![]() The cult film Donnie Darko (2001) could perhaps have been a notable contribution, with its neurotic teenage boy driven into schizophrenia by the adult world, making him carry out massive destruction at his high school, but the father is constructed largely as a friendly “regular guy,” and the film is burdened by a pointless and confusing sci-fi plot. ![]() The exceptional films, like Over the Edge (1979), show teens trying to attack very directly the avaricious, stifling adult world that dehumanizes them, continuing the more distinguished tradition of the teenpic established by Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1956), with its bisexual triad of James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo offered as an alternative to the bourgeois suburban family (we’ll set aside the blame the film places on the female for emasculating the father, a familiar trope of 50s culture). One can say, in retrospect, that films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) at least offer some spotty humor, and Heathers (1988) elements of rebellion. It is doubtful that he would be surprised by Hollywood’s current representation of kids, since what we now see is the logical playing-out of long entrenched assumptions not only about children but the society that produces them. ![]() teen culture flabbergasted Wood at the time. But it wasn’t too long before he was appalled. Many years ago Robin Wood wrote an essay (since included in the reprint of his Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond) on the post-Reagan teenpic, in part as a way in taking what he thought would be vicarious pleasure in the events of these films, his own teen years being highly repressed in what he termed a still-Victorian England. Although the boys must face legal sanctions, they are rewarded with a new respect back at the high school, where other kids now treat them as celebrities for hosting the by now well-known destructive orgy. The next morning we see the smoldering remains of Tom’s home, and witness his peeved father taking measure of the costly disaster-the father is angry but not too, since he seems gratified to know that his son “had it in him” (read, had enough manliness to cause violence of this magnitude). A battle with the police ensues, as news media helicopters fly overhead. The revelers destroy the house, and much of the neighborhood, the whole thing spinning far out of control when an angry drug dealer arrives with a flame thrower, setting on fire houses, cars, and shrubbery. The three boys are typically sex-obsessed, and plan the party as a means of getting “pussy.” Costa sends out an email “blast” and posts the party on the Internet, resulting in thousands of people descending on Tom’s home (his parents have conveniently left for an anniversary weekend). Costa, the organizer, plans the ultimate teen blast, mostly to impress their high school chums who taunt and bully them for their unprepossessing looks and “nerdish” behavior. Three teenage boys, Tom (Thomas Mann), Costa (Oliver Cooper), and JB (Jonathan Daniel Brown) throw a party celebrating Tom’s seventeenth birthday. The ad copy reads “From Todd Phillips, the director of The Hangover,” to assure kids that the current piece of rubbish offers the same or better delights than the last. Project X is a teenpic with a strong concern for targeting the right audience (nothing at all new here). I wanted to see it again not because I feared I missed something in the plot (there is hardly any of this, nor characterization, nor any meaningful exposition), but because I wanted to reflect on the film’s particular type of nullity, and the extent to which it embodies the current sensibilities of the youth audience. I have just re-screened on disc Nima Nourizadeh’s Project X (2012), which I saw in a nearby multiplex this past season.
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