. Life is fun. She meets boys, and falls in love. All of a sudden she’s in a new world, one that she’s losing grip on. Everything’s moving too fast, and the friends are gone and the boy is gone. She is now older, and is mulling over what happened: “Maybe you were all faster than me/We gave each other up so easily/These silly little wounds will never mend/I feel so far from where I've been/So I go, and I will not be back here again."

Boys have key words in their songs—whenever a boy is talking about a girl he likes and she’s with someone else, he always references that he is a better lover. They use the same words: faster, stronger, better. (No, this has nothing to do with the Kanye West song, incidentally.) But while the girls sometimes do incorporate that in (see examples above), their attitude toward the other woman isn’t always flaming hatred: Taylor Swift genuinely seems to be nice to her, at least in her head: "She'd better hold him tight, give him all her love/Look in those beautiful eyes and know she's lucky cause/ He's the reason for the teardrops on my guitar." She’s too charitable. In that state, how can you think nice? Sadly, thanks to those pretty girls, both Taylor and Rachael Yamagata can’t sleep at night. Poor kids. Brandon Flowers was starting to drift off when the girl of his dreams had to ruin it by fooling around with someone else. *Shakes head.*

(I’ve been working on a mixed CD featuring songs that are all about the narrator being in love with someone who is in love with someone else. Most of the above songs are included, with a few more, including Rilo Kiley’s “Does He Love You?” and Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl". I’m also sad to say that the Pussycat Dolls’ “Dontcha” fits into the mold too. Feel free to add some--I barely have half a CD at this point!)