It's a dance, dance revolution! Danielle Nussbaum crowns the kings and queens of iconic prom cinema.
Someone said:
My high school boyfriend wrote, “Will you go to prom with me?” in rose petals on my bedroom floor. I still have pictures and, believe it or not, the rose petals. I went to four proms and wore everything from cream silk (big mistake) to black velvet (bigger mistake), but I was guided by movies: They told me how cool the night could be, how cool it should be. The dress, the hair, the music, the limo, the theme . . . there’s a reason that prom is such a repeated trope in pop culture. It matters.
“It’s that one special moment when who you were for four years of high school—it ends right there,” says Aimee Teegarden, star of Disney’s Prom, this spring’s addition to the canon that shows a group of teens prepping for the big event. In real life, Aimee’s boyfriend created a scavenger hunt to ask her to be his date. “I wore a turquoise dress with spaghetti straps that I got for, like, $30,” she says. “His parents had a Suburban, and he played chauffeur. We watched Chappelle’s Show and then went stargazing.”
Cheesy? A little. (“You have to just go with it,” Aimee says, laughing.) But the most memorable scenes require the suspension of disbelief: An entire formalwear-clad student body breaks into a perfectly synchronized dance (High School Musical). A social outcast wreaks horror havoc on her pranking peers (Carrie). And, dreamily, the awkward beauty gets rescued by her quirky BFF and ends up in the arms of her rich semi-boyfriend (Pretty in Pink). Reality? Not so much. But when we’re young, these films are a blueprint. Older, they’re pure nostalgia.
Movie proms may not be real, but the experience is universal.
No comments:
Post a Comment