Charlie Lyne’s Kickstarter funded documentary BEYOND CLUELESS takes an earnest, deconstructive approach to the teen genre, and offers a refreshing alternative to the ubiquitous “talking head” nostalgia clip show. When we spoke to Lyne about his vision, he described his personal fascination with the genre, and his appetite for its untapped potential as a film discipline. Unfortunately, though, his personal insights and curiosities wave and then drown, in a mesmerically riffling onslaught of clips and quips.
The time scale is easy to pick up but the genre is not clear – not all of the films align so neatly with the “teen movie bingo” element, and outliers such as IDLE HANDS and FINAL DESTINATION are the sidelined, glaring goths of the compilation. Throughout the smartly orchestrated sequence of film titles, icons and influences, we linger on images and patterns rather than contexts and signifiers. A heavy focus on catchphrase dialogue and paint-by-numbers imagery flattens swathes of the film, while the more trend-bucking performances and conceits fly by in affectionate clip-shows and artful muso-montages. Some of the visual sleight-of-hand might have been exchanged for a deeper and more indulgent narrative examination. Balanced with a more interactive voiceover, this approach would have better honoured the honest integrity of the research, and the cleverly selected source material.
The documentary starts with a false step – a clunking and spoilery précis of THE CRAFT. Here and elsewhere, insight gives way to a dry summary of events, marking patterns and tropes with little more depth than Lyne’s own Buzzfeed list article on the subject. Fairuza Balk’s narration has a defused show-and-tell restraint which stifles her personality and flattens the commentary. Lyne describes an “outside looking in” approach that explains the reasoning behind this Brechtian style, but such a conceit works better where it’s used diegetically, in actual spoofs of teen drama – for instance, the character of Randy Meeks, the horror film expert in SCREAM who accurately predicts events as they unfold.
… layered trope and cliché bring out the beauty and complexity in the dumb beast …
Lyne watched 300 films when researching the documentary, and for the most part has chosen wisely, avoiding the obvious – but there are a couple of doubtful guests. For instance, the homoerotic tones he notes in JEEPERS CREEPERS are not only well known, but also deeply tainted by Victor Salva’s notorious reputation as a sexual predator of young boys. The Creeper is Salva’s Mary Sue, and invoking JEEPERS creates a rotten bruise in the compilation that would have been better avoided. The A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET franchise is just as ripe with high-school imagery and closet-homo undercurrents, but far more harmless – and Nick Hurran’s gender-swap comedies, touched on briefly in the documentary, are begging to be analysed as metaphors for “coming out”.
The film’s format is just too restless and excitable to support the considered approach Lyne hoped to apply. His visual classification of layered trope and cliché brings out the beauty and complexity in the dumb beast, but there’s a frustrating superficiality. This is of course appropriate to the genre, and the consciously meta way that the documentary itself echoes the structure and focus of a teen movie holds the promise of a subversive CABIN IN THE WOODS flavour. However, BEYOND CLUELESS shares qualities that hamper the genre, such as insularity and repetition. Lyne commented in our interview that teen movies are persistently self-absorbed, rarely reflecting real-life events or locations – and BEYOND CLUELESS is no exception, obliquely referencing the Columbine school shooting and featuring clips from ELEPHANT, but barely examining the way the massacre was mirrored in movies. The American teen’s social hierarchy and sexuality are considered briefly, but key themes are overlooked – such as the internecine potential of the American jock/nerd fiefdom, the depiction of late 90s gender politics, or the genre’s paucity of black characters. In any case, the collection isn’t limited to US output – for instance, GINGER SNAPS is Canadian. The net has been cast very wide despite the deliberately narrow time period. The teen genre is indeed a class dismissed too often by film scholars, but unfortunately BEYOND CLUELESS doesn’t succeed in showcasing its myriad seams of social anthropology and psycho-sexuality.
httpvh://youtu.be/DEz8pdxslYU