You say you want ?a revolution? – The Movie Filter
The Latin root means “a turn around,” and at its essence, revolution refers to any fundamental change of power or structure in a relatively short period of time. Now, though the term comes loaded with alternate and additional connotations after being bombarded—often literally—with violent upheaval across the geo-political spectrum.
Still, I’ll offer another: Teenagers. Is there a more economical term to describe those seven seminal years in each of our lives?
Author C.D. Payne doesn’t think so. His darkly comic epistolary novel Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp was first published in 1993. It blended autobiographical experiences from growing up in 1960s Akron and a stint as a trailer park handyman into a Catcher in the Rye-esque parable about a precocious and sensitive teen hopelessly in love and simultaneously repulsed by the surrounding adults he so garishly characterizes.
Perennially awkward big screen teen Michael Cera portrays Twisp, and with his twee self-deprecation, Revolt would have the air of a quirky, angst-gone-goofy comedy were it not also steeped in Jean-Luc Godard’s society-fleeing, age-defying exuberance seen best in Pierrot le fou and Breathless.
Being a teenager, however, Twisp’s rebellion is less a geographical or cultural one as seen in Godard’s work, and more a journey of the psyche, a connection to what Emerson might have called the Great Adolescent Oversoul. While his world does not change, in short order his worldview does, sparked by his attempt to win the affections of the measurably more freewheeling Sheeni Saunders. To that end Twisp transforms in times of need into the daring alter ego Francois Dillinger, an avatar created easily with a pair of blue contacts, Crockett-worthy aviators and topsiders, and one egregious mustache. All the better to pursue her with.
Dillinger, true to his gangster namesake, grants Twisp license to do and say whatever comes to mind, like long-dormant dispatches from the id. You know, things like contemptuously overturning his bowl of breakfast cereal, spitting on mom’s shag carpet and igniting $5 million in fire damage. For better or worse Twisp’s choices weld him to the classic alter ego archetype. Not the Clark Kent kind, but an alternate projection of the self, the kind that would exaggerate facts in a memoir, on a résumé, on a date. Politicians call it “misspeaking.” Through Dillinger, Twisp buys the ticket and takes the ride, all in the name of teenage love.
It’s an incredibly romantic—if shortsighted—notion Twisp has, that he and Sheeni can be outlaws together, staring down the establishment and taking their fugitive status as a creative date opportunity and not for the dire situation it is. This, like Dillinger’s persona, is exaggeration, of course. But as satire it measures the feeling of teenhood with precision by depicting the unknowable search for oneself, and just maybe someone worthwhile to share it with, at the most revolutionary period of life. “I told her once that hers would be the last name on my lips,” Twisp confesses in the novel. “I have no reason to suppose that would change.” Youth in Revolt opens Jan. 8.
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