There’s something about summer that always brings back the feeling of being a teenager. For the fourth season of Girlhood Studies, Claire Marie Healy examines the close relationship between girlhood and the summertime: as we experience it in our lives, and re-experience it through visual culture. This edition will publish weekly, with one for every week of the school holidays.
High school is already a pressure cooker of feeling: and the last day before the summer break – or before graduation – progresses at the ideal temperature for all those feelings to implode. As depicted in the movies, the final day of the school year offers a concentrated environment in which to explore all the different tenses we associate with coming-of-age: instant nostalgia for an experience which is about to be past, the excitement of a day that you will only experience once in the present, and the feeling of the future being closer than ever before. Like adolescence, one of the surefire things about high school is that it will end: but also, much like our teenage years, the final day sticks with us like sweat under a nylon school shirt.
There’s plenty of masculine energy in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), which, upon revisiting, is so clearly about a bunch of grown adult men displaying unchecked aggression that the idea that any of them are 17 years old is laughable. Similarly, the girls appear to be not only fully grown women, but even include a fully-fledged supermodel (Milla Jovovich) in their number. Set on the last day (and night) of school somewhere in America in 1976, the clothes are rad, the bellbottoms wide, and the hair long. But while Linklater’s film is undeniably a neat, cheesecloth-wrapped time capsule, it also registers as timeless: something to do with how the notion of transitional moments is built into the very questions the characters are asking of themselves. The graduating class constantly ponder their oncoming futures and wax lyrical about which eras were superior (“maybe the 80s will be like … radical”). As my favourite character, the geek-coded Cynthia, puts it – she looks very much like a young Nan Goldin with her red bouffant of hair – “What are we preparing ourselves for (…) I’d like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor insignificant preamble to something else.” (Such existential thoughts of her waning girlhood, relatably, are what lead her to reconsider Matthew McConaughey’s character as “kinda cute”. We have all been there).
That moment of identity crisis of the classic “good girl” brings to mind a contemporary take on the Last Day of School/First Party of the Summer drama that, refreshingly, centres the experience and gaze of young women. Booksmart (2019), directed by Olivia Wilde, centres the pleasures of best friendship for teenage girls like few other mainstream films. I love the film: especially the moment, in the final hours of high school, when our protagonists realise all their peers also got into good colleges while maintaining an active social life.
One thing that Dazed and Confused captures so well about that last day – and what makes up for its masculine energy for us scholars of girlhood/s – is that the girls are nearly as mean as the guys. (Parker Posey is on excellent early form as an especially sadistic track runner). But as initial jock japes give way to the rest of the day’s proceedings – and a young freshman boy and freshman girl are welcomed into the older gangs’ group – Linklater’s film is also very tender. The way Sabrina, a junior, interacts with the older girls captures how large a single year seems at that age. It also ultimately captures a moment when that vast gap begins to lessen.
The best movies about the last day of school hint at the melancholy of such transitional life events. This is a time we tend to remember, for better or worse. Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye’s remembrances of her intimate friendship with her white high school best friend forms the narrative of her short 1990 film Janine (viewable on the Criterion Channel). In the autobiographical, straight-to-camera piece, Dunye recalls her “two secret worlds” in high school, the school life with upper middle class white girlfriends, and the freedom of weekends with her first woman lover. She describes how she didn’t join her class’s graduation celebrations: actually, it’s only once that senior year summer begins that she is able to coalesce those two selves, cutting her hair off and telling the titular best friend that she is a lesbian (something which ultimately ends that friendship).
What about when the sense of release promised by the last day gets taken away from you, or conditions render it not even possible? One project that captured that feeling was Alys Tomlinson’s Lost Summer photo series (2020), which captured girls and boys in London in the outfits they would have worn to their prom if Covid-19 hadn’t cancelled them altogether (one of them is AnOther Magazine’s own fashion assistant, Precious Greham). The traditions of pranking and partying on the last day of school might feel universal, but it’s still easy to forget that, in recent years, the experience of high school for an entire generation was deeply warped. It’s something that invests films like Dazed and Confused with even more nostalgia, in the sense of them showing us something that became impossible.