Brick

I should find Brick offensive. I should be annoyed at the gimmick of a film noir set in a high school. I should find the whole thing contrived. I don't.

Much has been written about Brick, calling it everything from an homage to film noir to a parody of high school melodrama and all things emo. Indeed, Brick feels written from the outside looking in, like someone unpopular, uninformed, and uninvited watched too many movies and used them as a reference to fill in what he/she did not know about what popular people keep secret.

I remember many Mondays in high school, when I'd hear vague references to what happened or who did what with whom over the weekend at so-and-so's house (I wasn't invited). I grew up in a very protective, overbearing household, and we didn't have much money. I wasn't nearly cool enough to run with the cool people. Most weekends, I wasn't allowed to go anywhere, so invitations wouldn't have mattered. Much of that changed during my sophomore year, when I sat down next to a guy I knew named Josh in geometry class, and we soon found a kinship, a mutual appreciation of comedy, and we spent the rest of high school making each other laugh.

Josh's family is well off, and his dad is a car collector of sorts. On nice days, Josh would pick me up in a Ferrari or an Acura NSX or a Jensen Interceptor and we'd drive around Muncie. I thought I was hot shit for a time, riding around Muncie in some bitchen car, rednecks craning their, well, red necks to see who was in the kickass vehicle running up and down McGalliard, but that hot shit feeling faded when Josh dropped me off at home, mostly because if I acted like hot shit around my family after someone in a Ferrari dropped me off, I'd soon find myself with the hot shit knocked out of me.

I don't give a hot shit about cars now and I don't really know why I did then. Most likely, girls had something to do with me not acting like myself and instead spending half of high school envying the son of a doctor because I thought that having his life would've made me cool. I went to my first party with Josh, had my first whiskey, and ate my first entire box of orange Tic-Tacs to mask the whiskey smell from my parents. (There's no way that worked, but they never said anything.) I grew up a lot, had a lot of cool experiences, and laughed all the time. But I always sort of felt like I was living outside my own bubble, often acting like someone I wasn't. I hated that feeling.

Josh had this other life, and other friends, and some weekends he didn't call, or he'd say he would and wouldn't. Then on Monday I'd hear about things that happened at so-and-so's and I wasn't invited. He was more athletic, dated more, and had other things going on. I cared a lot more about all of this at the time. Everything mattered.

Even then, I knew that who I was and where I was from didn't amount to a hill of beans to Josh and his family because they were good people. Their possessions, which they worked damned hard to get, were not everything. They still ate dinner as a family, and they still punished their kids when they screwed up. Though time and distance has separated us and we're not as close as we used to be, my guess is Josh and I could pick right up where we left off last time, whenever that was, and probably be laughing at the same old jokes and some new ones within a few minutes.

But I still never really found out what was going on at all those parties I missed. Probably nothing, but I had the time to let my imagination run wild during all those weekends cooped up in my bedroom in my parents' house, sorting through baseball cards, reading comics, and really only coming out for food or when Dad came home with a stack of movie rentals. I never came up with an elaborate story like the one in Brick. Typically I just wrote silly, postmodern comedy that I'm now embarrassed to let anyone read.

Brick is a "teensploitation" film. Teens lead such serious, important lives, and everything matters! (Why don't you understand this, Mom and Dad?!?!?) This is a film, unlike teen comedies, that appeals specifically to those teens for whom life is deadly serious, not some big joke full of high school archetypes. I mean, Richard Roundtree, the blaxsploitation actor who played Shaft, appears here as the vice-principal. Coincidence?

Call Brick what you will; people love or hate this film. But there's a definite angle toward a specific type of audience — maybe one I was once in, or wanted desperately to be among, or just sort of got into along the way, or maybe never found at all.