I Like to Watch

March 16, 2008 | Will you ever live down high school? You were larger than life or painfully insignificant, popular or nerdy, acceptable or odd, embraced or rejected. If you were a winner in high school, you look back and wonder if you'll ever feel the warm, welcoming waters of such a small pond again. If you were a loser, you're filled with a nagging compulsion to prove your coolness to the world once and for all.

Either way, when you revisit those years as an adult, piecing together old triumphs and rejections and disasters and reexamining them in the context of what you know now, suddenly it all makes sense: You were just a kid, and those bad classmates who made you feel envious and angry and pathetic were other kids, groping their way through the dark, grasping for whatever could soothe their insecurities or give them a firmer footing in the world, whether it was a Flock of Seagulls haircut or tapered jeans or Echo & the Bunnymen playing on a steady loop in their Walkman headphones or a 6-foot-high bong with a dancing bear sticker on the side.

For all the nastiness and stupidity of high school, it's hard not to miss the naive romanticism of those years: mooning over crushes and daydreaming through class as if the world were one big, flashy musical extravaganza and you were its plucky, incorrigible star. As you get older, there's a relief that comes from realizing that no one is watching and you can make whatever choices you want to. But there's also a nostalgia for the days when the world was your stage -- even if the audience was filled with merciless thugs, armed with spoiled eggs and rotting tomatoes.

Fast times
If you can't quite remember just how awkward and painful it was to be a teenager, "High School Confidential" (10 p.m. Mondays on WE) provides a chilling reminder. The eight-part documentary series follows 12 teenage girls attending a high school in Overland Park, Kan., revealing all of the triumphs and tragedies that can occur over the course of four short years.

We meet the girls before their freshman year, inevitably looking awkward and pimply and nervous at the prospect of being thrown into a big school filled with ruthless older kids. We watch the girls mature before our eyes, making and losing friends, picking up boyfriends (and in some cases, babies) along the way. The pitfalls chronicled here are not insignificant: A girl named Lauren, has a brain tumor removed. Another girl, Allyson, deals with an abortion and the death of her father. More typical, though, is Cappie, who fights with her mother, gets drunk with her friends, and ends a friendship, but makes it out of high school without any major mishaps.

Unfortunately, instead of watching the girls interact with their peers, we learn about their lives primarily through interviews, in which they tend to describe the latest developments in their lives with vagaries and exaggerations. The footage and editing are pretty primitive and the voice-overs share the leaden prose of a high school term paper. "Cappie was always adventurous, but by her junior year, her independent nature brought her to a difficult crossroads." "Courtney's story is about temptation and consequence in a Kansas high school." The series' perspective is so square that it's clearly aimed at parents, not kids.

Although the problems these girls battle can feel oppressively heavy -- peer pressure, anorexia, depression, loneliness -- the terms they use to express their experiences sometimes provide unintentional comic relief along the way. Lauren describes being on the homecoming court as "the most amazing and fulfilling experience probably of my life." Yes, walking onto the football field with a rhinestone tiara on your head is truly a life-altering event. "I've always been the type of person to think. I think all the time!" says Courtney. Remember when you believed you were the only one in the world with thoughts floating around in your head?

But I think my favorite part is when Courtney, who's a good Catholic, has a dream that she gets drunk and runs over Jesus in her car. (I'm not an expert at dream analysis, but I think that dream means that she wants to get drunk and run over Jesus in her car.)

Along with the natural comedy inherent to high school, each episode has a few heartbreaking or memorable moments. In 9th grade, Cappie reports that her dad "isn't making her a priority," language that's obviously been stolen straight from her mother's mouth. But Cappie feels the absence of her father at this age to a painful degree. "You go over to your friend's house and they have their dad, and you don't have ..." she trails off, in tears. And then there's the end of Courtney's episode, where her little sister, who struggled through a pregnancy when she was only 15, turns to her while the camera is rolling and says, tearily, "I never really thanked you for being there for me through the whole pregnancy thing." Gulp! Sure, these kids are young and hormone-addled and they make stupid mistakes, but when you see how openhearted and kind they can be ... Well, it makes you feel old and fat and jaded.

Old and fat and jaded as you are, though, it's nice to spend a little time with young people, and get to the point where you can hear past the endless flow of "likes" and "whatevers" to the likable kids underneath. Clumsy and tone-deaf as it sometimes is, "High School Confidential" offers a fascinating look at the challenges and heartbreaks facing today's teenage girl.

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