I knew a boy…
I knew a boy named Thayer Mangeress. I had the good fortune of being close to him… alphabetically.
It’s rare that a movie completely blows me away. The description of Teenage Dirtbag read like the story of Clair and John from The Breakfast Club so I wasn’t expecting anything groundbreaking. This movie left me on the edge of really wanting the cliche ending, and then astounded me by showing me exactly the ending that had to be. It tore my heart out and left me cold in only the way the truth can. I would say that this movie is a display of what’s wrong with teenagers and high school but the story line continues on into Amber’s collage life. Really this is about our ability to break down barriers and face our fear of intimacy and vulnerability. Amber says it best at the end of the movie:
“Your life didn’t matter to you, but it mattered to me. I tried so hard to keep you from getting underneath my skin that I never stopped to see that it was me underneath your skin all the time. I killed you a little bit every day. I understand now what happens when you don’t give love to someone who needs it; eventually, they die.”
There climax of this movie is an incredibly underplayed scene at 1-hour and 6-min into the movie. You don’t realize how poignant this scene is until you finish the movie and see how it all plays out. The acting here is phenomenal. The screen is filled with tension that is beyond sexual. Desperation, passion, anger, and fear envelop the two characters for the 35-seconds of this scene. It’s the little things that make this scene resonate. The way Thayers head falls forward onto hers as if he were fighting something. The way her hands go up to touch him when their foreheads touch. The way she pulls herself back with her hands in fists again.
Against the stark white layer of snowfall
I see bright orange bits of flesh.
Shrapnel of an insane man.
Words fall freely from the mouth of madness…
White
And orange
And black.
Words on paper
Wet and wrinkled…
Bleeding.
Bleeding all over my head
And my arms
And the back of my neck.
I know right now there is a regret to be had here.
I breathe deep the fragrance of regret.
Bright orange
Frosty white
Snow-covered doom
Encircling me now.