Movies of nothing to Hannah Montana: A lesson in life
Have you ever watched a series several years past its prime,
and realized that you missed something big in your life? Now, I don’t mean that
nostalgic feeling you get, the one where you want to go back and relive things.
Rather, that feeling that you knew about something, you recognized it, but personal
pride stopped you from enjoying it at the moment.
Many forms of entertainment take the world by storm, but
none are as culturally influential as a good sitcom. Each generation has its
own set of sitcoms that influences them, for my parents these would have
started at Cheers, swept through Frasier, and remembered through Friends. All
of which are great sitcoms, all of which are still loved by new people each
generation, but you get a different kind.
A series that comes along and you watch it once or twice
when it’s on TV, or you become a massive fan and watch it religiously, but then
life happens. You grow up, forget about it, or the actors grow up and something
just changes, they change. Change is good, change is healthy, but sometimes, it
does immediate damage that has to settle down before its value is seen.
I can’t speak of what these shows were in the 80s or 90s, I wasn’t
even a real thought until 92, and even then I enjoyed the safe life of someone
who’s got pre-recorded Afrikaans shows to watch. But, as I entered into high
school in 2006 the world experienced a few sensations, something I’ll refer to
as the Disney Teens.
A period of shows made by teenagers aimed at teenagers that
were much different than anything else currently on TV. You see, I did watch
the series of that time, and have since watched a few of them to death, the
Scrubs, the How I Met Your Mother’s, these things were what defined the
generation before me. I watched them, enjoyed them, but they didn’t matter to
me as much as other things should have.
See, I was perfectly happy wasting away an afternoon watching Avatar, Kim Possible, or maybe even just a random thing on Cartoon Network. But these weren’t the things that were in the Disney Teens era. Shows like The Suite Life, Wizards of Waverly Place, and yes, Hannah Montana. These are the things that are in the Disney Teens.
Why I Didn’t Watch Them.
You might have caught that earlier, but I didn’t watch
these, I was too busy being what I now call stupid. I’d see a few episodes of
Wizards, maybe sleep through a few Suite Life’s, or skip right past Hannah.
Seeing as I was a teenage boy going to school in a mostly boys school watching
any of these was similar to just flushing a social life down the toilet.
Now, is this a good reason not to watch these shows, no, no
it isn’t. But as a soon to be 16-year-old they were reason enough to stop me
from even attempting to like them. As I grew up I did eventually give in and
watch a few of them, even actively switched the channel to watch some. But they
were always background things, I’d rather watch a cool action movie, an anime
with weird subtitles, or just put it on the music channel to waste time efficiently.
I didn’t watch these shows because I had an ego that stopped me, and I now realize that I missed something. Something that had been building for years before, something that I saw the rise and decline of, something that I only now find myself enjoying.
What did I miss?
You see, before any of these shows, which all mostly started
in 2006, there was live-action stuff on Disney and Nickelodeon, but they weren’t
ground-breaking. Hannah Montana and High School Musical changed that; they
weren’t simply good things on TV for teenagers to watch.
They were amazing things to watch, things that touched on
the base premise of what it meant to be a teenager in the 2000s, being a millennial
in a world that was not what anyone could prepare us for. Now don’t get me
wrong, the premises of these shows were odd, magnificent, and entirely goofy,
no one would ever live their lives in a five-star hotel.
But still, the premises of these shows might have been odd, but the characters, they were just teenagers. They were going through each challenge and responding in a much more realistic way than adults thought they would react. You see this is what I missed when I skipped past these shows, these weren’t 29-year old’s pretending to be teenagers, these were teenagers, being teenagers.
They were facing the challenges set forth for them in the only ways that they could, by trying to survive. As odd as it may be, but I missed out on enjoying people my age being on TV and acting in any reasonable way. Ashley Tisdale in High School Musical was a caricature, but honestly, it was fantastic to see her struggle trying to grab what her character believed to be her right.
Now, I have no idea what is currently on Disney Channel, or any of the other channels that are on TV, I only stream things. Nor do I care, they’re things aimed squarely at the current generation of teenagers, and I might soon hear rumblings of new teen pop sensations rearing their heads. But I had the honour of living through an era of TV that might never happen again, and I missed much of it until just recently.
This is why I am talking about this.
I’ve been looking to rewatch some old things, I started with
the usual suspects for my binging life, watching Frasier, Friends, Community,
and Scrubs. But I soon became either bored or simply realized that I had
watched these things a million times before. I felt like I could relate to
these people on the screen, but something was missing.
I kept looking, going to movies instead, looking for
something that I had missed, which I am glad to say worked quite well. New and
older movies starting from 2001 to now are quite amazing at helping you realize
what you’re missing in your personal growth. Just stay away from the action movies,
you’d be surprised just how mind-numbingly boring they are after the first
watch.
No, stick to that genre that all men are told is not meant
for them, love, drama, and romantic movies. See these movies fall in what I
call nothing movies, movies in which a lot can happen, but there is no real discernible
point where you go, “Oh, this is where he/she realizes that they’re perfect for
each other”. It’s something that does happen, but the main plot is not affected
so deeply by it.
If you need a good introduction to this genre, go watch A
Good Year, Elizabethtown, Love Actually, or even Under the Tuscan Sun. These
are my Christmas movies, and this is the first year I can remember where I had
to watch them alone, without my mom and dad. You may be asking what this has to
do with the Disney Teens, but I needed to discuss that first, and I can go on
tangents, it’s my blog.
Now, these movies held me over for a while, I even added in
27 Dresses and Made of Honour just for the comedic purposes they bring. But the
Disney Teens are these movies put into series, you can watch all of The Suite
Life on Deck and go through a deeply emotional experience, while still
laughing. Now, the cynics in here may be thinking that I am overaerating, but once
you watch these things from beginning to end, you get more invested than you can
imagine.
My parents may never watch these things, and hopefully, they
won’t, but they can point to a series in their youth that had the same effect.
And therein lies part of what I need to say, they may have one singular series
that affected them as these did. Millennials didn’t have one, we had several
series that we could rely on, and a whole mountain of Disney movies to go with
it.
I’ve never seen anyone give more than a passing mention of
it either, but I can say that I could talk to anyone my age, or even slightly
older or younger and launch into a discussion about these series and they would
know. They may not remember, they may try to deflect, but they would know at
least one of them. Because they would have watched these things as they were
airing, usually while shirking on their homework.
It needs to be talked about because if we take a look at what these shows were, we might see why so much of the media around the world feels so very empty right now.
What sparked me to do this.
Now seems to be the time to say something that I probably
should leave alone, but I’ve changed a lot in my 20s. As the soup of hormones
in my body calmed down, I realized that I am slightly more prone to emotions
than I would like. What this means for me daily is that I need to be hyper-aware
of how people may affect them.
But where it matters most is how it affects what I watch, because
whether I liked it or not when I was still a teen, I got almost bored with
action flicks. A guy running up and shooting things, that’s awesome, but also,
after the fifth movie, I’ve seen it all before. I quietly drifted to not caring
about series and movies that were suspense-filled or action-driven.
As I read more and more books, watched more and more media,
these things became almost predictable. I didn’t need to watch the Fast and
Furious to know that they would 1 be fast and 2 be furious, sometimes they are both
at the same time. The only thing that seems to have changed is the intensity of
their immortality, the Rock somehow healed a broken arm with pure flexing.
No, what sparked me to do this was lust, a lust to figure
out what the fuck happened in the 2010s. When I say there is nothing good to
watch I don’t mean that there are only alright shows to watch, but now that millennials
are all in their 20s and 30s the only good shows that seem to try to represent
us are kind of dumb.
They’re either hyper-realistic depressive comedic shows
like BoJack Horsemen (A cartoon, I know) or impossible to relate to things like
Always Sunny In Philadelphia. These are good shows, don’t get me wrong, but
unless you are closely connected to Hollywood, or live somewhere close to Philadelphia
you will find it hard to relate to.
The thing that sparked me to write this is the show Hannah Montana, which I will not explain whatsoever. Now, I can’t relate, it’s about a bunch of young teens going through their life, but I can understand, and even more importantly, I laughed. Something I found myself doing rarely throughout the 2010s when watching a series.
These are not comedy shows, they are shows made by creators
no longer wanting audiences to enjoy their lives. Instead, every show has a
deep meaning in them, a message hidden away in some part of the story, a new
social agenda that needs to be pushed. Sitcoms are no longer things you watch
to see others going through the same challenges you are facing.
The modern sitcom, the shows millennials are forced to
watch, are all about creating people that have it worse than you do. Sure, you
may be a drone working a 9 to 5 every day, but look at these poor shmucks on TV
tonight, her father was arrested for embezzlement and now she’s penniless. Every
show on TV is now about Allen from Two and a Half Men, someone who is being
exploited, living a miserable life, and being constantly punished despite supposedly
being a good person.
The spark that set me off to write this is that Hannah Montana is not this, nor are any of the other Disney Teens shows that aired when I entered High School. They didn’t always sugar coat it, they sometimes ignored reality, but I laughed with the characters, not at the characters.
We need perspective.
A popular thing floating on the internet is that we are now
in the most peaceful era of human history ever. Yet, if we watch any sitcom,
series, or TV show on one of what feels like millions of streaming services, we
will believe the opposite. Our influences are what define us, the things we laugh
at is what makes us happy.
If the only thing you can watch is other people being
miserable, then all you’ll ever be is miserable. The Disney Teens are
remembered by many people as being cringe or some other sort of thing, a way of
living life in such a way would surely be impossible. However, I find it is the
opposite, the shows of the Disney Teens had some of the most realistic
characters in the world.
It is their worlds that were unrealistic, but they still
moved forward.
There is no greater testament to this than how the actors of
these shows have grown up, all seeking to distance themselves from these things
they did as teenagers. Yet I cannot pinpoint exactly why, as a consumer of
music, constantly trying to find something new to add to my playlists, I cannot
understand why the singers desperately wanted new sounds.
I am going to focus here, going into a hole that I won’t
ever be able to drag myself out of, but the Hannah Montana songs, they’re
really good. Now, they’re superficial and teen pop, but when you remember they
were sung by a 14- to 19-year-old to a bunch of 11-to-18-year olds, it makes
you wonder. Why did Miley so desperately want to move away from that?
I guess that she did what she wanted to do and created a few
albums in the 2010s that satisfied what she wanted. But those tracks to me were
like nails on a chalkboard. Songs that are not remembered for how good they
are, instead being remembered for how much of a sudden course ‘correction’ they
were. Miley released a new album in 2020, called Plastic Hearts, and honestly, if
she had released it directly after her Hannah years it would not have been out
of place.
Subtract the 2010s from her music career and you miss no
good songs, and you may think I am hyper-focused, but the other stars from the Disney
Teens are doing something similar. Hell, Emily Osment, Lily from Hannah, has
released a few new songs under the name Bluebiird that made me do a triple
check on who was singing.
We need to step back and take a look at how things went in
the 2010s because we seem to have decided to be negative. Forcing ourselves to
constantly look at everything in the light of a bad morning, making even the
bright moments seem awful. As we continue to grow I can only hope that the same
teenagers who spearheaded the positive series of my teenage years will do
something about the current media.
Perspective is needed to see that the world is not a deep
dark depressing place of constant death, even when we are convinced that is it.
From what I have seen in history the current leaders we have are no worse than
the ones we had 100 years ago. Well almost, now instead of knowing that they are
awful people 10 years after they have died, we can see immediately how awful
they are.
The millennial reaction of being negative was cute in high school, but now it seems to be nothing more than a hindrance to our lives as a whole.
Why say anything at all?
I’m not sure who would be reading this, but I can only imagine that you are dedicated when you’ve read this far. I am looking at the way we are treating the next few generations and I honestly cannot say that I like what I am seeing. Gen Z is growing up in our trails, picking up things we left behind, almost literally going, “Who was this Hannah Montana?”
And the Millennials are not doing a good job of answering them we answer them the same way a teen may answer their overbearing mother, “No one important, turns out she went crazy”. As we continue to grow we are giving birth to the next generation and doing one hell of a job of making them depressed, and not in the same way we think we are.
When I talk to someone younger than me I have this innate urge to roll my eyes when they talk about things they like. The world of gaming has made them feel unwelcome, attacking the very games they seem to love, yes, I am talking about Fortnite. We seem to think we know more than them, because we have the experience while shouting at anyone older, calling them morons for not understanding us.
The vocal side of millennials seems to have wholly entered their teenage years and are refusing to grow out of it. We make mistakes and turn around pointing at others hoping to fix them, as much as we would like to say that Hollywood is the reason so much of our media is so depressing, it is not true.
Hollywood churns out what is loved by people to watch, if a fantasy series with death, rape, and murder seems popular they’re going to make more. If a sitcom about awful people doing awful things seems popular, Hollywood is going to seek to make more. Anyone who dares to make a positive series, a sitcom about what might very well be someone’s normal life, gets laughed at.
How can a movie, sitcom, series, skit, or even song be positive, the millennials feel sad so what they consume has to be sad. We have created a media that is wholly focused on only making us more and more depressed; if it bleeds it leads, but if it smiles it gets shushed. This may be a desperate plea for something to change, but it's not, I’m not saying this with delusions of grandeur, hoping to have someone read this and them changing the world.
I write this because I cannot accept this anymore, I don’t read the news because it’s always depressing or simply meaningless. I watch series from different eras because they make more sense to me, and I will be watching movies about nothing because they are more realistic than any ‘true story’ could ever hope to be.
I am writing this because I can no longer pretend to be depressed all the time, I would rather watch an 18-year-old being an 18-year-old in 2010 than watch a 28-year-old pretending to be a depressed 18-year-old in 2021.
You could almost say, I want only the best of both worlds.
Comments
Post a Comment