I'll Take Generational Movies for Fun, Alex

“We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all.”

                                                                              -- Andrew (Emilio Estevez) in The Breakfast Club
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A student last year gave me a homework assignment.

“You know what you should do? If you really want to get to understand us, you should watch our movies,” this high school senior said.

“Which movies?”

At this point, he rattled off a list of about three or four movies. Some of them I’d actually heard of. “You know what, I’ll bring some in for you.”

A couple days later, he came in with a nondescript brown plastic bag (perfect once I saw the movies). I opened it to find my homework: Superbad (2007), Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008), Anchorman (2004), a standup comedy video from Eddie Griffin, Friday After Next (2002) and How High (2001). Imagine the look on my wife’s face coming into the living room during one of the racier sex/drug scenes from How High. “I’m doing homework, I swear.”

What a great assignment. Fun. But also an exercise in thematic development, and reflection.

I responded with a thanks, and a list of movies from my teenage years. “If you really want to get to understand me …” type of thing. Quid pro quo.

It was tougher than I thought. The easy route was to take the most popular movies of the day: Animal House, Blues Brothers, The Terminator. But those were little reflection on teenage life. (Animal House is the closest but that was really about college in the 1960s rather than high school in the early ‘80s.) I began my list quickly with Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and The Breakfast Club (1985), but then stumbled several minutes before recalling Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Risky Business (1983) and Revenge of the Nerds (1984).

My wife – a fellow English teacher whom I also gave the assignment – said it was interesting because you’d get different lists depending upon the individual’s gender and geography. (She grew up on Long Island suburbia while I was raised in Idaho farm country.) Fast Times didn’t even reach her radar; she went more John Hughes with Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club.

A great follow up assignment would be a comparison piece between different people and/or different generations. For example, I was somewhat disheartened after viewing my student’s list, and thinking how this young inner-city African American boy and his peers were being inundated by distorted Hollywood messages about sex, drugs, profanity and a general lackadaisical – if not antagonist – view toward school and work.

Then I looked at my own list. Spicoli, Guido the Killer Pimp, “Bueller, Bueller, Bueller…?”

Maybe we’re not so different. Good lesson.

ALTERNATE LESSON:  For further work in thematic development and reflection, have students list their favorite songs and analyze what that says about their times or their personality.

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