If the success of Pitch Perfect is any indication, teens no longer want to be cool.
And who can blame them? Being cool seems exhausting. Being cool calls for dress codes, heavily curated social circles and late nights spent at hip events. (Those hip events seem tiring, too.) According to teen movie lore, to be cool you must walk a certain way, talk a certain way and wear pink on Wednesdays. Finally, you must be thoroughly hated, because even before Heathers dropped in the late 1980s (hello, Carrie), nobody wanted the cool kids to win.
In 90s teen films, adolescents were pitted against each other, and one side usually lost. Think Taylor in She’s All That or the bullies in Never Been Kissed and The Craft – all demonised without any real insight into what makes them so mean.
Today’s teen films have redefined cool. Now, coolness is kindness (The Hunger Games), tolerance (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) and understanding (The Fault in Our Stars). In this year’s The Duff (it stands for designated ugly fat friend), when Bianca Piper confronts her antagonist and reminds her that the concept of social hierarchy is very damaging, that’s cool.
In other words, happiness lies in opting not to participate in “cool” at all. Which is why the Pitch Perfect franchise, about a competitive a capella group, has struck such a chord with audiences.
There are two things Pitch Perfect champions: the power of female friendship, and the process of discovering oneself. But at the start of the movie, the concept of acapella singing is stigmatised – it’s not hip, its participants are over-enthusiastic, and the Bellas’s team leaders (played flawlessly by Brittany Snow and Anna Camp) are afraid to evolve.
That changes when Beca (Anna Kendrick) shows up, falls in love with the club and helps her leaders celebrate the uniqueness of each team member. This creates something powerful and leads the Bellas to victory. They’re proud to love something unabashedly, and they end up supporting each other without question.
It’s cool to watch Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) refuse to be subjected to sexism because she knows she’s stronger, better, and that her friends have her back. It’s cool to watch the Bellas come together after a brawl that includes projectile vomiting. It’s even cooler to see Beca accept the Bellas as her extended family and to forgive Camp’s character for a fall-out between them – instead of making her the enemy. Sincerity is cool. Understanding is cool. Trying hard and working hard are the coolest of all. And Pitch Perfect, for all its physical humour and solid one-liners by Elizabeth Banks, is a guidebook for banding together in the name of friendship and success.
The Pitch Perfect franchise has helped teen movies evolve from “you can’t sit with us” into the equivalent of an ever-expanding cafeteria table. We want the Bellas to succeed because they celebrate inclusiveness, and we want to be a part of their group because we know we can still be ourselves. There’s room for both the Laney Boggses and the Taylor Vaughans (who I’m sure had to have undergone some sort of trauma to be so mean).
So who cares about hierarchy, out-of-competition dress codes and hip late-night events? (Unless you do.) Because cool is no longer prescriptive – it’s whatever you want it to be.
