“Stay with her. It's the best advice I can give you. Oh, that, and bring rubber flip-flops in the shower. I got warts all over my feet.” This was the best advice given to Mike Dexter (Peter Facinelli) for college in the movie “Can’t Hardly Wait”. College is always represented on the silver screen as some larger than life entity. More chilling than a thousand knife-wielding maniacs, college as a movie topic is a powerful force if only because of the gravity of the reality following it. It drives men to foil administration at every turn to either graduate or stay in it (“Animal House”, “Van Wilder”). For high school students in movies, it’s something even more frightening: ‘the next step’ (“American Pie”).
Typically, college and high school kids were relegated to the lower echelon on the movie pyramid, having to settle with partying naked in graveyards just in time to get eaten by zombies or causing some great political cataclysm (“Return of the Living Dead” and “WarGames”). Then someone realized that people enjoyed watching movies where these characters weren’t doing some outlandish activity and instead did things that people their age actually do. For high school, the story was always the need to move forward: graduate, go to college, get a job, and sever the old friendships with people you probably won’t see again. Sometimes though, it’s just about remembering the good times and keeping your friends as you move forward, from Spicoli ordering pizzas in Mr. Hand’s class (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High”) to Preston Meyers getting his high school sweetheart (“Can’t Hardly Wait”).
College movies, it’s a different story: find purpose, graduate, move into the ‘real’ world, at whatever cost. In “Dead Man on Campus” two roommates try to find a suitemate desperate enough to kill himself so they can stay in school and inadvertently discover what they actually want to spend the rest of their lives doing. In “Road Trip” an accidentally sent tape of a sexual encounter to his girlfriend forces Josh Parker to realize what he needs to make it in college. If high school was about keeping your friends and finding yourself, college is about finding where you need to go and getting there. The worry is that you graduate without having it all figured out, and then you get sucked back in to college or into affairs with controlling women (“Old School” and “The Graduate”).
Regardless, it seems that everyone manages to drop into the role of adult just in time, and this is the climax of the picture.Remember that no matter what happens once you get ‘out there’, you’ve always got the memory of what happened during your time here. If there is one thing that all these movies can teach us, it is that life is not about the ending credits, it’s about the story before the credits. College loses it mysticism after you spend some time at it, and undoubtedly the real world will too. Like Mike Dexter, we tend to linger and hang on to the familiar, but high school and college are only gateways to the rest of our lives.
Aloha, Mr. Hand.
