Exploring The Tropes of The Genre With a Limitless Budget for Song Rights
I am nothing if not a fan of the coming of age movie.
I find the formula comforting, and the outcomes cathartic.
From Garden State, to The Wood, to The Devil Wears Prada, to Superbad, to Swingers, to Empire Records, to The King of Staten Island, to Clueless, to High Fidelity, to Almost Famous, to Mean Girls, to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the arch of these stories seem to suggest that life is about being something one day, going through some distinct changes, and then becoming something different another day, something better, as an outcome of those changes.
To hear the songs in between the songs in this article, listen to the full Soundtrack on Spotify.
In other words, the changing starts, and ends, and we get to leave at the moment in the story before things will probably start getting complicated again.
This is a nice divergence from real life which is more like:
- not knowing when you started becoming who you are today
- shit changing all around you all the time
- including yourself
- mostly in imperceptible ways
- with no definitive markers as to when you’ve
- learned a lesson or
- have become a better person
- and very few, if any, big emotional closure scenes.
Life is a daily battle to be the person you aspire to be.
If that sounds grueling, it’s because it is.
Thankfully, none of that exists in the sub-sub-genre, Coming of Age Movie About White Upper Middle Class Kids in High School Who Act Like They’re 20-Somethings, and Are Played By 20-Somethings.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
I can tell you right now what the perk of being a wallflower is:
If you actively work to distance yourself, make yourself unseen, you will be rewarded with Mary J. Blige Mutombo-finger-waving the drama away as she whispers to it, and to you, “no more, no more”.
This lack of drama due to social, emotional distancing is the starting place of what is possibly my favorite coming of age film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
There are 5 acts in TPoBaW, and they are the 5 acts you expect in most modern drama.
- Act 1: Establish the Existing. In TPoBaW‘s case, this means establishing a main character in high school with no friends.
- Act 2: Initiate Change. In TPoBaW‘s case, our main character, Charlie, meets people at a HS football game, all of them attending somewhat ironically.
- Act 3: The Change is Working. Charlie fits in with this new group of friends, one of them saying, “we didn’t think there was anyone cool left to meet”.
As someone who really didn’t start talking to people until the last semester of High School, this is what I mean when I say the outcomes in these movies are cathartic.
- Act 4: Things Go Bad…and Get Worse. One of the lessons of TPoBaW, without spoiling the movie, is that people and relationships are complicated. By contrast, being a wallflower is not. The key to this act of the movie is that just when you think things are as bad as they’re going to get, most films take it one step further. TPoBaW is not an exception to this formula.
- Act 5: Resolution. Usually uplifting and cathartic, our Charlie is now a more complete, more complicated person who has reconciled his demons and learned to really live as represented by standing up in the back of a pickup truck barreling down the highway.
While TPoBaW makes this resolution seem like the start of a new, ongoing journey, it’s more or less an ending where (spoiler alert) the guy gets the girl.
I love the coming-of-age drama for a lot of its tropes. Did I mention I find them cathartic?
So my original idea was to just point out those tropes using a soundtrack as a clever kind of vehicle.
But the more I poked loving-fun (band name) of the genre, the more I couldn’t ignore a fundamental tent post of the genre.
Why does it gotta be about White people?
It doesn’t.
There’s no reason any or all of these characters have to be restricted to a race or even gender.
But the story is a historically White one.
America is more comfortable reserving these emotionally individualistic films for White people. “Emotionally individualistic” as in: the driving force of the movie is a capital R Romantic one: one of self-discovery, friendship, and romance.
The result of these inward-facing plot drivers is films that have the privilege of never acknowledging racial or social politics.
Hollywood – read: America – is a lot more comfortable with Black drama if it the drama is related to Blackness. See, Rosewood, Boyz N The Hood, Menace II Society, Do The Right Thing, Dead Presidents, 42, The Great Debaters, Loving, Selma, Get Out, A Raisin In The Sun, The Color Purple, Higher Learning, The Help, The Butler, Lean On Me, Look Who’s Coming To Dinner, etc.
Kenya Barris (creator of Blackish, #blackAF) on Marc Maron’s WTFpod in May 2020, said,
My friend, she has this saying, “Black people only get to tell 4 stories…White people get so many stories”
I do feel like we get you know, [All Day and a Night] and Boyz n The Hood, Menace II Society….then we get a slave biopic…and then we get, “I’m Black and single and can’t find a man”…and a historical movie.
I wanna get a 1917, I wanna get a Unorthodox, a Punch Drunk Love
There’s no reason Black people can’t have their own, self-involved coming of age films that ignore all historical and political contexts.
But maybe that’s not the lesson to learn.
Maybe all coming of age films moving forward, whatever the race of their main character, should address matters of race and privilege as part of the growing up that is so important to the coming of age.
That’s a great way to subvert the genre.
Let’s see how the movie I’m creating the soundtrack for, which I haven’t put a nearly a movies-worth level of thought into, deals with those complex issues.
Intro Song
We wanna go with something up-beat, but emotional. We’re setting the tone for the entire film.
It has to be “This Is The Day” by The The.
We’ve already had our cold open: something to do with our protagonist walking into High School – on their last day? – while they narrate via inner monologue.
As this cold open ends, we see our protagonist from the side, in motion, and the title card pops up, something like Jackie Brown.
Maybe the protagonist is now biking home as the credits roll? Maybe everyone it teepeeing the high school as we see our protagonist walk through the beautiful mess in slow motion? I probably stole both of these ideas from other movies.
Either way, this gem from The The sets the stage: this day is both the end of an old life (bitter) and the start of a new life (sweet).
With a semi-obscure hit like “This Is The Day” we’re also nodding and winking to our White upper-middle class audience that our soundtrack is going to be aimed squarely at them, just like all the coming of age films they are comfortable with. All the better to subvert those expectations later.
Things Are Starting To Get Interesting: Change is Initiating
Fast Forward about 20 minutes of establishing our film’s world, which is mostly, the life of our main character.
He probably listens to Wu-Tang in his headphones at one point to signify how cool he is, of course, and to hint at the aggression within him that lies right beneath his polite exterior.
“Re-united”, Wu-Tang Clan
And there’s probably been a little classic rock playing in the background of one of the scenes.
Let’s make it Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”, but only faintly. This will make most viewers not feel left out by the music included so far. They’ll go, “oh I know that song”.
“You’re So Vain”, Carly Simon
Even better, we’ve now established Carly Simon, the perfect artist to blur our lines between ironic and sincere enjoyment. We’ll use her music at a critical juncture later.
Our character has a best friend. They’re co-dependent and socially anxious.
Our character and best friend get dragged along – on their last day of school?! of all days!? – to one of their kid sister’s parties at a roller skating rink.
Great opportunity for visual nostalgia.
And what’s this?
While they’re at their kid sisters lame birthday party they meet cool new people?
A group of cool kids – not the most popular of course, they’re the coolest in a goth-meets-hipster, upper-middle class, disaffected youth way – at the roller rink? And one of them is a pretty girl? What are the odds?
1:1 because we’re making it up.
So main character and best friend meet this cool group – it turns out it’s going well – who then invite our duo to a party the disaffected youths know about.
Yadda yadda yadda our main character finds himself dancing with the cool pretty girl and our senses become overwhelmed by “oh baby” as background sounds are downed to zero.
“oh baby”, LCD Soundsystem
Our character is given some drug we are, or are not, told the identity of, a la the drug scene in Garden State only our Zach Braff has more fun.
The Taking-Random-Drugs montage is a major trope we want to cash in on. See also, The Long Shot, Knocked Up, The Big Lebowski.
It gives our character umph, chutzpah, intrigue, street cred.
Suddenly, our song – and the party – is violently interrupted by police who systematically target kids of color for abuse and arrest, clearly letting White kids go free.
Our hero, if he is White, sneaks by.
If he is not White, he sneaks by because he gets surrounded by White people who sneak him out.
Either way, it’s too early for our protagonist to go to jail, as that would kill our rising action vibe, but the foreshadowing has been established. Or at least, the foreshadowing has been established because I’ve told you it’s foreshadowing.
The Rising Action Sequence: Falling In Love
Let’s do this Rising Action with three songs.
But first, let’s chose from the Love Story Template.
- Unrequited Guy Likes Girl: the Almost Famous template.
- Unrequited Girl Likes Guy: template not found.
- Guy and Girl Get Together But it Doesn’t Last: the 500 Days of Summer template.
- Guy and Girl Are Dating at The Beginning, But The Real Love Story Is With One’s Career: The Devil Wears Prada template.
- It All Works Out, But Right At The End: The Clueless, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or High Fidelity template.
Sad as it was, the 500 Days of Summer template is gonna be our go-to.
It just naturally allows for the most drama; it’s the most template-y of templates as it includes all the stages from alone, to together, to alone again.
“Death Is Not Enough” by The Pretenders
“Death Is Not Enough” is when we know that our character knows he’s in too deep, for the first time.
As this Pretenders classic plays, time slows, and our heroine does something like dance in an empty room full of rose pedals. You know, something poetically beautiful that all real women do in real life.
After a few more scenes advancing subplots, our hero and heroine are doing something fun to the sounds of Galantis.
“Peanut Butter Jelly”, Galantis
Pounding kick drum, ethereal synths, high-pitched voice saying, “visualize it”.
“Peanut Butter Jelly” is not only ridiculously fun, it has some heart. There’s some soul in those chord changes.
The use of this song at this critical falling-in-love-and-having-fun scene, also hints that this love is fun, and maybe not as serious as some of our characters (the guy) might think it is.
Let’s have our young people doing something visually appealing: riding bikes with a large group of her friends (it’s always her friends), at night. The bikes have cool lights in the wheels and everyone is wearing glow stick bracelets.
As they ride, the group of exuberant youth pass a candle lit memorial for a child killed by gun violence. The yellow light of the candles a stark contrast to our protagonist’s neon.
But that sobering interruption lasts only a few seconds.
Our heroes continue bouncing around the city, from party to party, finding themselves at the end of a fun night, laying down together, on a rooftop overlooking the city because why not, it’s a movie, let’s exaggerate everything.
Our hero and heroine have their heads (almost literally) in the clouds.
The backing music for this is the third song of the Falling In Love Rising Action trilogy.
“Take Off Your Cool”, Outkast featuring Norah Jones
Things Get Worse
The critical turn, from the rising, to the falling action, must be accompanied by the most important song of the film.
It’s the “The Whole of the Moon” in Let It Snow (2019). It’s “Heroes” in TPoBaW.
We want to introduce it now, and punch it home again at the end.
We’ve seen our main character moving further from his best friend, towards what is clearly his first romantic relationship of any real intensity, when something unexpected happens.
In this case, the father of our heroine dies.
A heart attack, too young, but sadly, not surprising for a blue collar man in America. He had lived a hard-working, sometimes hard-drinking, stressful life supporting the family that he loved. All as a single dad. Now our heroine has to take on the responsibility of family leader for her two smaller brothers, instead of going to college out of town like she had planned.
She becomes distant, almost ghosting our Main Character, until she confirms to get together, texting him to meet her at the water tower, on top of the hill, overlooking the lake, where she subsequently – but what a view! – breaks up with him.
“We Only Come Out At Night”, The Smashing Pumpkins
“We Only Come Out At Night”, by The Smashing Pumpkins plays quietly in the background as our hero has his young heart broken.
A song written by Billy Corgan, from Chicago, who writes about his “city by the lake” on “Tonight, Tonight”, one of the lead singles from Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness, the album from which “We Only Come Out At Night” comes from.
But as our hero rides away on his bike – with the glow sticks she insisted on sticking in his wheels that night they rode through the city streets, and which he has not since removed – we hit the emotional anthem of the film.
“Seasons (Waiting on You)”, Future Islands
“Seasons” has that driving, pulsing bass line that “Heroes” has, giving it’s heartbreak a pushing urgency, while we see a city, the same city He once rode through with Her, now empty where it was once vibrant, now too-busy with happy crowds, crowds that only remind him how alone he is. The metaphorical imagery is just really, really profound at this point. Layers on layers of meaning, like that layers of clothes…on people…in a big crowd. So many layers.
What comes next is a real downer of a montage showing us just how hard our hero is spiraling.
We see him bored and hungover at his dead-end job.
The job he used to work with his best friend until his friend quit. I didn’t mention that? Probably because I didn’t think of it before but now it’s canon.
We see him doing things he used to do with people, but now he’s alone (which is sad).
We see him grappling with the loneliness of a summer that will end with our hero leaving his hometown – a town more home to him than his parents own house (more on that juicy tidbit later).
Now we’ve shown the sadness, but as mentioned earlier, our heroes issues, like TPoBaW’s Charlie, include an underlying rage he can only white-knuckle for so long.
Things Get Even Worse
Just when we thought our character couldn’t take on any more emotional issues – we give him one more.
As we know, our Charlie and his Best Friend have just had a terrible argument causing Best Friend to leave their agreed-upon, dead-end job.
And right after his falling out with the love of his young life?! What bad timing, what timeless tragedy.
So now our hero is lost. He tries to recreate the fun with a drug party scene – just like earlier! – but this time it’s terrible: the dark side of drugs. What a curve ball.
The party gets busted, our character spends a night in jail, or, if he’s White, he watches as all the people of color around him go to jail, as the cops glide right on by him.
Rather than live with the terrible, terrible White guilt of not getting arrested, he reaches into a momentarily unattended cop car, blares the siren, grabs the mic, and chants “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me”.
“Killing In the Name”, Rage Against The Machine
That does the trick.
An act just illegal enough to get arrested, just legal enough for him to avoid a long time in jail and to lose the audience entirely.
Now we see our protagonist rock-bottoming in jail of his own accord.
How do we convey this sense of dettachment? This disillusionment?
Emo trap.
“Myself” by Nav plays at some point, and probably something by JUICE Wrld.
“Myself”, NAV
I am not an emo trap expert. To nod to this fact, our Charlie is picked up from the police station the next morning by his dad, who we don’t hear, or see directly, our screen is only our hero, now fallen, silent, dead-eyed peering forward as the luxury car drives him home.
His dad is listening to Lil Uzi Vert because it’s on the radio. I’m the lame dad in the metaphor.
“XO Tour Lif3”, Lil Uzi Vert
This is the only time we’ve seen anything close to the parents on-screen.
And they are not present in the next scene as our protagonist smokes weed in the family garage that’s been clearly been upgraded to allow him to sleep there most nights, physically removing him from his parent’s house, and by extension of the metaphor, emotionally from his parents.
We haven’t subverted many tropes yet, and we’re not starting with Upper Middle Class Basically Rich Parents Being Emotionally and Physically Distant From Their Children.
If you are a parent in a Disney movie, watch out, you are probably gonna die. See, Bambi, The Lion King, Aladdin lives with a monkey, Cinderella, Big Hero 6, Peter Pan is a land of 100 orphans, The Jungle Book, Up, Coco basically dies and is separated from his family the whole movie, Who knows what Snow White’s parents are doing while she lives with seven dwarfs and where is Belle’s mother the entire time she’s being held captive by a Beast?)
This parental absence leaves room – or demands it – for the character to change, and change on they’re own accord.
For this we’ll use the on-the-nose Channel Orange track,
“Super Rich Kids”, Frank Ocean
So let’s have that playing in the background at the beginning of the final act when it’s clear it’s,
Time to Turn Things Around and Land This Cliché Ridden Plane
Best Friend finds Main Character in sad, smoky garage.
It’s clear they haven’t talked in a while.
Best friend offers our hero a Cousins sub referencing Swingers as he insists Main Character follow him – out of his isolationist garage, out of his own head, not telling him where they are going – until they arrive at a homeless sanctuary city of hundreds of tents.
They spend the afternoon volunteering, handing out supplies and setting up a small electrical network that runs off of solar power.
Our Main Character is shamed into feeling better about his selfish problems.
We see our Main Character working harder at his dumb job, filling out college applications, talking to a therapist, walking his dog that he’s had this whole time who’s stayed by his side on all those nights he passed out in the garage but who I’m just mentioning now.
On one of these dog walks, Best Friend pulls up with – what’s this! – Disaffected Youth Group, including the now Ex-Girlfriend!?
In the car they’re playing Cypress Hill as they pull up.
“I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That”, Cypress Hill
This represents how the movie ain’t letting the main character…go out like that.
The group has a visually stunning quick night out, let’s say, paintball in a forest full of lazers and smoke to the tune of “Ante Up”, where the group gets to destroy each other with paint balls in a way that makes the audience amused. Can you do that in screenplays? Just write, “and the audience was amused”?
“Ante Up”, M.O.P.
The montage comes to an end as we find just the main character, his Ex and Best Friend in the same late night spot – did I not mention this earlier? – that the whole crew went to after the first party scene was broken up by police. What a way to tie things up.
In the background plays Carly Simon’s “Give Me All Night” which has the pathos we’re aiming for in the moment, and the (softly) driving anthem-like rhythm that ties in with our theme song, “Seasons (Waiting On You)”.
“Give Me All Night”, Carly Simon
“I’m sorry I dumped you at make out hill”, she says.
“I’m sorry your dad died”, he replies.
Best Friend breaks the tension by pouring ketchup in his mouth straight out of the bottle!? Whaaaat!?
After all our characters have been through, “Seasons” will undoubtedly take on an even deeper meaning as the main trio exit the diner, crane shot pulling up and away.
Our couple: not back together as a couple, or even, emotionally as individuals, but leaving the diner, and our lives, as more complex, more emotionally layered, people. So many layers.
As the lights come up in the theater, audiences openly weep in the aisles, overcome by the excellent screenwriting (not included in this article) and superb song selection (arguably included in this article).
The credits roll to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Want You In My Room”.