High School Musical and Real Millennial Teens

The High School Musical movies premiered in 2006, 2007, and 2008, which were my freshman, sophomore, and junior years in high school, respectively. Cranking out three movies in three years is more than a little nuts to me, but this isn’t an article about Disney’s labor practices.

Despite the furor around these movies when they came out, it was mostly background noise to me and my fellow classmates. Disney, after all, made High School Musical for the younger sect of millennials who were still in lower and middle school, and we wanted more “mature” high school content like The OC and Laguna Beach (and eventually The Hills). Or in my case, you could afford to avail yourself of the DVD market and your parents didn’t supervise you, and wound up a massive dork who occasionally blogs about TV shows. (I’ve never written a more millennial sentence.)

Other fads came and went, including Vine, the pioneer social media service of user-generated short content. I fell down the rabbit hole of Vine compilations on Worldstar, and suddenly I was seeing videos of fights with “We’re All in This Together” playing over them and that one video where the kids in the gym knock down the ceiling panel to “Break Free”. I had never heard these songs before, and after seeing these Vines, I had to ask myself, “Did High School Musical… matter?”

Years later, here I am. As of last Sunday, I’ve seen all three of these films. These movies have been thoroughly explored by the millennial take economy, so I don’t have much to add. But I still feel compelled to make two points.

The High School Musical Kids Aren’t Traumatized Enough to Feel Like Real Millennial Teens

I know full well that the High School Musical movies, two of which were made for broadcast television, were never going to depict “real” teens, and they never pretended like they were trying to. Criticizing movies for not doing a thing they weren’t trying to do is arguably a waste of time. But still, these movies depict high schoolers, and when they came out, I was in high school. I can’t help but think about how I was being portrayed.

Even if they were trying to capture “actual” teens, they could only go so far. High schoolers swear and experiment with drugs and sex and make horrible decisions based on a lack of empathy and an abundance of chemicals running through their brains that dictate their behavior. This isn’t what parents have in mind when they have The Disney Channel babysit their kids, nor do advertisers want their products associated with it.

However, let’s ask ourselves an important question: What’s the most culturally resonant movie to millennials?

By raw box office, you might be tempted to say that it’s Avatar or The Dark Knight or X big franchise movie. There are decent arguments for some of those, especially The Dark Knight, considering its part in catapulting superhero movies and The Joker’s rise in the zeitgeist. But what about other cultural metrics? Maybe it’s Superbad, or Mean Girls, or The Lion King. (The original, of course.)

Personally, I’m going to argue that it’s Shrek.

Shrek rules millennial childhood memories. We quoted it, we watched it over and over again, and it had so much of an impact on us that we made Shrek 2 the 38th highest grossing movie of all time, adjusting for inflation. (32nd if you don’t.) We’ve kept Shrek so ever-present on the internet that younger generations are still making memes about him to a degree that feels stronger than the typical twenty-year nostalgia cycle. In fact, it took me one search to find an article that partially blames Shrek for Gen Z internet brain rot.

The question is why, and now we must cue the greatest Millennial trauma hits.

9/11 and the erosion of democratic norms that happened after. The wars in Iraq in Afghanistan, and the ensuing scandals associated with them. Watching footage of Hurricane Katrina and learning that not only are we inheriting a climate change waste planet, but also that the government won’t rescue us if we’re drowning. The 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession hit us right as we were entering the job market. Predatory student loan debt we took on (that most of my friends are still paying off in their 30s) because our parents were preparing us for a world where you needed a degree, only to watch college drop-outs become billionaire techno-fascists thanks to the internet. For those like me who were born in 1991, we graduated from college in 2014, got to enjoy 2015, and then watched Trump get elected for the first time a year later. Any financial progress we made was promptly fucked out of existence by COVID, and it certainly doesn’t help that, depending on which state we’re in, many women have and will be forced to give birth to children we don’t want.

On top of that, we were the first generation to grow up with easy access to the internet, and there’s no force on Earth better at ruining innocence and sowing discontent than the horrors online. We were taught not to reveal personal information or to meet up with strangers, but we weren’t taught how not to be radicalized and red-pilled on social media. After all, I’d be willing to bet that some of those who taught those classes probably met the same fate. I never fell down that hole, but I had seen a beheading video before I entered high school.

Shrek, the movie, tells a ton of raunchy jokes that went over a lot of kids’ heads, thus keeping up with the millennial tradition of being exposed to adult subject matter at an early age. It also has an equal distrust of power and establishment. Granted, Shrek exists because Disney rewarded eventual Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg for his years of service by firing him, and given the Duloc sequence, we can tell how he felt about that. Still, Lord Farquaad (I didn’t get a lot of the adult humor in Shrek as a kid, but I did somehow get the Farquaad/fuckwad thing ) is a petulant petty tyrant motivated purely by self-interest and ego. Traits we’ve seen in most of our leaders since.

Shrek even acknowledges that sex exists. Meanwhile, I’ve read more than a handful of posts about High School Musical 3’s plotline where Sharpay asks her gay coded brother Ryan to hit on Kelsi, another gay coded character.

Shrek, the character, distrusts institutions and authority. A culture that villainizes him keeps trying to kill him. The kingdom forces all the other fairy tale creatures into his land. If it were up to him, he’d live in peace in his swamp, but the world keeps intruding, and thus he spends much of the movie in various states of dejection, anger, and exhaustion.

Of course we love Shrek. He’s us. High School Musical lives in our heads as well, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Shrek because those high schoolers still believe.

It’s hard to know whether or not these kids experienced the Great Recession. Judging by the fact that I’ve never seen fictional teenagers so over-the-moon to get summer jobs as the Wildcats in the second film, one could assume that maybe that had. Troy’s the only one who’s saving for college, but everyone else just wants stuff. The third film has Troy constantly struggling with his car, but unless I missed something, I can’t tell if it’s because his family can’t afford to have it fixed or Disney wanted Troy to be a working class teenager in the Bush Jr dustbowl world in which he was conceived. He winds up enrolling at UCLA Berkeley. Fuck knows how much debt he took to go there.

No matter their financial standing, most of the time, the kids have all the faith in the world in their school, their institutions, their parents, and their futures. This, to my shattered millennial mind, is the attitude of teens who didn’t see the planes hit the towers or the photos from Abu Ghraib. These teens were still innocent. Even if I had seen High School Musical when I was in high school, I was far too gone by then to ever be able to relate. Granted, I was listening to socialist hip hop and I was in obnoxious Reddit atheist shit so maybe I’m not the best example. However, it only takes our Wikipedia page three paragraphs to get into how fucked we are. You can see how I doubt I’m the only one who feels that way.

Again, I know that these are DCOMs. But something at the heart of Shrek, a movie targeted for the same audience, feels true, even beneath the layers and layers of cynicism to be had at its creation. The teens in High School Musical, however, feel like the same kind of fairytale characters forced to move onto Shrek’s swamp.

Sharpay is Brilliant Social Critique, But Not of the Intended Target

Let’s take a moment to give Ashley Tisdale her flowers.

By and large, the actors in High School Musical do a great job. None of the roles demand greatness from any of them, but you still find slivers of it in their performances, particularly in how clearly Ashley Tisdale understood her character and what she’s supposed to represent. Tisdale makes a meal out of every villainous act and passive-aggressive remark, and this lends Sharpay an edge that most of the characters don’t have.

Why Tisdale’s career didn’t take off in the same way it did for Zac Efron or Vanessa Hudgens probably has something to do with one of our great pastimes that hit a fever pitch in the 2000s: Treating female celebrities with unforgivable levels of contempt and disrespect.

This was the era of the mass mockery of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. The Simple Life was a thing, and most people weren’t media literate enough to know that reality TV isn’t actually “real”. This was the era of treating Britney Spears’s harrowing public breakdown as late-night TV joke fodder. The era of Perez Hilton drawing dicks on pictures of Rumer Willis. (Even if I could find an example, I wouldn’t link to it.) The era of it being okay to call Lindsay Lohan a “fire crotch” because a billionaire oil tycoon’s grandson made a big stupid show of calling her that in public. (Not linking to that either.) I could name a bunch more deeply embarrassing and shameful episodes. I was going to say, “Were it not for this period, Amy Winehouse might still be alive,” but I’m not entirely sure we’ve left it. See: Amber Heard.

It was a period of rationalizing the scorn for rich white celebrity women by saying they deserved it for being rich white celebrity women. Were those the actual motivations, we may have had a point. But in reality, it was just garden variety misogyny mixed with a healthy dose of Bush Jr. era slut shaming. The media created the character of the Dumb Rich Slut, and we lapped it up like cats to a milk bowl.

Sharpay was clearly supposed to embody this character, as the creative team gave her most of the attributes associated with the 2000s Dumb Rich Slut. She’s rich, shallow, conceited, unpleasant, cruel, and frequently comes across as oblivious. She also wears a wardrobe of seemingly all pink, and even her name is meant to mock the faux sophistication of this new generation of reality TV-fueled high society. There is, however, a key difference. The High School Musical team forgot to make her stupid.

Stupidity is a core trait of the Dumb Rich Slut character the media created. Part of the supposed appeal of The Simple Life was laughing at Paris and Nicole failing to know basic everyday knowledge, like what Wal-Mart is or how to properly carry out the most basic of chores. (Or at least they pretended not to know these things. The Simple Life was obviously in on the joke. Not that anybody knew that at the time.) South Park even put out an episode about Paris Hilton called “Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset” in 2004. (Though to give South Park credit, they also put out "Britney's New Look” in 2008, an episode that critiqued the media’s treatment of Britney Spears years before anyone else bothered.) Lindsay Lohan kept getting arrested, Jessica Simpson didn’t understand “Chicken of the Sea” while her sister Ashlee was ousted from the spotlight for the mild (and commonplace) crime of getting caught lip-syncing, Jennifer Lopez kept dating a lot of men which was apparently a derision worthy offense, and example after example after example.

Sharpay can be immature and lacking in self-awareness, but she’s not stupid. If anything, her constant scheming proved her to be rather cunning. In the first movie, she tries to get Gabriella out of the picture by putting her on the radar of the scholastic decathlon team, and she gets Ms. Darbus to change the schedule to try to deny Troy and Gabriella the chance to audition for the musical. The plan probably would’ve worked were it not for the decathlon and the basketball team’s unrealistic levels of accommodation. (Or at least it read as unrealistic to me. I lived forty minutes away from my school and I fought with them constantly to allow me to drive to practices.)

In High School Musical 2, while the rest of the characters work their summer jobs at a country club, Sharpay spends the movie sitting by the pool and having her classmates serve her. Sharpay regularly has the manager change schedules and work assignments to break up Troy and Gabriella, and the manager’s willing to do so because Sharpay and her family are so wealthy that he’s essentially at their beck and call. She abuses her power so much, in fact, that it stopped being funny for me at a certain point and started being genuinely grating. (For the record, High School Musical 2 almost tells a story about class, but it backs off at the last second.)

A wealthy woman using her place of privilege and social status against those less fortunate and, in large part, of a different race. Of course, we know this woman today as a Karen.

Unfortunately, the term “Karen” has come to mean anyone who has a freakout or is in any way rude or argumentative in public. But the term was invented to describe white women who engage in behavior just like Sharpay’s. White women who weaponize their status against people of color knowing that they’ll probably get away with it.

It would be disingenuous to say she fits the mold perfectly. Most of the time, she’s more surreptitious and she’s not one to freak out in a fast food restaurant. But Sharpay and the woman calling the cops on the barbecue have the same motivation. To use and abuse the power given to them by an unjust society.

Not that the creative team behind the High School Musical film should’ve done anything further to make fun of the Dumb Rich Slut, but by failing to do so effectively, the folks at Disney accidentally created a massive self-own in the form of Sharpay. Sharpay isn’t from the world of most of the other students at East High. She’s from old money, and she embodies all the gentry’s worst traits. Solipsism. An endless appetite for money. Like Disney itself, Sharpay is a force only interested in asserting herself at cost at the expense of everyone else. High School Music thought it was making a ditz. They really made Leonna Helmsley. They might as well have made Bob Igor himself.

Here we are, right back to millennial doom. Again, I know this is just a silly series of kids’ movies. But when the rich get involved, this is just where my mind goes.