Review of Icarus Films' Seventeen

Abstract

Review of Icarus Films' Seventeen The 1985 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize Documentary winner, Seventeen was produced for PBS in 1982 by Peter Davis and directed, photographed, and edited by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines. It is the most revealing, the most controversial, and (at 118 minutes) the longest of the six documentaries that comprise the 457minute Middletown Film Project, an ambitious attempt to capture the nitty-gritty cadence of life in 1982 Muncie, Indiana, that was inspired by earlier sociological texts Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929) and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1937), Robert and Helen Lynd's landmark anthropological investigations of Muncie in the 1920s. The other five documentaries in The Middletown Film Project- which examine politics, religion, high-school sports, marriage and divorce, and a struggling family-owned business- were broadcast on PBS in 1982, but Seventeen was never aired on TV (although it was subsequently released in theaters) due to its more incendiary content: an earthy mix of disrespect for authority, foul language, drunkenness, pot-smoking, interracial sex, and just hanging out that the executives at PBS preferred to believe was an accurate portrayal of American youth. Yet, what was shocking to the point of being ostensibly incredible in 1982 is all too easy to credit today, and from a contemporary perspective the most surprising element of Seventeen is its contemner se but the fact that the filmmakers were so able to elicit such candor and unselfconscious openness from their subjects, the seniors at Southside High School, their teachers, and their parents. Seventeen is a grainy, warty, heaping slice of life in the 1980s that, through this 2010 Icarus Films Home Video release of the entire Middletown Film Project, can finally find its small-screen authence. Kiss my ass, says Michelle to her high school home economics teacher Miss Hartley, and her desk-mate Lynn then announces that her mother has promised to beat the shit out of the teacher if she gives her daughter another F. Thus begins Seventeen, which follows a group of seniors through their final year at racially integrated Southside with a leisurely, even languid pace that reflects how unremarkable and commonplace such ostensibly scandalous behavior really is. Lynn, a lively, bright, attractive, and likable brunette, is the central figure in this engagingly honest and strangely timeless expose of the American teenage experience. Some black students are shown smoking marijuana at home. The next day in school, the government teacher discusses the class project, writing a letter to the president. Back to Miss Hartley's class, where it clear that students are at all good at following directions, and then home with Lynn, who introduces her black boyfriend John Vance to her white family. Southside wins the Senior Day basketball game, but the coach nonetheless chews out the team for being more preoccupied with girls than with basketball. And back in home economics, Miss Hartley is surprised to learn that Robert has impregnated Kim, but does plan to marry her, while Lynn and Michelle agree that Robert is not stupid as Robert just laughs it off, admitting We wasn't going together when it happened, that was a mistake. . . . My mother was happy; it's her first grandchild. Both Robert and Kim are black. The students, who consistently throw the word fuck around a lot - sometimes creatively-attend a local carnival, but on the ride home Lynn and a white friend, Tink, are upset that their black boyfriends would publicly acknowledge them; they argue that they are the ones risking their reputations because we're seen with one of you guys ain't no white dude ever gonna touch us again, and after you guys are seen with a white girl, ain't nobody cares. While doing much research in the library, another of Lynn's white friends tells her, I could read a dirty book and be interested; why these books don't thrill me. …