Who cares about young people?

Ontario's new law that prohibits drivers under 21 from drinking any alcohol at all before driving reminds me of something an old friend said years ago.

He used to do market research, focusing particularly on young people, what attracts them to particular brands, what values they wanted to see in consumer products, etc. He pointed out that nobody cares about youth issues except youth themselves. Teenagers might rail about not being able to vote or drink or how their schools treat them or how they are targeted by the police. But then they turn of age, leave school and they don't care about those issues anymore. In fact, young adults often put a great amount of distance between themselves and "youth" issues. I know there are adults who advocate for young people and they do great work but they are an exception, and usually paid for their advocacy.

Which is why governments can get away with clearly unconstitutional laws like these. By the time someone gathers up steam to launch a proper court challenge, which can take years, their age makes them stop caring; they move on to other things. There is not enough continuity to create a genuine movement.

Imagine if this law was applied to any other group that's protected by the Charter, which protects people from discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability. For "under 21," imagine "men," "Protestants," or "Irish-Canadians." It could never happen. That's because these characteristics are (mostly) permanent and the affected individuals would stay affected for a long time, long enough to lobby against the law.

Youth is fleeting. Governments exploit that fact every time they take away young people's rights. It's politically pragmatic but it's hardly fair.

'Moon' child

Kristen Stewart? How has an actress so sullen, so dour and unemotive managed to steer the Twilight franchise into the hearts and pocketbooks of movie audiences worldwide?

So visibly awkward, it's like she's been coached not to hunch but keeps forgetting. Her chin juts like she's on edge even as her eyes zone out. Wear-wolfs? Vampires? Stewart's Bella seems ready to doze off any second or go stand in the corner and sulk.

Her very particular talent made sense in, say, Adventureland, where her character was the same sort of sullen beauty. But, setting her performance aside, we constantly hear the other Twilight Saga characters--from the vamps to the wear-wolfs to the cafeteria kids--obsess over her. They keep telling us she's special as they orbit around her like she has some special power. There's a tremendous disconnect but Stewart must be doing something wright. New Moon made more than $150 million domestically in its first weekend, quite an achievement for a film that, judging by the look of it, cost a fraction of the cost of other members of the $100-million-plus club.

I think it's because she's so utterly replaceable in the viewer's imagination. Any viewer who wants to imagine themselves as the focus of New Moon's very sexy love triangle--and that would be pretty much anyone who went to the film on their own steam--can banish her from registering on their cerebral cortex, leaving a blank spot onto which they can project themselves. She's not a star--someone who's inherently watchable--and she's no character actor either. We can essentially place our thumb between us and her face and let ourselves take part in the fantasy that her Bella doesn't really deserve.

Adventureland for boys

Though I thoroughly enjoyed Adventureland--set a grease fire in 1987 and I'd watch if only to hear "Dancehall Days" in the soundtrack--I came out feeling that it drew its female characters so thinly you could see misogyny through the ensuing rips and tears.

The film--its script, its direction and sensibility--certainly liked its male characters and the lead James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg, the library-card-owner's Michael Cera) deserved it, wearing his heart so loosely on his sleeve it fell off a couple of times. In some ways, it's a fantasy piece for the underdog in all of us. The film liked underdog Joel and even liked womanizer Mike Connelly (a blank faced Ryan Reynolds--who writes a summer teen comedy without writing a scene for the stud to take off his shirt?). Connelly might be a player and the villain (the first always leading to the other in Hollywood), but never raised his voice or made threats or did anything particularly degrading to his conquests. His worst crimes were wanting it all and lying about music (which sadly remains only a summary offence conviction, despite all my lobbying efforts).

But the ladies! The two moms were unforgiving shrews who, though one had her hair and one didn't, might have been interchangeable. There was the racist Catholic girl. There was the dumb, slut Catholic girl (who seemed to be in a more satirical movie than the twee gang around her) and then there was the love interest, Em, which had Kristen Stewart playing an even blanker slate than she played as Twilight's heroine. I don't think the film hated her. She was the love interest after all. But she was such a lobotomized object-of-desire, she was well beyond the realms of likeability. We have no idea why she's attracted to James, but she is, maybe. She seems smart, but not smart enough to see that she's one in a long series of girls sleeping with the stud. She's a bad girl, but one who confronts racism like a 90s activist. Her strange behaviour comes off as something of a midway game--those pop-up gophers, perhaps--that the hero must deal with in order to keep the plot churning along. But it does seem like the behaviour of a real teenager.

T.S. Eliot's kind of Spring

Except for all the multisyllabic German names and the harsh cut of the boy's school uniforms, Spring Awakening doesn't make much of a show of its late 19th Century German setting. Considering the 2006 musical version gleefully tampers with Frank Wedekind's play--I doubt the original had bare-butted simulated sex and lines about "My Junk" and being "Totally Fucked"--you wonder why they didn't go all the way and make the thing contemporary or in a more trendy conservative era like the early 1960s of Mad Men. I doubt you have to go back 130 years to find teenagers who believe in the stork stumbling innocently into sex, though I suppose I can more easily imagine young Germans than young Americans stumbling from innocence right into SM sex play.

Duncan Sheik's songs--the same sort of adult-oriented indie pop that made him beloved by critics way back on his debut 1996 album, that got him recognized as a smart songwriter that was perhaps out of sync with the industry's whims--are the show's main selling point. They're emotional without being theatrical, so we see the cast members grab a hand-held mic and break character every time they launch into one. The performances by the young cast are good but, since the soundtrack comes from MOR land, not Broadway, there are few opportunities to punch the audience in the gut.

Spring Awakening's caused some buzz for its racy content. You can see atypical theatre audiences buying into the passion. But as far as stage time goes, "happy sexual discovery," though its the main story line, accounts for about 15 percent. The rest is taken up by revelations of suicide, sexual abuse, pregnancy and abortion, with side trips to masturbation and homosexuality. Though it might claim to be an unexpurgated High School Musical--its teens Barbies moulded with genitalia intact--Spring Awakening actually comes a little closer to Jerry Springer: the Musical.

Musical high

What's astonishing about High School Musical 3 (I must plead ignorance on numbers 1 and 2 which didn't get theatrical releases) beside the joyous sweat and cuddly vim of the performances (was there a story there?) is how much cultural clutter the filmmakers must sweep away nowadays before we partake of goodhearted wholesome song and dance numbers.

And I don't just mean the de-sexed gay character, sashaying his choreography moves with his rhinestone jeans, asymmetrical argyle sweaters and pink-buuffanted backup dancers, though I can totally see Ryan Evans and his artsy prom date Kelsi boogying at a gay club in the East Village two or three years after graduation, if they're not already doing it on the weekends. Nor do I mean how the black kids get to be almost-main characters but not quite and how they can only date each other, each colour of this rainbow-coloured universe staying safely in its place. Or how Troy, because he's good at dancing, has to compensate by being hyper masculine in other ways: A glossy teen with perfect hair wouldn't have rummaged through a salvage yard for jalopy parts in any era, not even Archie Andrews. Or the victory party without drinks of any kind and the absence of drugs. I mean how everybody has to get out of the way of the heroine, Gabrielle, because she has to have zero personality characteristics except being sweet.

All the other female characters--and I should point out that the female friendships in HSM3 are closer to particle physics than intimacy--have singular defining characteristics: Sharpay's star-struck consumerism, Taylor's political ambitions, Martha's big-girl brains (she'll be at the clubs with Ryan and Kelsi soon), Kelsi's offbeat funkiness, Ms Darbus's striking similarity to Mrs. Doubtfire. Appropriately uniformed, they all do one thing extremely well. In the male world, you make your lead stand out among his peers by having him do everything well: Troy can sing, dance, play basketball, fix his car, bond with his friends, haze the juniors. His is alpha dog in all arenas. But Gabrielle? We're told repeatedly how great she is, but we never see her do anything particularly great except her swooning numbers with Troy. She's sweet, period. Even at Stanford, all she does is wander by herself, a damsel in distress as yet unaware that she needs to be rescued. It's true that near the end of the film they do say she's going into pre-law, but it might have been medicine or film studies or engineering--I'm sure the writers just made her major up on the day. In order for her to be the romantic female lead, she has to be about absolutely nothing. It's the zen approach to femininity. Girls might be good at one thing or the other, but all that's going to get them is a beta. To rise to the top, to be the one everybody aspires to be, they must effortlessly be little more than a vessel for the leading man's dreams.