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Back in 2012, Guardian film critic Charlie Lyne set up a Kickstarter to fund Beyond Clueless, promising a “part historical account, part close textual analysis, part audiovisual mood piece, and part head-over-heels love letter to the teen genre”. His documentary focuses on the period between 1995 and 2004, bookended by the ultimate teen movies, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless and Tina Fey’s Mean Girls. Lyne purports to offer a sustained analysis of cinematic depictions of high school, focusing largely on American films.
It quickly becomes clear that Lyne has no thesis to speak of. The film never outlines the parameters of its study, and doesn’t offer any definition of what constitutes a “teen movie”. Viewers may assume that a “teen movie” is a film targeted at a young adult audience, which takes place in a high school setting and features a cast of teenage characters. By including films like Mean Girls and She’s All That, Beyond Clueless would seem to fit this definition. However, Lyne departs from this definition to focus on films as broadly ranging as Y Tu Mamá También, American Beauty, and American History X. Lyne struggles with the scale of his subject, clumsily lumping together films as diverse as The Craft, 13 Going on 30, Bubble Boy, Final Destination and Spiderman. The film also fails to differentiate between the vast array of teen movie subgenres, discussing slasher films like Jeepers Creepers and I Know What You Did Last Summer in the same context as it deals with raunchy comedies such as Eurotrip and The Girl Next Door. This ignorance of genre is only one example of Beyond Clueless’s failure to build a coherent argument or reach a substantial conclusion.
The choice of films for discussion is simply bizarre. Lyne doesn’t establish any historical context, excluding any mention of John Hughes or the other films that laid the foundations for contemporary teen movies. His study also relies heavily on long-forgotten, critically-panned box office flops, neglecting such classics of teen movie history as American Pie, 10 Things I Hate About You, Bring It On, Scream, and even its namesake Clueless (which only appears as part of a clips collage), in favour of presenting lengthy synopses of Ginger Snaps, Slap Her She’s French and Disturbing Behaviour, suggesting that the films have been chosen out of convenience, a tactic which will be familiar to any student who has scrambled to link unrelated paragraphs in their own essays.
Lyne appears to be ignorant of the distinction between summary and analysis, as he rarely takes the discussion beyond a rudimentary survey of these movies, merely offering condensed descriptions of their plots. There are chapter titles that ostensibly tie the films together along general themes such as fitting in, rebellion and sexual awakening, but impressively designed section headings are no substitute for actual transitions. After a stretch of plot summary, we get such lines as “a lone wolf will always be a threat to the herd” and the observation that nonconformists threaten social order and must be “cast out or made over”. Lyne makes a stab at psychoanalytic criticism with his examination of the horror-comedy Idle Hands, blandly suggesting that cutting off body parts represents symbolic castration. There are a number of exceptions, such as the commentary on Eurotrip and Jeepers Creepers as explorations of gay panic, but these exceptions leave viewers wishing the rest of the documentary was as sharp. On top of this, Fairuza Balk’s narration is gratingly earnest and short on humour, emphasising how dry the documentary can be.
The greatest oversight is the inattention to any of the more challenging questions regarding teen movies. Lyne completely bypasses the issue of race in this overwhelmingly white genre. Beyond Clueless may impress middle-aged viewers unfamiliar with these films, but for a young audience, and especially a student audience accustomed to critical analysis, the documentary provides little more than a surface-level overview of a questionable selection of movies. For an audience that has grown up watching these films and is fully versed in their tropes, Lyne’s visual essay is ultimately unilluminating and offers nothing new. Lyne’s stylish editing and Summer Camp’s great soundtrack are not enough to save this exhaustingly dull film, and the audience will likely find themselves wishing they had chosen to watch one of these teen movies instead.
