The geek. The rebel. The jock. The Princess. The heartthrob. Who were you? The teenage terror exposed in the filmdocu American Teen (2008) takes you right back to your own high school years, but also makes you truly wonder on American society. Unfortunately the typical American teenage comedies in the end seem not to be so much over the top after all…

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Set in the conservative white town of Warsaw, Indiana, this documentary follows the lives of four senior high school students in their graduation year. The camera stays close and shows merciless the ups and downs of the teens. What is even more, it gives an apparently quite accurate view on real life in American high school and its inevitable caste system. There is the popular and pretty but mean bitch, who behind all the superficiality has her own story. Her complete opposite is the shy and neurotic geek guy who is desperately trying to find a date. His counterpart is the popular sporty boy who is the star of the school basketball team. And lastly, there is the girl for whom it is all too boring, who can’t cope with the narrow-mindedness that surrounds her and dreams of getting out. All of these characters seem to be stereotype, but since this is a non-fiction docu-drama, they actually turn out not to be. What however shocked me most in this documentary next to the all too arranged and commercialized school system is the indifference with which the parents tended to treat their children and how they seem to be completely unaware of what is happening with their kids. A mother who tells her daughter that she shouldn’t think she is special or a father who presses his son to join the army since he cannot afford his college money are painful situations to watch, but at the same time they expose the truly superficial soul of American society: what you see is what you get. America is hard, we always learned. Statement definitely confirmed, but American high school is even harder...