FILM

THE HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL MOVIES

Or, your life as the best movie ever

By Vrinda Bindal

Look at those two

It’s New Year’s Eve and you’ve just sung karaoke with someone you’ve just met but it’s love at first sight. You know it, they know it, the guy who set you two up to sing knows it. No, that’s too cheesy, too dreamy. Is it though? High School Musical, released in 2006, was the first of a trilogy of the cheesiest, dreamiest movies you could ever imagine. Based on the lives of six characters in their final two years of high school, the movie starts with Troy and Gabriella at a ski resort on New Year’s Eve, who get invited up to sing. Two weeks later, they find out that they attend the same school. Incredible!

HSM’s success was chalked up to its dream-like retelling of the high school experience where everything works out just perfectly in the beginning, middle, and end. That’s why many critics and sour-faced people hate it: they can’t stand the sense of perfection and dreaminess in HSM’s soft heart, but it’s not just about having a soft heart, it’s about understanding the nature of soft hearts and what that means. After all, how many advice columns about love do we have? Literally thousands and HSM is just one of the more entertaining and knowing versions.

The first interesting problem of HSM is how to represent love. This might sound strange or odd, but how you represent love is either obvious or almost ridiculously difficult. HSM attempts to get at the problem and give it dramatic shape in ways that people can understand and emotionally connect with. So, what’s a friend and when does a friend become something more? The experience of really hitting it off with someone is actually terrifying and anxiety producing and never really goes well until it’s over. HSM makes us see the process in ways that even the most seasoned philosopher does not: of how people come together; all the feelings involved; and how difficult love is to process. In a way that forces you to reflect on your life, without even realizing it.

Beautiful people in love

Troy and Gabriella’s relationship is far from perfect. They break up at least three times and each break up is instructive of different stages of a relationship. All of the movies focus on the “what if” of relationships. The first movie is about the issues of just liking someone and wanting to be with them. The second movie is the honeymoon phase of the relationship, where Troy and Gabriella are just excited to be together. The third movie is about the future, where is this relationship going and is it going to last? These are the basic questions of what constitutes a good and proper life.

The next thing HSM addresses is fear, an interesting philosophical concept if there ever was one. Nobody really acknowledges it, or notices it, but fear is the driving force behind a lot of our decisions and behaviour, especially in high school. It pushes us to meet new people, to try new things, but it’s also what stops us from doing the same. HSM understands that and places fear in a dramatic context so that we can think about it. It’s like watching your nightmare unravel in real life. What would your friends think of you? What about your reputation? Everything you have worked so hard for might get flushed down the drain if your friends don’t approve. And so, HSM gives us a quintessential scene of fear.

Don't hide your feelings, Troy

Troy’s friends plot with Gabriella’s friends to stop them from trying out for the school musical, a perfect meta moment for a movie called HSM. The plan is to make Troy say a few bad things about Gabriella, capture it live for her to see, and then make her drop out of auditioning with him. It’s definitely an elaborate plan for something so minor, but in high school, losing your friends can seem like losing your soul. This is a pretty wild and intelligent notion of depth of feeling around something that is inherently shallow. But after all, most of us live in the shallow part of life, not with great depth.

The next worry is the problem of losing one of the best stories of your life. From a philosophical point of view the stories that we tell ourselves are how we become ourselves. Stories complete our identities. You know how Troy and Gabriella got together, you know that it was a moment that you’ll never forget. Imagine how it must have felt for them, thinking that their friendship is over just because of a few simple misunderstood words. They would not just lose each other but lose the story of how they came to be. The “story” is important to everyone. It is the specific memory of how you and someone you care about met. It won’t matter to other people, but it matters to you and that person. Keeping the story is like preserving 500-year-old art. After Troy’s friends separate Gabriella and him, Troy doesn’t want to sing anymore. The story is tainted and with it his sense of self.

Oh, I'm losing my sense of self that true love brought to my heart!

The thing about this scene is that it’s enjoyable because you aren’t the one experiencing it, but you can reflect on the moment because you know how it feels. What HSM allows us to experience is life without experiencing life and that’s vital to knowing how to live. But HSM wouldn’t be this popular if the movie had ended there. You make up with your friends and Troy does too. The need for love is what gets people through high school, it’s a necessity. How do you get through the most troubling years of your life without some kind of belief that the world will turn out okay? Or how did HSM take a memory from your life and turn it into a teenage romance movie that somehow everyone can relate to?

The representation of young love is interesting because in the first HSM movie, while it’s clear that Troy and Gabriella aren’t dating, it’s obvious that they like each other. The movie shows this in the form of a developing friendship and then a crushing heartbreak, which is their realisation of their feelings. When Troy shows up at Gabriella’s balcony, to sing his apology, your heart swells because of how sweet the moment is. Even if nothing has happened yet, the knowledge that these two like each other forces both them and us to imagine the future. Because these relationships are always about imagining the future before they happen. The potential of what could happen and what is happening is what makes high school relationships so exhilarating.

Romeo and Juliet had a balcony, too

We reach a new understanding of the nature of love as we watch Troy and Gabriella reach new understanding as they reconcile while singing on stage. Different expectations of their summer break drove them apart, and the idea of college and getting a job definitely didn’t help with that. Sure, now they have to prepare for college and senior year, but they know that deep down, they will always come back to each other and, in doing so, will not lose themselves. The audience is delighted to know that the story is still sacred and untainted.You know that if you really do care about someone, you will find a way to be around them and honour the story. In this movie, we see Troy try again and again to meet Gabriella, even following her until she leaves. We see the impact her leaving has on Troy because he forgets who he is, again. Talk about dramatic.

In the end, why is HSM such an enjoyable experience for everyone? Because it’s the perfect story that combines all of the important life lessons, without making it seem like it’s a lesson. It’s dream-like in the story telling but that’s it. It follows the love story of two characters, two types of people you never thought would come together. So it gives us hope of the kind of people we will meet and form different kinds of relationships with. It tells us how to handle new situations life throws at us- singing on stage for the first time, joining a new school, trying out a new activity, making friends, forming relationships, basically how to navigate growing up. It prepares you for the future that everyone is afraid of, college or getting a job, and it gives you closure. Troy and Gabriella got into several disagreements over the three movies, with each other, with their friends, with their classmates, but they figured it out in the end. It’s comforting to know that things work out and they have or will for you too. HSM is just your life, and that’s why you love it.

©Vrinda Bindal and the CCA Arts Review