The Myth of the American Sleepover. One Night for a Lifetime
This article was originally published in 2011 on Off-beat Cinema, a short-lived Amsterdam underground cinema magazine.
Whether you are American or not, you know what a sleepover or a pijama party is. If anything, because of the movies. I, for one, have seen my share of teenage comedies and college flicks, from the mainstream hits focused on stoner odysseys to the more introspective indie films. Still, although it is fundamentally nothing new, The Myth of the American Sleepover came as a refreshing view to me. Clearly the movie places itself on the indie/artsy end of the spectrum, honoring preceding classics with soft images and subtle cleverness. The film has been compared by some to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, but unlike his later Last Days — which dealt with the demise of a Kurt Cobain clone — it really does smell like the teen spirit from the legendary Nirvana song.
Set in a Detroit suburb on the last night of summer, the plot follows four story lines, all revolving around personal searches for romance, acceptance, maturity, or revenge. The protagonists are a group of kids, boys and girls of different ages, all looking for a last good time before fall comes and sweeps them all back to school or to college, away form their suburban homes. There is the young blondie with the labret piercing, encouraged by her geekier friend to try and kiss an older guy at the pool party; the lonely searcher following an almost ghostly vision of the ideal girl — glanced at the supermarket — through the night; the creepy stalker hanging onto the memory of a couple of twins he took theater class with; the betrayed girlfriend of an unfaithful boyfriend having her revenge at the other girl’s party.
Across all these mini-plots, love, sex, or a simple kiss are all that is at stake, but the story is built on the impalpable tension of social codes, attraction, and unsaid truths. As well as, of course, its mythical visual landscape.
There is something paradoxical about the way the American suburbia is so present as a mnemonic reference for us all, the Western youth. Those little white houses, with their little green lawns, are so iconic that we are seduced into believing they are an archetype, instead of a very specific architectural typology, predominant in a very specific geographical context. Another paradox underlies the mix of excitement and boredom the teenagers populating that environment seem to experience — as represented with a special glow in Ghost World, from the Daniel Clowes comic. Clowes’s kids may sport subcultural accessories, but his retro-infused style makes his illustrations look less detailed and site-specific than they actually are, a sort of rounded atmosphere that blurs the edges of the characters and the places portrayed. From its very name, Ghost World takes the form of a suspended memory, a sleepy cavalcade infused with the strange thrill that is so typical of any tale of American youth. From Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to American Pie, the threshold to college is a period of pioneering conquers and life-changing revelations. College is that buffer zone where adult codes coexist with unrelenting desires, where parents’ expectations loom and pile up on peer pressure. And it’s the place of sex and (Animal) frat houses, too. College kills the ghost world that preceded it and, with its completion, marks the end of that American Beauty — music and sex — which director Sam Mendes obsessively chased in his first movie (a good example of a European feeling nostalgia for someone else’s past).
The Myth of the American Sleepover stands somewhere near the end of the pre-college ghost world, and the poster illustration echoing Clowes is the first signal of this. The colorful ensemble of the protagonists is posing in a group shot, each drawn as a cartoonish version of him or herself, the clothes simplified to brand-free templates, the colors flattened to one tone each. Rather than Ghost World the movie, David Robert Mitchell’s first feature film is dense with the same type of suspended tension we find in the comic — in which you have the time to look at the images and absorb them before you read the balloons. In fact, the dialogues are definitely not the highlight here: they are dry and leave all the confused frills of common conversation to the imagination. The tension radiates from the eyes of the protagonists, which fill the gaps between the words, telling a story of their own. And it soaks up the whole environment, mythifying the streets, the living room, the trees, the swimming pools.
It’s clear we are floating in a dimension where, for one night, anything can happen. The characters wander through fulls and voids, friendly crowds and metaphysical wastelands — highways, woods, abandoned halls — where adults are either absent or asleep. Before the morning comes, the city is free for the kids to toilet paper the neighbors’ houses, swim drunk or make out on chipped steps. After that, the daily parade of roles and rules will be back into place, everyone distanced by the cleansing awkwardness of the morning light. Until then, though, it’s time to be courageous and daring, to reach out despite a deep solitude that all the protagonists have to struggle with. Each of the four main characters has a moment in which to separate from their friends and undertake their personal search on their own, eventually reaching somewhat of a goal that was not necessarily what they were envisioning.
The clear definition of a rainy, sleepless dimension of its own makes The Myth of the American Sleepover something different from Ghost World’s pop cultural geography and far from Elephant’s tragic acceleration towards an Event. The film is closer to Michelangelo Antonioni’s silent wanderings, where the characters cross metaphysical landscapes rather than negotiate a truth through dialogues. Trapped in a slow but limited slice of time, the viewer is left reconstructing a mnemonic space, outlined through vectors drawn by the kids’ eyes. Tracing the lines of attraction between the characters, the film unrolls to its reassuring ending like a cathartically predictable puzzle, in which the viewer will appreciate his or her own participation rather than the final outcome. That is, it is a worthy viewing even if you’re not — and have never been — an American teenager.
