My name is Nicola, this is Brews, Hamish and Melissa. Today as a group we will discuss The Perks of Being a Wallflower directed by Stephen Chbosky (also the author of the book, from which the movie is adapted).
The coming of age teen film, which was released in cinemas in September 2012, navigates, the main character Charlie’s first, or in American terms “freshman”, the year at high school. To give a little bit more insight into the film, for those who have not seen it, we have a short trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0nTfbg24Qs
As can be seen in the trailer, the film explores several themes including fitting in and friendship. However, what the trailer fails to represent are the deep and more significant themes The Perks of Being a Wallflower explores such as sexuality, mental illness, drugs and sexual experimentation and finally paedophilia. Such significant teen issues are what made us a group choose the film to analyse and shaped how we have discussed it in terms of why it can be classified as a popular film.
On that note, Brews will begin the following discussion exploring what such a storyline reflects in terms of authorship and Steven Chbosky while contextualising the teen issues included in the film. I will then discuss how the film's exploration of such teen issues, along with the use of certain tropes and conventions used in previous films, classify the film as not only part of the teen genre, but the subgenre of teen melodrama. Hamish will then move onto film formula and narrative style, while Melissa will analyse the film in terms of its distribution and exhibition and use of stardom as a marketing tactic.
The Perks of being a wallflower this film has all the typical teen film tropes, but meanwhile very different from any other teen films, because it’s super serious! The film tried to explore some taboo issues happening to teenagers, specifically homosexuality, suicide, paedophilia.
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Charlie (Logan Lerman), Sam (EW) and Patrick (Ezra Miller). Each one of them has their own mental issues.
Patrick is a gay…
Charlie’s best friend Michael Dobson from middle school commits suicide.
Sam got sexually abused by her father’s boss…
Charlie got sexually abused by his aunt Helen…
But in the film, all these matters come across in a very implicit way.
A critic said that Charlie's coming of age story is particularly interesting because he must overcome and deal with the fact that he was sexually abused by his aunt. Overall, Charlie's quest for growth and adulthood drives the plot of the whole story.
Two main factors cause youth mental illness according to Australian Institute of Health and Welfare:
• Negative early life experiences - abuse, neglect, a death of a relative or other losses and trauma.
• Bad current social circumstances - school, work, financial, relationship or family stress, or negative life events.
After I watched the film, I was so interested in the questions:
How did Stephen Chbosky develop the protagonist, Charlie? Did Charlie have any relation to his own adolescence?
According to an interview with Stephen Chbosky, he has always said the book is very personal to him, but it isn’t necessarily autobiographical.
He didn’t so much develop Charlie as Charlie came to himself, but he has many of those thoughts and feelings about people and the world as same as Charlie does. For example People only accept the love they think they deserve.
He had been thinking about this story for around five years: these images of a kid standing up in a tunnel and this girl Charlie finds beautiful. And these parties he goes to. All those details and impressions one day clicked him, and then he finished the whole book within a few months.
Stephen Chbosky thinks that popular fiction for teens is mainly aimed at girls because they are the ones who buy it. In contrast, most of guys like fantasy or horror or war books. It has been the norm for a long while.
Charlie reads the American classic novel The Catcher in the Rye many times over in the film. And Stephen Chbosky likes how people could compare Charlie to Holden Caulfield who is the novel’s protagonist and was the first icon for teenage rebellion in the 1950s. They are both very different people with unique problems and perspectives and since becoming popular with adolescent readers for their same issues of teenage angst and alienation.
Genre
Although originally a novel, the film itself is a salient example of the teen film genre. This is proven through The Perk’s of Being A Wallflower’s reuse, or repetition, of “age old” teen film conventions, which date all the way back to the classic Hollywood era.
The first of these conventions is the use of setting. Like most other teen films – Clueless, Mean Girls, Rebel Without A Cause, The Breakfast Club, the list goes on, The Perks of Being A Wallflower is set in the domain of the teen – the family home, school and school events, sporting events, prom, the mall etc. Just looking back at the trailer, we see Charlie navigate his first day at school, school dances, school football games, high school parties and school graduation. Accordingly, Timothy Shary in his book Generation Multiplex would classify The Perks of Being a Wallflower under the subgenre of school films, where the education setting becomes an index for youth issues.
The second of these conventions is the exploration of coming of age and “rights of passage” themes and plots. This includes storylines such as the main character’s first kiss, first sexual encounter, first time drinking, which we see again in many previous teen films. For example, as an audience, we see In the Perks of Being a Wallflower Charlie’s first kiss, his first time experimenting with drugs, his first time in love.
A third convention The Perks of Being a Wallflower plays on is the use stereotypes. Catherine Driscoll in her book Teen Film: A Critical Introduction argues the systematic use of character stereotypes is a central characteristic of the teen genre. You know, jock characters like John Tucker from John Tucker Must Die, Brian the nerd/outsider from The Breakfast Club, the Regina George popular girl, the Jim Stark rebel. Like previous teen films, The Perks of Being a Wallflower utilises such stereotypes – Firstly, Charlie the main character plays the literature nerd/outsider, or in this case “Wallflower” stereotype. Then you have Brad, the jock, Patrick the high school gay and even Mr Anderson, the typical supportive and somewhat inspirational teacher.
However, in our analysis of the Perks of Being a Wallflower, we found that often such stereotypes were turned into archetypes, a very different trend to teen films before it. For example, Brad, the high school football star, is a closeted gay. As a group, we found this came down mostly to the film’s exploration of serious teen issues.
This exploration of heavy and somewhat taboo issues such as homosexuality, drugs, mental illness further distinguished The Perks of Being a Wallflower from the teen genre at large. Instead, it can be further categorised as a teenage melodrama. The teen melodrama, as we have discussed in class previously and as Timothy Shary would define – films that took adolescent conditions seriously, rather than bundling them in juvenile high jinx or faddish trends. Like previous movies before it – The Breakfast Club, Splendour in the Grass, Me Earl and The Dying Girl, Girl, Interrupted, The Perks of Being A Wallflower takes adolescent issues seriously. Thus, a group we categorise The Perks of Being a Wallflower as a teen melodrama.
Film Formula
As is probably news to nobody, Hollywood films tend to follow specific formulas they know have been successful in the past, as a way to keep making money without any risk. These formulas depend on the film genre, and arguably the subgenre may depend on the formula used (or vice versa).
The genre of the film was brought up earlier, but we can delve into it even further. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a dramatic “coming of age” film, but that label doesn’t really mean anything on its own. Bentahia et. al listed several common features of this kind of film:
- An adolescent character making the mental transition between being a child and being an adult (usually accelerated to a matter of months due to film time constraints, though this transition typically takes years in reality). There are so many different ways for a character or a person to “grow up”, but a personal change in some way is a must.
- The central character is usually a mid-teen male.
- The story is usually told by the narrating main character who is now older, which essentially makes the majority of the story a flashback.
Additionally:
- Coming of age films are typical “dramady” (a combination of drama and comedy), which makes them prone to switching tones really quickly (mood whiplash). They can also be pure drama and tragedy films.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower absolutely fits these qualifications.
As well as the film genre and sub genre conventions, there are certain storylines that keep reoccurring. According to Booker (2004), there are only seven basic plots that a story could follow:
- Overcoming the Monster
- Rags to Riches
- The Quest
- Voyage and Return
- Comedy
- Tragedy
- Rebirth
It would take too much time to explain all of them, but The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and in fact the majority of “coming of age films” consist of the Rebirth plot.
“During the course of the story, an important event forces the main character to change their ways, often making them a better person.”
Basically, the protagonist lives under a shadow of some kind. Things go fine for a while, and the threat has apparently disappeared, but then it returns even stronger. Everything seems hopeless and the threat has nearly triumphed until a “miraculous redemption” occurs, allowing the protagonist to fight back and win.
Vague, but it still fits. In this instance, the “shadow” Charlie lives under is his mental illness. With his new friendships he seems happier and gains confidence, but it all comes crashing down when his actions strain his relationships in the group. He seems worse than ever but is able to prove himself and win them back by defending Patrick in front of the school. Later his emotional state deteriorates further as some repressed memories come back to him and he is hospitalised, but Sam and Patrick visit and help him. The film ends on a positive note, with Charlie’s improvement and his friendships repaired.
For reference, some other films with a Rebirth plot are Megamind, Sleeping Beauty, and Schindler’s List. Note that the plot description doesn’t exactly have to be literal. For the seven plots to collectively account for every story, by definition they have to be quite vague.
Narrative Style:
The Narrative style of The Perks of Being a Wallflower is mostly the standard classical Hollywood cinema style, described by Bordwell (1986), so the focus is on continuity editing and narrative logic.
While the whole film can be seen as a flashback as I mentioned before, things still occur chronologically, with the exception of a few additional flashbacks functioning as Charlie’s repressed memories returning. There are many instances where time jumps forwards suddenly in the form of a smash cut (rather than the traditional jump cut), but as this usually coincides with Charlie’s narration beginning a new letter, it’s thematically appropriate.
Finally, as is typical in classical Hollywood cinema, the narrative is indeed a chain of cause and effect, with the characters being responsible for advancing the story. The characters have their own individual traits and goals, and things don’t just happen randomly, every event is directly caused by the actions of a character (whether deliberately or accidentally).
Thanks for listening friends. Next up, Melissa is going to talk about distribution, marketing, and all that good stuff.
Promotion/Marketing/Distribution
So now I’ll move us on to outside the film itself and look at some of the marketing, promotional and distributional aspects that contribute to having this film be an example of popular teen cinema.
Relatability is a huge part of making a popular teen drama and in the promotion of this film, common and stereotypical teen elements are utilised to draw in and emphasise the teen audience. Looking at the promotional poster for Perks we can see that it’s quite simple, however, there are various visual elements implemented to help appeal to teenagers. The depiction of the main character Patrick, Sam and Charlie standing next to each other and use of a bright, green/yellow background are two common elements when looking at other teen film posters. By doing a quick search on teen film posters, you can see a pattern, whereby there is incorporation of a particular colour to represent a film, like orange for Juno or pink or Mean Girls and then having the poster also depict the main characters in a group, like you can see in the ’10 Things I Hate About You’ poster or poster for ‘American Teen’. This contrasts to posters from other genres, such as drama, where the palette is generally much darker. The film trailer also demonstrates a semi stereotypical teen narrative in typical teen settings…that being, in a high school, dinner, at homecoming, in a bedroom addressing issues like belonging, friendship, heartbreak, bullying and trials and triumphs of growing up. David M. Considine in his book, ‘The Cinema of Adolescence’ states that there is ‘little doubt that Hollywood has contributed to the ethos of adolescence, depicting the rituals and rights of passage it imagines to be the youthful reality.’ The trailer doesn’t mention any of the deeper, more serious issues which make up a large part of the narrative in the film, as the overall aim of this film is to play on and spread the idea of hopefulness to those in adolescence.
Having a look at music…in this film, music plays a pivotal role in most teenagers lives and this film makes music not only a big part of the narrative often through the exploration of mixtape culture, but also a key contributor in the film’s promotion and distribution. Pop music can be seen as a common musical genre found in teen cinema because of a) pop music is often upbeat, energetic and in a major key, making the tone brighter, and b) mainstreamed pop music sells both music records/OST and movie tickets/DVDs. In the film’s trailer, the featured song is a pop rock song called ‘It’s Time’ by Imagine Dragons. However, this song isn’t featured anywhere in the actual film nor is it in the Original Soundtrack (OST). What’s interesting but is no coincidence is that this song was one of the single releases for Imagine Dragon’s new album which was released in early September of 2012, while the film was premiered at Toronto Film Festival in early September as well and in cinemas on September 21st. Furthermore, at the time of the film trailer release, the featured trailer song would have been getting mainstream radio play, therefore enticing people to think of the film every time they heard the song, working in itself as a promotional tool.
Also, the songs in the OST are mostly 70’s and 80’s pop classics which trigger a sense of nostalgia. Having a modern song be the feature song for the trailer further emphasises the promotional value of the film trailer. Some of the tracks included throughout the film are ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie, ‘Come on Eileen’ by Dexy’s Midnight Runners and ‘Asleep’ by The Smiths. In an interview with Stephan Chbosky, by the Los Angeles Times, Chbosky explains that since the book was released in 1999, he wanted to make a film that a current teenager could relate to while also appealing to their parent’s sense of nostalgia, relating back to the idea of a different era, same issues. In using easily recognisable musical works, reflection on past adolescence and memories of that time can be more easily triggered, as those songs would have held a more prevalent place in many people’s lives, achieving Chbosky’s goals.
Lastly, recognition also plays a major part in the commercial success of this film when considering its casting decisions and use of stars. The film uses many recognisable stars, of whom have all been in other teen films or television series’. The character of Charlie is played by Logan Lerman, who is known for his role as Percy Jackson in the Percy Jackson film series, Emma Watson who we all know played Hermione in the Harry Potter film series, Nina Dobrev from The Vampire Diaries and Paul Rudd, who played Josh in Clueless. By selecting stars who have previously worked in teen film and television, audiences are presented with a sense of familiarity. When looking at the numbers, the cost of production for the film was just over 16 million (AUD) and in the box office, made 42.1 million (AUD). Outside of the USA, the highest amount of ticket sales was in the UK, making over 3.5 million (USD), Australia and Italy. Jeremy G. Butler’s discussion on stars and idea of structured polysemy can be connected to Emma Watson, as curiosity from the public and media into seeing how she would perform ran high as it was Emma’s first film after having fully completed the Harry Potter series and although seemingly irrelevant, was her first film after cutting her hair, which was as much a symbolic choice as it was a stylistic one as she felt ready to break away from the routine, scrutiny and pressure of being Hermione. Emma Watson can be seen as a crossover between a perfect and selective fit for her role as Sam. Emma’s desire to show a different side of herself in real life meshes with her character, Sam, making her in this sense a ‘perfect fit’. However, she is also a selective fit, as her prominence in the Harry Potter films would draw public curiosity in seeing her perform in something outside of that realm, further driving sales.
Conclusion
In taking on relatable teen themes, like belonging, bullying, heartbreak and the responsibilities of growing up, Chbosky aims for The Perks of Being a Wallflower to ultimately be recognised as a hopeful film. It demonstrates that it is in our friendships where we find solace in the turbulent time of adolescence and is represented in the film’s final scene where Charlie, Sam and Patrick drive through a tunnel, reaching its end as if to symbolise that they have reached the light at the end of the tunnel. Therefore, with the film’s narrative style in conjunction with its commercial success and the success of the original 1999 novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower can be considered a valuable piece of popular, teen cinema.
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