In reviewing the recent documentary feature film American Teen, which features students at a small Indiana high school, Richard von Busack made the following astute observations:

On the one hand, the director is reporting on social class strata that haven’t budged in Indiana since Booth Tarkington was alive. (Maybe I wasn’t seeing this right, but it looked like Megan’s Midwestern castle got bigger in every subsequent exterior shot.) On the other hand, the director is dealing with a group of students who are more accustomed to spilling their guts online. They’re armed with cameras every minute. Burstein had unique access to these students. But she also shaped this film, keeping this from being a boring series of straight-to-the-lens confessionals.

American Teen is an instant classic of teenage life and, like the recently rereleased-on-DVD Heathers, it makes you laugh at adolescent tragedy you never thought you would find funny. Megan and her crowd intercept a photo of a topless female student that she foolishly emailed to a boy; the film fractures into split screen, first double, then quadruple sections, as the photo travels over the town. The sequence is mean and hilarious, in the way vicious high school humor is.

Now, it’s hard to imagine Willie Baxter either fitting into Heathers or chumming it up with Megan and her crowd; but Busack is right that, particulars aside, there is a certain universality to the high school experience… and nearly a hundred years hasn’t made a dent in the angst associated with it.