Teen movie energy is commonly signified yet grossly misrepresented
in the cinema. Its signage is obvious - a grab-bag of whatever
the art department thinks will make the film hip - yet its
representation is vacuous and ingenuine. In most permutations
of the genre, teen energy is thematically articulated: writ
large and unimaginatively onto the screen as convincingly
as a water-based tattoo transfer. 'Youth' is the deodorant
of this cinematic corpus; teen movies accordingly stink
of youth. They smell of adults remembering their youth,
redressing their youth, inventing their youth, and plainly
fucking with youth. Adult guilt in representing youth is
typified by neurotic vacillation between cruel flippancy
and maudlin yearning. So many teen movies walk a fine line
between intentional expression and reactionary dismissal,
squirming on their own psychiatric couch as they figure
youth with wildly conflicting emotions and perspectives.
This would be one reason why teen movies are so derided:
their apparent 'celebration' of youth is registered at the
level of formal narrative construction as if designed with
clear authorial guidance. The contextual reality of most
teen movies is that highly problematized psychologies author
their texts. Fucked-up parents are the ones making most
of these movies. It would be rare for a teen movie to textually
and thematically (not to mention formally and materially)
admit that it is so far removed from its subject that it
cannot help but generate an invalid and suspect text. (This,
for example, accounts for the last decade's worth of 'age-shift'
movies, where an adult suddenly inhabits a kid's body and
vice versa.) Self-loathing has been a major modulating current
in 90s teen movies due to that decade's own liveliness of
pop cultural trends which - as they do each decade - mark
the gaping distance between the veracity of true ephemera
and the presumption with which filmmakers depict currencies
and fads. Each new teen movie knows it's dated, yet its
maker wants to claim accuracy in depicting 'what kids are
really like these days'. (This is why Larry Clark's KIDS
is a sublime exception: he allows kids to be their own energy
irrespective of their age and era.)
The main reason for teen energy's overwhelmingly affected
and underwhelmingly effective display in the movies is to
do with the obvious fact that teens or youths are not the
makers of the film. Picture teen energy - the embodiment
of some such force within the psycho-sexual vessel of the
body of youth - as a voice: a material manifestation of
identity, noticeable with precise characteristics which
define its identity. Picture teen movies - the dramaturgical
diorama for the staging of that force - as mimicry, impersonation,
caricature. Like a comedian doing Stallone or an actor doing
a Valley girl, their reference hinges on complete acceptance
of their illegitimacy. Teen energy is most noticeable in
social formations, group gatherings and public spaces. In
place of a voice that can either be controlled, copied or
codified, you have a din of voices, all taking at once,
each the centre of its own stage. Screaming, yelling, shouting,
gaggling.
Consider that sonic image for a moment. Now amplify it
a thousand fold. The noise you now hear is the sound of
teen energy in BRING IT ON. The dramaturgical diorama of
BRING IT ON is one that commits to presenting this scenario,
and with such intensity that there can be no room for smarminess,
irony, hipness or satire. I'm sure many people equate cheer
leaders with the image through which they have been branded
by countless attacks on their subculture - from serial killers
to comedians to punk bands to arthouse movies. I admit that
I thought BRING IT ON was going to be some para-indie Sundance-hip
witty critique of an obvious bimbo-target like cheer leaders.
But BRING IT ON is so aware of the cheap (and dated) idea
of 'critiquing pop culture' that one scene brings up the
infamous mother who hired someone to kill a cheerleader
competing against her own cheer leader daughter - then dismisses
it instantaneously. If you can understand why a mother would
be that obsessive, you wouldn't make fun of such an event;
you would accept its deviancy as normal. For BRING IT ON
is literally about the absolute drive which pumps adrenaline
through the youthful corpus. It embraces the competitiveness,
rivalry, sexuality, sexiness, hysteria and exhaustion which
vibrate the world of the cheer leader.
As such, BRING IT ON is a sign of an appositely progressive
cinema which cares zero for the jaded counter-cultural dialectic
which erroneously equates critique with intelligence and
awareness. Like ROMY AND MICHELLE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION
(the ultimate 90s 're-teen' movie), BRING IT ON generates
something that critical strategy can never manage: a wholly
inward perception of self which simultaneously negates the
external world while totalizing a sense of place within
the world. Or, a presentation of dumbness which is so unproblematized
that one feels stupid in having highlighted the supposed
dumbness in the first place. Unlike the dominant teen movie
setting, BRING IT ON presents not just a bunch of rowdy
kids in a mall, but a group of cheerleaders whose job is
to yell and scream and go crazy to whip up a crowd at a
sports event. And - get this - their main aim is not just
to be cheer leaders for any one sports event or season,
but to compete with other cheer leaders in a national cheer
leading tournament, where a mass of other people cheer them
as they act out how they would cheerlead a sports event
audience. The feedback loop of an audience cheering the
routines of a cheer leading group is both 'stupid' yet also
epicentral to designing the contained sonorific arena for
BRING IT ON's depiction of a teen energy space.
The sound of voice and music are, not surprisingly, vital
ingredients in the creation and sustention of teen energy
throughout BRING IT ON. The main approach to voice placement
throughout the film entails hyper-compaction. The whole
sound track - especially when music is sounded - stylistically
and technically employs the type of compression and 'ducking'
which allows radio presenters' voices to talk over dense
music presence while never seeming to be on a separate volume
plane. 'Ducking' is an automated process of compression
which involves feeding a vocal track signal into a music
track signal so that when no voice is present, the music
is boosted to optimum level, and as soon as the voice comes
in, the music instantly drops down and back up in every
pause between the speaker's words. When used to a high degree
as it is in AM talk-radio broadcasts, its psycho-acoustic
side-effects induce a breathless claustrophobia wherein
no gaps are allowed and the passage of time is rendered
thick, imposing, congested. Narrative film sound design
generally disallows this for two reasons: firstly, voice
is typically rendered as being embedded within a location
(or locatable) environment which includes occasional yet
slight interference to the voice, rather than placing it
in an aural void; and secondly, narrative crafting conservatively
favours classical 'peaking-and-troughing' which stimulates
drama through variance in dynamics, rather than pummeling
the audience with a sonic onslaught.
Most scenes in BRING IT ON start with the explosive introduction
of a music track as if you have jumped in a car and turning
on the engine has simultaneously turned on the radio at
full volume. The music then sits underneath the dialogue
of the scene, but never low enough to feel separate from
the socio-musical realm of the characters. Kids listen to
music loud, so they must talk loudly over it. It is arguable
that conventions of sound mixing for film are out of synch
with people's ability to hear 'through' the noise which
surrounds us, so it is refreshing when a film acknowledges
the currency of this through its mix. Not that the dialogue
is ever hard to decipher, or that the film is noisy per
se, but BRING IT ON recreates the aural energy of being
in a space where volume is an issue which affects communication;
the hyper-compaction of the vocal ducking facilitates this
well.
Editing rhythms both support and enforce this aesthetic.
The contemporary template of this type of hyper-compaction
is to be found in Thelma Schoonmaker's editing of the dynamic
bind between voice-over narration and song-over score in
Scorsese's GOODFELLAS. BRING IT ON is like a screaming teen
energy version of GOODFELLAS 'solo voce' opera; the former
unleashes its energy in a flashing present, while the latter
orchestrates its energy in a contemplative past. Both films,
though, rely on a clearly defined integration of aural levels
and sonic rhythms between the cut and the mix. One operating
in ignorance of the other would deliver an unbalanced combine,
such as is the case in something like AMERICAN PIE which
clearly separates voice from music from score from film
in a clinical and totally unerotic way. BRING IT ON drives
on its energy like a fuel within the body of the text: the
cheer leaders are always engaged in responding to music,
through being energized by its erotic pulsation, choreographing
body movements to it, and chanting slogans and call-signs
over its amplified presence. Song has a distinct use-value
for the film's characters, and its placement is rendered
compatible with their physicality.
The finale of the tournament and its confrontation between
the East Compton team (as black as) and the Burbank team
(as white as) takes place in the ground zero of American
teen energy: Fort Lauderdale, Miami, site of many an atomic
detonation of teen energy in the movies (see Sean Cunningham's
SPRING BREAK for the most frighteningly pornographic version).
An interesting musicological schism culminates here in the
opposing of the LA (ie. Hollywood versioning) sound of energetic
dance pop as exemplified by the Euro-House sample stabs
reimported into the West Coast by the likes of CC &
Factory's Everybody Dance Now against the multi-faceted
fractalized cut-up of the current Miami mutation between
old school Miami Bass (itself a regional take on East Coast
Electro) and the UK sound of Jump-Up (itself a collision
between Hip Hop, Drum & Bass and Electro). While the
Burbank team originally went for the pop sound, they learnt
from the East Compton team the power of the underground
sound. In the climactic finale, both teams use similar tracks
which provide a breathless and breath-taking soundtrack
to the dynamic body scores of their routines, like watching
a group version of an aerobics doubles tournament. Surprisingly,
the underdog team (East Compton) wins, enabling a form of
social justice to overcome dramatic resolution in the film
- another progressive element of the film which other so-called
non-mainstream films would not consider due to their intent
to craft a 'well-told resolved story'. Again, it is refreshing
that an American film foregrounds race when dealing with
music, considering the tense history (and present) of criss-crossing
racial appropriations of pop and folk forms which gives
life to so much music.
But let's put things in context here. BRING IT ON is dressed
in the narrative regalia of competitive sport. Sports should
allow people to kill each other. That way the winners can
be ultimately victorious and the losers can all become martyrs
- like tragic fools whose boats capsize in rich corporate
yacht races. All competitive team sports enact militaristic
stratagems, suggesting that deep down, people like war,
but they moan about it to feign worldly concern. (This is
why pseudo-intellectuals waxing lyrical and meaningful about
football is so offensive and gutless, and also why they
deny the abject theatricality of WWF Wrestling.) BRING IT
ON collapses dance, sport and spectacle in a way that the
base death drive which compels one to play or support sport
is erased by the vitality with which the cheer leaders expel,
eject and ejaculate themselves across the screen. Its stage
is a healthy pornorium within which teen energy - compounding
sexual, bodily and musical electricity - can both combust
and regenerate to the sound of the crowd. BRING IT ON is
healthy - and believe it or not, it's not bad for you.
