There are several things you could associate with the word “cool” in human history, specifically in the 20th and 21st centuries. Listening to music is cool. Playing guitar is cool. Those are the quintessential traits you must possess in order to even meet the basic requirements of “cool”. None of those, however, even come close to the holy grail of Cool: saying things that make you seem wise beyond your years while you’re a teenager. Now that is what I call the trademark of the indie hipster — the kind of person we all aspire to be without seeming like a pretentious douchebag. Except, it’s pretty much unattainable in real life.
I cannot stress just how difficult it is to be a teenage indie hipster and also not be completely insufferable at the same time. Yet it’s also one of the most commonly seen tropes in all forms of media, some done right (see: Juno, Mixtape, Scott Piligrim, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), some done terribly (see: anything John Green has ever created, especially, especially Paper Towns).
What’s interesting about the indie hipster archetype, though, is that even when it’s done well and not completely cringe-worthy, it’s also incredibly — and I mean incredibly — unrealistic. In what world would you ever see a teenage girl lounge on a velvet armchair on your lawn, with a tiger rug sprawled out in front of her, as she takes a drag from her pipe while waiting for you to get out of your house? No world at all! Except in Juno.
Mixtape takes that same indie hipster archetype and dials it up to 11 with all three of its main characters. Rockford is the undeniably cool music girl who spouts off facts about the compact disc and The Jesus and Mary Chain without missing a beat. Slater casually slips into his joker persona, witticisms rolling off his tongue whenever Rockford gives him his cue. And Cass… well, Cass is the most realistic of the bunch, but she still plays the role of the unattainable cool girl we all wish we could be, but could never, really.
Cass is the most Juno-adjacent of the bunch, with her deadpan humor and expressions. Her questions are blunt, yet disarmingly sharp at the same time. “Who’s this woman who’s tearing us apart?” she asks, her expression never changing. When Cass tells Rockford that her New York plans have completely derailed the road trip they’d been talking about since freshman year, Rockford simply says, “I know this.” Cool. Calm. Collected. She turns to the camera, looks me right in the eye, and says this has been the cause of much tension.
In all of these coming-of-age movies, the indie hipster protagonists are always seen as cool and charming. Most people love them, and the ones who don’t? Well, they’re the villains of the movie. It’s funny, though, because I imagine if I encountered Ferris Bueller in real life I’d probably think he was absolutely insufferable. Weirdly enough, when I watch that movie, I sort of relate to his sister Jeanie because I, like her, would definitely see through all his bullshit and call him out on it while waiting for everyone else to see that he’s just full of crap, too. And guess what? In that movie, Jeanie’s kind of a secondary antagonist until the last act. Surprise, surprise.
Call me a party pooper, but I genuinely think a good percentage of people would feel the same way I do in the real world. No one likes a 17-year-old pretentious smartass walking around like they know they’re better than you. So why do we love these movies so much?
The answer, I think, is deceptively simple. These movies and stories are what we wish we could’ve been when we were teenagers. It’s the golden age of our lives; it’s when we were at our physically fittest (for most folks, at least), and more importantly, it’s when we were at our freest, with no responsibilities, jobs, or families to think of. “In that moment, we were infinite”, and all that.
It’s why this genre is so popular, and it’s why the teens all sound like adults. They’re being written by the very adults who wish they could time travel their 30-something brains back into their teenage bodies. We probably wouldn’t necessarily change anything that happened in our teenage years, but we’d certainly change the way we reacted and responded to things. It’s an irresistible fantasy, and that’s why we’re all so drawn to it.
Similarly, Mixtape falls into that same trap of having its characters sound way wiser than they should, but when you combine that coming-of-age formula with ’90s nostalgia, it works. It works very well, in fact, which is why I ended up giving it such a high score in my review. Sure, none of that hipster cool would every fly in the real world. But still, it’s nice to fantasize every once in a while, isn’t it?
