A Film Canon

Wasted On The Young does to mobile social media what Elephant did to gaming, to the extent that the love triangle between high school students Darren (Oliver Ackland), Zack (Alex Russell) and Xadie (Adelaide Clemens) - set into motion by Zack and his friends raping Xadie - feels like an incipient "social film", designed to be seen on multiple technological platforms simultaneously. Not only does it feels as if Ben E. Lucas wants to reduce the space between scenes to the simultaneity of an IM, but the screen is continually and elaborately scrawled with the detritus of instant messages, or overlaid with multiple layers and windows of communicative pixellation. By making the striking decision to refrain, with the exception of the last shot, from casting any adults - parents and teachers are continually mentioned, but never seen - Lucas suggests that social media has finally fulfilled the teen fantasy of creating a completely adultless space, a mobility that's sufficiently fluent and elastic to elude parental or pastoral control. That's also the essential fantasy of the teenage, high school house party - and so Lucas beautifully suggests a fundamental alteration, or perhaps just consummation, of party topography. Parties, in this world, are no longer an event but a medium, as pervasive in the school playground as in their ostensible venue. Dance beats seep seamlessly in and out of the diegesis, while the most stylised cinematography is reserved for the blue-green osmosis that connects dancefloor and school pool. In the process, bullying itself becomes more mobile, elasticised, effeminised, partaking of the subtlety and nuance that's more conventionally typical of female bullying - Chris Lilley's 'Jaime' reimagined as a horror protagonist - while the familial, communal overtones of social media are completely quashed (Zack and Darren are half-brothers, and their absent parents' surveillance system segues quite effortlessly into their mobile party). Nor is the class levelling of social media presented as redemptive in any way - it just means that the bullies can conceivably attend an exclusive private school but still sport Southern Cross tattoos. Apart from being the greatest film about school bullying since The Faculty, it's a chilling and refreshingly unconventional vision of an education system in which laptops have replaced books - the fight that anchors the narrative gradually gathers the school across the library, laptop announcements and iPhone videos - that, like Elephant, can only conceive of a violent response in virtuality, as an attempt to escape being "trapped inside of a bubble", imprisoned in a facebook fortress.