Seemingly staged "documentary"

bwaynef

Although I like documentaries, I tend to favor those about historical events or historical figures with film clips and an off-screen narrator rather than those in which a camera follows "real" people around, supposedly capturing events as they occur without benefit of, well, you know, a script. The presence of a camera changes everything, does it not? The presence of a camera is only too obvious in "American Teen," a supposed documentary that I found as believable as any TV "reality show" or your average bestselling memoir.

In this film, the subject is a group of Idaho teenagers who are experiencing their final year of high school. The kids themselves are all stereotypes, even if they are "real." There's the popular girl, the jock, the nerd, the misfit, etc. These are all average kids, we're told, but how many average kids would be willing to subject themselves to exposure in a documentary? Of course, I speak as someone who grew up in the days before the Internet and Facebook, both of which seem to have led to an epidemic of narcissism and a complete lack of concern about something as silly as privacy, so maybe I'm out of touch. Still, it's rather apparent that some of the incidents in "American Teen" are staged.

The most obvious example of pre-planning is when Megan, the popular girl, gets back at someone for an offense I don't remember, by spray-painting a nasty word and a nastier drawing on his window. She does it even though she's well aware that she's being filmed. Later, while the cameras are still running, she worries about the possibility of getting caught. Of course, she is caught and called on the carpet by the principal, and it's all caught on film.

"American Teen" is a phony, and proof that, if you really want to tell the truth, do it with fiction.

Brian W. Fairbanks

score 4/10

bwaynef 18 January 2011

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2371745/