When I was in high school, the movies my friends and I hated most were
the ones packaged for teens--decrepit low-budget sex comedies, hack 'n'
slash cheapies set on increasingly obscure holidays, pseudo-hip swill based
on the trends of six months past. (My apologies to all partisans of
Joysticks, Graduation Day, or Breakin' 2: Electric
Boogaloo.) What we resented most was the insulting mirror these movies
held up to us. They said, in essence, "You kids are slack-jawed sheep, and
you'll buy anything we sell you." To this day, whenever I see ads for the
latest MTV-approved teen market-a-thon, I can feel the bile rising to the
back of my throat.
If I'd seen Rushmore when I was 15, the age of its megalomaniacal
hero Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), it would've been my favorite movie of
all time, chiefly because of its protagonist. Max the overambitious,
insecure teen entrepreneur is so precisely observed that he's an instant
archetype--the kind of kid who defensively tells a Harvard grad that
Harvard is his back-up school, or who fails geometry because he's too busy
keeping bees and mounting a stage production of Serpico. A go-getter
with zero tolerance for obstacles, he has everything except concern for
others, and in the end, he gets that too; in fact, that turns out to be the
missing piece that fits his profligate talents together. Who couldn't love
an odd-looking, bookish hero who triumphs in love, life, and drama club,
without ever once suiting up for the football team or bribing a cheerleader
for dates?
As it is, I love Rushmore so much I'm not willing to risk
reviewing it to death. Suffice to say that it's the rare American movie
that treats teens as part of a larger world that extends beyond high
school; that in the role of a lonely millionaire, Bill Murray has never
seemed so touching; and that in addition to his sweetness and generosity of
imagination, cowriter/director Wes Anderson has a gift for timed-release
jokes that make you giggle at first and laugh out loud in retrospect. But I
should probably add that I love Rushmore partially because it runs
so counter to what teenagers are market-tested to like.
Especially now. At the moment, Rushmore's competition for that
lucrative 18-25 youth demo includes Jawbreaker, a vile
Heathers clone about some popular high school girls who accidentally
kill a friend and decide to make it look like a rape--this is a comedy--and
She's All That, in which "plain" teen artist Rachael Leigh Cook is
persuaded by soccer jock Freddie Prinze Jr. to become a generic hottie.
Jawbreaker alone sends a veritable Western Union of mixed messages,
from anorexic body typing to snobbery, but both movies hold up bland
normalcy as a holy grail. With their mall-bound fashions and radio-tailored
soundtracks, they're like the glossy magazines in John Carpenter's They
Live, which bear subliminal messages like "Conform!" and "Obey!"
Somehow Rushmore allows Max to become a better person and to
succeed--for Wes Anderson, they're synonymous--without losing his
individuality or his ideas. Which makes it all the more galling that the
senile MPAA has seen fit to slap Rushmore with an R rating that will
keep the movie from viewers Max's age--even though the coarser She's All
That has a kid-friendly PG-13. For this reason, I wish luck to Rachel
Jrade and Emily McGrew, two teenage University School of Nashville students
who are challenging the MPAA's strictures regarding parental attendance at
R-rated movies. Something tells me Max Fischer would approve.
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