But don't break out your feather gel pens or "fetch" references just yet. Beyond Clueless is as interested in forgotten teen movies as the genre's celebrated archetypes. "Around movies like Clueless were hundreds of incredibly diverse teen movies that were really appealing to every imaginable clique or variety of teen," Charlie explained when we met up in Austin this week.
Narrated by the voice of Fairuza Balk (star of 1996’s The Craft) and scored by UK rock band Summer Camp, Beyond Clueless samples footage from 220 films, working both as an image-essay about and a tribute to its subject matter. Mimicking the classics, its narrative is structured around staple scenes: the house party, graduation, prom.
It's impossible not to feel nostalgic watching Beyond Clueless, though the film also has critical bite. Charlie Lyne dissects themes of conformity and dissonance, sexual awakenings, and the universal trek from childhood in 10 Things I Hate About You, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Idle Hands, and She’s All That––subtexts you might not have picked up the first time around. In this way, Charlie accomplishes a storyteller’s most important goal: to say what we all know but could never have put so well ourselves.
William Nixon: What drew you to teen movies?
Charlie Lyne: A couple of years ago, I started re-watching all the films that I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager, digging out these old DVDs and VHSs and kind of delving back into it. And immediately realizing how much I still love them, but also how much stuff had gone completely past me when I was a teenager. Because they’re films designed to hit people at the most impressionable age imaginable, it seemed really weird that no one was talking about the kind of power these films have.
I certainly didn’t want to feel like I was condescending to the genre in any way. I wanted the key message to be, “I’m really passionate about these films and I want to deconstruct them a bit.” So it seemed really natural to do it as a film, and from there we just got to the point where I was watching five teen movies a day taking endless notes and slowly building up a picture of how the film might work.
Would you say that Beyond Clueless is a love letter to teen cinema or a criticism of it?
I hope it’s a love letter… Some people have said, "Oh, aren’t you worried that so-and-so will hear what you’ve said about his or her film and be offended?" And that seems weird to me because the things that I critique about these films are for the most part the things that I love about them. It's incredible how these movies say so much yet were released as these fluffy throwaway comedies or horror movies or whatever else ten years ago.
I got chills from how the