The ‘Nice’ Nuking of the Nuclear Family
THE TV TEENAGE DAUGHTER
Think everyone in a Dom Comwith two X chromosomes is closer to Earth? Boy howdy, you haven't met this kid!
A standard member of the Dysfunctional Family, the Bratty Teenage Daughter is a natural offspring of the Bumbling Dad and his level-headed wife (who herself may have been one). The Bratty Teenage Daughter is a whiny, self-involved girl at That Age. She obsesses over the latest fashions and is incredibly boy-crazy, often more so than her parents think. The two may combine to create conflict with her parents over what she wears. If she ever dates someone, expect her father to instantly turn into a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad. Basically, she will either go around acting like a Drama Queen and wangsting up over every minor little thing ("My life is ruined!") or else she will just roll her eyes exasperatedly at the "wacky" hijinks the rest of the family gets up to, often becoming a bit of a sullen killjoy in the process.
Her most valued personal possession is the phone. She talks and/or texts endlessly on it with her friends, and breaks down when she's without it. In older media, this will lead to a confrontation with Mom where she tells her to stop tying up the phone lines. Today, these confrontations are likely to revolve around her being glued to her cellphone 24/7. In either case, the loss of phone privileges is often a go-to punishment. If she’s rich, she’ll be a Spoiled Brat.
The natural enemies of the Bratty Teenage Daughter are assorted Annoying Younger Siblings, her Aloof Big Brother who usually treats her with scorn, as well as anything else that upsets the status quo of her little world as she sits in her room listening on her headphones to the latest music from that hot pop star she has a huge crush on. She will be more averse to the Horrible Camping Trip than any other member of the family (and probably act like a City Mouse on that trip), near-continuously complaining about breaking her nails or how much she would rather be at the mall.
She tends to be a supporting character, with the show's focus usually only being put on her in the event of a Very Special Episode about drugs, underage sex, etc. Often (but by no means always) an Alpha Bitch or a Brainless Beauty. If she's not, expect her to hide it carefully since smart people are never cool at that age. Is usually one of the sisters caught up in The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry. She can easily become The Scrappy if she's whiny and grating enough.
If the teenage daughter is the show's protagonist, she probably won't be this character, or at least, not as extreme a version. May sometimes have a brother in the Dumbass Teenage Son. She also tends to love shopping and is often easily-embarrassed. Due to her mood swings she is most likely one of the emotional temperaments of the Four-Temperament Ensemble, like sanguine or melancholic. She is more likely to be the Girly Girl of the Tomboy and Girly Girl ensemble.
If the show covers enough time, say if it's a Long Runner or involves a Time Skip or Revival, don't be surprised if she has children of her own and gets a taste of what she put her parents through.
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That’s a direct lift from a major website called TV Tropes, which I urge everyone to subscribe to. It’s as funny as The Babylon Bee, and it’s also deeply instructive about how mere purportedly audience-friendly content is, in fact, part of an ongoing subversion of what we used to consider normal family life. It’s not my usual practice to grab big chunks of other people’s work, but I’m making an exception for this, because this post and its many links demonstrate that the creators are onto something important that has many interconnections with all kinds of tendentious portrayals of American life.
My suggestion? Take the links, as many as you can, and then go back and take the links from the links. It’s a very big world they’re gutting here for our enlightenment. Just for fun? Yes and no. The world they’re exposing is a fiction, of course, and the reductive portrayals could be dismissed as satirical if they weren’t so universally consistent. Are they true? That’s the important question here.
I have my own theories about that, as I generally do. My perspective obviously tends toward consideration of the writing source as a first step. Who’s our archetypal screenwriter for this body of work? My suspicion is that the best place to look for the current crop of TV and B-movie screenwriters is the contemporary high school movie. I’ve watched a lot of these over the years for the simple reason that I didn’t go to high school and thus know virtually nothing about the typical high school experience. There may be elements in common between public schools and all-boys boarding schools, but I don’t know with any degree of certainty what they are. I am curious to learn as much as possible about what seems to so many the central formative experience of their lives. I’m an outsider to this vitally significant aspect of American culture.
So, I suspect, are the screenwriters of high school movies. Meaning they’re outsiders too, in the same way that standup comics are. It’s a population of people who don’t quite fit in, never have, and have therefore grown obsessive about observing and making fun of the stereotypical ‘types’ who never let them into the most popular cliques in their pubescent years. The screenwriter is the standup-behind-the-camera-comic, freed by a keyboard to take subtle (and not so subtle) revenge against the jocks, cheerleaders, bullies, and mean girls that single out the losers in the contests for sex, popularity, and belonging in the school community.
The protagonists in high school movies are more interesting than the tropes they ridicule when they’re not actively running from them. They’re already working on how they’ll write this chapter of their life stories. The movie we’re watching is their revenge or part of it. It can take a career, even a lifetime, to exact a full measure of justice in this arena.
The most obvious symptom of the passive-aggressive response is exaggeration, from mild to over-the-top into a realm of cliché, hysteria, violence, and gore. The lead jock is a psychopath. The lead cheerleader is a witch with a slavish coven. The most charismatic teacher is a criminal lecher and pedophile. Parents are buffoonish ciphers or left out of the script altogether. The school shooter is a victim turned inevitably bloodthirsty.
If the scriptwriter is male, his outsider typically becomes a hero or a martyr. He kills the ones who need killing. Sometimes he dies in the end or walks away to the parking lot while the credits roll, ultimate fate undetermined. If the screenwriter is female, she has even more scope as an avenging angel, returning from the dead in a drop-dead-gorgeous body to kill everybody with her T&A, or building her own pseudo-male army to destroy utterly the sexual abusers who ruined their lives before they had a chance to be happy, whatever that means. There’s a whole genre of female vigilante movies in which hatred of men is depicted as anything from judiciously selective to orgasmically total.
By total coincidence, I stumbled on the most extreme version of the genre just the other day. 1997’s A Gun for Jennifer has become a kind of cult film and is cautiously lauded by many critics for its courage in going where most don’t dare to go. Here’s a trailer. There are two:
There’s another, longer trailer. Definitely NSFW. Don’t watch it.
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