Not Another Teen Movie: Charlie Lyne on Beyond Clueless

I find myself in an unusual position when I meet Charlie Lyne in a Soho coffee shop. The young director is busily promoting his debut feature, Beyond Clueless, a unique and fascinating visual essay about teen movies. It’s a film funded entirely through crowdfunding website Kickstarter, with donations from over 500 backers. Full disclosure: your correspondent, as it happens, is one of those backers.

“Oh shit, amazing! Thank you!” says Lyne when I admit to him that I am both a backer and an entirely objective journalist. “It’s weird. There’s only 500 or so backers. The odds are, I probably should not have met many of you. But I’ve bumped into backers halfway across the world.”

Does a fiver on a crowdfunding website equate to a conflict of interest? I hope not. But such is the new reality. The democratisation of the arts means anyone is now a potential investor. Indie films were pledged 100 million dollars through Kickstarter last year, and Lyne, whose project smashed its modest £9,500 target (“I wouldn’t say smashed,” he says. “We just started to overfill the cup. Minor spillage”) is one of the many success stories.

Effusive and articulate (Lyne is 23 but could be mistaken for a teenager himself), the born-and-raised Londoner speaks happily and gratefully of his Kickstarter experience: “I’m always cautious talking about it in too exaggeratedly flattering terms – it’s not right for every project – but I think for what we were doing, it was kind of perfect.”

It’s a niche enterprise, certainly. In both subject matter and format, Beyond Clueless is too much of a pre-ordained cult movie to ever hope for big studio backing. But it has that cult audience inbuilt. It’s an affectionate love letter to a specific generation of high school romps, roughly covering the timespan between seminal sleepover favourites Clueless (1995) and Mean Girls (2004), with everything from EuroTrip to Bubble Boy in between. Comprised entirely of archival footage, it has a thoughtful, analytical approach: a film essay in the Mark Cousins mould.

Lyne, a longtime outspoken fan of the teen genre, first had the idea when putting together a one-day teen movie festival, finding himself “captivated” while rewatching old favourites. “I think a lot of people get that same feeling when they revisit films that meant a lot to them as teenagers: that simultaneous feeling of nostalgia and joy and affection – plus the unnerving realisation of things missed, first time around. I was trying to think how best to condense that feeling into some sort of statement. And that’s when it struck me that it might work best to do it as a teen movie in and of itself.”

So it is, then. Beyond Clueless is effectively a teen movie about teen movies, faithfully following the familiar formula and structure of the films it seeks to analyse, from the yellow school bus prologues to the red-cupped beer pong parties, told in a dizzying patchwork quilt of clips that form a unique story in and of themselves. Over 200 movies are featured, culled from 400 hours of footage, the result of a gruelling six-month edit session.

But why teen movies? Nonfiction cinema tends to lean towards the weighty, and films about films tend to square in on the masterpieces or the trailblazers. By contrast, the films included in Beyond Clueless are light and goofy. Many of the titles included are no strangers to bargain bins, or the deepest recesses of Netflix. Most are critically maligned. Are the likes of Slap Her, She’s French! really due a critical revaluation?

Lyne is unapologetic about his choices. “That’s kind of what fascinates me about them: they’re not perfect. They are, for the most part, deeply flawed films – which is why they inevitably get torn apart by critics. But why would you not want to scrutinise films that are having a massive impact on people at the most vulnerable point in their lives?”

Central to Lyne’s thesis is this idea that, whatever the genre’s obvious surface flaws, they inspire an “intense following” from the young target audience, a following that should not be so easily dismissed. Teen movies, he claims, almost become an echo chamber between the audiences and the filmmakers – where teenage life imitates art, and vice versa. “They massively inform the way that the people who watch them then approach their own adolescent lives. That was certainly true of me. I remember filtering so much of my teenage experiences through these films.”

It’s evident, in fact, that Lyne’s own love for the genre is entirely earnest – there’s no hipster’s irony here. “One of the things you always risk if you want to talk analytically about something thought of as fluffy and stupid,” Lyne explains, “is that it can seem quite condescending. And we really didn’t want that. We wanted to be clear that we loved these movies, in spite of, and embracing all, their flaws and weirdness, and we thought what better way to do that than make a teen movie that could itself celebrate and critique this genre.”

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“A few blogs have torn it apart, but they’ve been undermined by poor grammar” – Charlie Lyne

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What could have only amounted to a trite fanboyish gush, then, actually becomes an engrossing odyssey into the adolescent experience itself. Themes such as alienation, anti-authoritarianism, and factionalism are all explored through this glossy Hollywood prism. A hypnotic voiceover by teen star Fairuza Balk and a mesmerisingly cool Summer Camp soundtrack tie the whole thing together. Even as someone directly responsible for its existence, I can still say with some distance that it works.

Before Beyond Clueless, Lyne wrote and edited the frequently hilarious film blog Ultra Culture, which provided an early soap box for his teen movie devotion – many posts, in particular, waxed lyrical on the virtues of EuroTrip; a sincere 2500-word review called it “one of the greatest comedy movies ever made.”

But the blog was also ruthless and caustic, firing deliciously irreverent missives on everything from the BBFC to Derek Jacobi. Lyne is a rare example of a successful leap from film critic to filmmaker, even if, in making a film based around critical analysis, it is a relatively short jump. Now he’s on the other side of the curtain, is he ready for an Ultra Culture-style blog to eviscerate his film, as he himself might have done once? “I’m looking forward to the first proper takedown, actually. A few blogs have torn it apart, but they’ve been undermined by poor grammar.”

Teen movie fans, he notes, “get really fucking defensive of films they hold dear.” At documentary festival Q&As – sharing the bill with all manner of ponderous political polemicists – Lyne found that “audiences were just as opinionated and pent up about teen movies as they were about major geopolitical conflicts. As well they should!” If ever he needed vindication, surely, there it was.

Reviews, in fact, have been largely positive; it’s a different sort of judgement that stings. “The most biting criticism I tend to get is not ‘Why did you waste an hour of my life?’ but more along the lines of: ‘How dare you misrepresent 13 Going on 30!’”