A Study in Tropes: The Blonde Sacrifice

(SPOILER WARNING: I Know What You Did Last Summer) We've seen it a thousand times. She's cute! She's blonde! She's...dead and covered in her own blood and guts! This trope was popularized, and most likely created by, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock enjoyed killing blondes in his movies, and the audience loved to see them get killed. What is it that is so appealing to movie-goers about seeing angelic-looking young women get slashed? Maybe it's the contrast between the pure, light hair and the heavy, dark blood. But you have to love the blonde sacrifice! She's unsuspecting, she's beautiful and she's got a pretty sweet death scene, but no one takes her seriously. What many don't realize is that the blonde sacrifice can be the most interesting character in the movie. Take Helen Shivers in I Know What You Did Last Summer, played perfectly by my life-long idol, Sarah Michelle Gellar. Helen's life seems like a teenage girl's dream before the car incident. Helen is beautiful, she's fashionable, and she dates Ryan Philippe, for God's sake. Her character is shallowly written before the car incident,  but after she is forced to realize that all of her good fortune has been based entirely on her looks. She tries her hand at acting in New York City, but realizes that she lacks the depth needed to be a serious actress. When she moves back to her home town, she feels worthless. She values her looks above everything, because she thinks that her looks are the only thing she has. The killer has been observing her for a year now and knows about her insecurities. The killer knows that the way to finally destroy her is by taking away the only thing she has left, which is in her mind, her looks. The killer cuts her long, blonde hair while she sleeps, thus symbolically delivering the final blow. Poor Helen is tortured and tormented unfairly by the killer. He kills her sister, then proceeds to chase her for several terrifying minutes. Helen narrowly escapes, but is finally, brutally murdered by the hook-handed villain. Helen was a fighter, she was bright, and there was so much more to her than met the eye. Thank you, SMG for portraying perhaps the most secretly-interesting, totally-tragic, blonde sacrifice of all time. Helen Shivers, you deserved a better fate.

A Tribute to "My So-Called Life"

The year is 1994. A teenage girl finally sees a show that actually understands what she's going through. The year is 2015. A teenage girl finally sees a show that actually understands what she's going through. The show is My So-Called Life. I've only been on this planet for fifteen years, but I have watched an obscene amount of television. Probably more than most people twice my age (I'm really not bragging, I just have very few hobbies). Of all of the dozens of television shows for teenagers I've seen, My So-Called Life is the most honest and the most realistic. It has been over twenty years since it's premiere, but the issues it tackles span generations. The show was, in many ways, ahead of it's time. One of the show's main characters is a gay, Puerto Rican teenager played expertly by Wilson Cruz. I mean, look at television shows for teens even today and you won't see many LGBT+ youth. Let alone LGBT+ PoC. Wilson Cruz's character Rickie was intelligently and beautifully written. In fact, all of the characters were. A.J. Langer's troubled rebel Rayanne was apart of some of the most emotional story arcs. My So-Called Life had so many memorable characters, but none so iconic as it's star. Claire Danes' Angela was so perfectly angst-ridden, so wonderfully inquisitive. We see through high school as it truly is through the eyes of Angela, an average fifteen-year-old girl living in Pittsburgh in the mid-'90s. Angela feels everything so strongly as she attempts to make sense of her adolescent years. Angela is very smart, but kind of clueless about a lot of things (much like myself). She tries to find out who she is and where she belongs in this world. It would amaze me how I'd watch an episode of My So-Called Life that correlated directly to my life. A favorite of mine was the episode where the guys at Angela's school made a list ranking the sophomore girls in categories based on their physical appearances or personalities. Rayanne got the honor of being named the sophomore girl with the "most slut-potential". This list is so obviously ridiculous, but Angela can't help but question her own attractiveness. She feels ugly, even though she knows it's just a stupid list. This is perhaps Angela's most relatable and realistic quality: she can't help but care what other people think of her.

To Love, To Understand, and to Appreciate: Teen Movies

Teen movies have faded in and out of popular culture since James Dean became the pinnacle of all things cool in Rebel Without a Cause. Fast-forward to 2015, and teen movies are still splashed on the silver screen. Just this year we've seen The Duff, Dope, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and most recently, Paper Towns. Perhaps they are not as big of a deal as they were in the John Hughes era  of the mid-'80s, but everything comes back eventually. Things died down after John Hughes' reign, but made a comeback with Clueless in 1995. I believe that teen movies have stood the test of time because they depict the awkward, exciting, and at times, terrifying things we are all forced to go through in high school. That's not to say, however, that they're always realistic. I mean, I seriously doubt that anyone at you high school looked like Freddie Prinze Jr. or Johnny Depp. You'll very seldom see actual awkward sixteen-year-olds in teen movies, more like, ridiculously attractive almost-thirty-year-olds. These movies are full of scandal, betrayal, love, lust, temptation, humor, and new experiences. These coming-of-age movies help us to grow up and mature. Seeing these beautiful actors play teenagers makes adolescence seem so much less terrifying. They remind us that there is always humor in even the most angst-y situations. Even though teen movies aren't always terribly realistic, they have so many other great qualities. While some may  seem trite, others are classics of their genres. There are teen comedies, slasher flicks, action movies, comic book movies, dramas, and just about every genre in between. They're special and they comfort us in our confusing formative years. These movies present to us in a typically more glamorous light what we must face the day our lives begin: we all have to grow up eventually.