As summer rolls around, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find movies that accurately depict high school reality. Hollywood High is an eccentric caricaturization of how high school really is.
Hollywood High operates under the bold assumption that teenagers actually have their lives together. Students wake up five minutes before the bus arrives and somehow put on thought-out outfits. They have time to grab a bite and have a long reflective moment by the window. In reality, mornings are often when students are the most stressed. Mornings become a series of rushed decisions, which leads to leaving the house slightly disoriented and in desperate need of some serious fashion advice and a hairbrush.
Hollywood High’s students look like they pay taxes and have a Roth IRA. Everyone is weirdly, perfectly styled and suspiciously expressive, with even background characters making animated faces like they actually want to be there. However, high school is filled with kids who look like they just rolled out of bed, wearing the same pajamas they picked out the night before.
Hallways in movies are spacious, with ample room for meaningful one-on-one moments between characters that could never happen in actual high school hallways. In real life, there is always one person moving inexplicably slowly, creating a traffic jam that causes people to trip down the stairs and shove their way past mobs of people.
Classroom interactions are by far the most unrealistic part of Hollywood High. Students deliver the most heartfelt speeches about how they hate their lovers so much that it makes them sick. That would NOT slide in real life, with teachers immediately shutting down verbose confessions that sound eerily similar to Shakespearean sonnets. Someone could stand up in a movie and give a five-minute speech mid-class, and the teacher is looking up in awe. In real life, talking for more than six seconds is bound to come with a few eye rolls from the class.
But perhaps the biggest difference is the perfectly organized clique ecosystem. You have the popular kids, the emos, the athletes, the theatre kids and the jocks. It is like a weird zoo, where everyone is grouped into levels of the food pyramid. Real life is nothing like that. People move between groups depending on the class, the day, or even just who they happen to see first. So as the credits roll, you know for certain: reality isn’t as glamorous or dramatic as Hollywood paints it to be. At least we can cry about it in the comfort of our sweatpants, even at school.
