America's Average White Teens

Personally, I think the main issue with American Teen was the way the students were depicted to us. We all thought it was a mockumentary because the things each individual said sounded not only scripted, but it sounded like adults wrote lines for today's teens. Part of me hopes that the reason we all thought it was fake was because we're not used to seeing people's lives in that way. We notice our classmates may have issues like the students from American Teen, but we don't see it in such a detailed manner. Assuming the crew spent nearly every waking moment with these kids, they had such a large amount of footage they could have done anything. Out of hours of footage, they chose 95 minutes. Maybe they recreated certain interactions to make them more cinematic, or they had the students act out things that weren't filmed. 

I think there was one black kid in the whole film, and that's as far as this film's representation went. Aside from the race issues, the students themselves were mostly incredibly average. The person who had the most severe issues was Hannah. Megan's problems were not being sure if her top choice could accept her (which is something a lot of kids go through, so who cares about her), and experiencing the consequences of spray painting slurs on someone's house. Honestly, she was incredibly uninteresting and an overall terrible person. I don't remember Mitch at all. Colin was a little more interesting, but still painfully average. If the director's goal was to take the most average kids in some small town and glorify their boring lives, she succeeded. However, if the film had more students like Hannah who went through a severe issue that most kids don't experience or hear about, it would have been better. I really liked that about the film. They were able to show people what happens to some people. That some people go through very serious emotional problems, but we don't get to see how that person lives with it every day. The point is, aside from Hannah, all the storylines were bland. We all know what those kids went through because every kid goes through it. There are so many things happening to high schoolers, and we focused on the white girl who cares about prom more than she cares about other human beings, the jock who has to do something amazing for the team to win, some random kid who can't get a girlfriend, and I still don't remember who Mitch was.