Director Jeffrey Blitz is best known for his documentary Spellbound, all about the USA's peculiar but dear spelling bee tradition. The film is striking for how it uses the framework of the spelling bee to trace the prepubescent lives of kids from a range of backgrounds; what it shows us is how, through the common pursuit of the arcane art of spelling, all kinds of kids can express sides of themselves that they might not otherwise have known they had. Competition is the watchword for all of them, whether they come from poor, immigrant backgrounds or wealthy suburban ones, and we spend a lot of time watching the spellers drilling and memorizing, disciplining themselves to learn reams of roots while sacrificing lazy downtime with their friends.
Blitz has stayed on the subject of adolescence, but has moved from documentary to comedy, and from spelling to speech. In Rocket Science, he tells the story of a new kid who is also a stutterer finding his way through the unlikely avenue of the debate team. The new film is a coming of age story told in the mode of Harold and Maude and Being There--sharp and smart and funny, but still serious, moving, a little bit dark and at times touchingly sweet. Rocket Science won the director prize at this year's Sundance Festival.
Why adolescence? Blitz says it's because we all have easy access to those years, because they are so formative for us:
"I took a sewing class in junior high school," says writer-director Jeffrey Blitz, who made a splash a few years ago with his documentary Spellbound, but has since shifted gears to make his first narrative feature, the teen comedy Rocket Science. "I was so upset that I had to take sewing that, for my big project, I wanted to make a pair of gigantic underpants.”“My teacher was like, 'No, we're not going to let you make a pair of gigantic underpants. That's completely inappropriate,'” he continues. “So I made a vest for myself instead and then I stuffed it so it would be a cold weather vest, and all the stuffing just immediately sank down to the bottom. I'm sure my parents still have that. It's really bad."
"I think I have easy access to those junior high school, high school years still. I think most people do. I think there's a lot of formative stuff that goes on there that most people hang onto."
But there's more than just memory underwriting the perennially popular genre of teen films and television shows centered on kids growing up. Whether it's The Wonder Years, Freaks and Geeks, The Breakfast Club, My So-Called Life, Napoleon Dynamite, or even Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the classics all have one thing in common: They all use the coming of age story as a way to explore the problems and possibilities of freedom. Unconstrained by the adult world, the kids in these films and shows find themselves enormously constrained by the rigid social hierarchy of school and by the repressive power of adults. They can sense the promise of freedom, but they are not free to be free. Often, they can only experience freedom by breaking a rule -- and in so doing, they explore in the most fundamental manner the most elemental aspect of liberty: choice. Choices are assertions of liberty, and they have consequences that often show us the price we pay to express ourselves. This is always true, but it is especially so for those of us who are not yet of age, and who do not yet enjoy the full use of our constitutional rights.
We watch these shows and see these films--sometimes over and over, so often that we have parts of them memorized--because we are entranced by their treatment of freedom. They are more complex than they know--and they remind us of the moment when we first began to understand what a complicated, beautiful, and consequential thing liberty is.