You’ve no doubt heard of the Jonas Brothers, but have you heard them?
You’ve almost certainly seen their names bandied about, but do you actually know their names or anything else about them?
Why stay in the dark? Knowledge is power. Is it that their non-threatening caterpillar eyebrows, freshly-scrubbed faces and mop tops threaten you? Or is it the imminent cold sweats and night terrors that await when assessing their potential standing as the Beatles and Nirvana to a current tween generation? It’s okay, I’m scared too.
I just sat through the latest original movie offering from the Disney Channel – the newest in a self-created genre that also spawned the wildly successful High School Musical 2, which you’re also probably aware of without actually knowing anything about – in its entirety and lived to tell about it. It’s called Camp Rock, and lest you think our Wild Card Wednesdays are surreptitiously sponsored by Disney (we did talk about Miley Cyrus just last week, I know I know), I can explain.
See, we need to face our fears head on. I am afraid of the Jonas Brothers, the Disney Channel, the words “High School Musical”, and people younger than me named “Zach”, “Vanessa”, “Hannah”, and “Miley” (hey Disney, what ever happened to Huey, Louie, and Dewey?). So I took one for the team, and much to my roommate’s bewilderment I DVR’d Camp Rock this past weekend. I wanted to decode and make sense of what our future musicians, actors, and artists are being weaned on. Here’s what I found:
SYNOPSIS
Mitchie Torres, an aspiring singer songwriter of indeterminate tween age (read: 13-16 maybe?) dreams of going to the prestigious Camp Rock for the summer. Restricted financially, her caterer mom agrees to run the kitchen of the camp in order to get a discount on enrollment for Mitchie and make her dreams come true. Meanwhile, famous bad boy heartthrob - and frontman of the chart-topping Connect 3 - Shane Gray (the brooding Jonas brother) must teach at the camp as a punishment for his unspecified bad boy ways. After this setup, the following goes down: Mitchie craves acceptance, lies about her parents’ professions, and falls in with the bitchy elitist crowd run by Tess Tyler (the daughter of a pop star) before truly finding herself and singing a duet with Shane. Similarly, Shane bitches and moans, becomes inspired by hearing a mystery girl (Mitchie) sing a shitty song, writes new “less commercial” songs while truly finding himself and singing a duet with Mitchie.
PRECEDENTS
The film’s plot elements borrow messily and explicitly from the following films: Mean Girls (Tess Tyler’s crew = The Plastics), Mrs. Doubtfire (Mitchie frantically balancing two worlds: her middle class reality and privileged façade she’s created), Dirty Dancing (unlikely star-crossed folks from opposite sides of the track fall “in like” with each other at summer camp), Cinderella (Shane’s search for the mystery singer = Prince Charming and the glass slipper), and A Hard Day’s Night (see Shane continually avoid throngs of adoring campers).
And you know what? It doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s a genius move; chances are, the juice-box set tuned into this movie have only seen one or two of these cannibalized pics at best. Hey, it’s new to them.
PREVALENT THEME
Class warfare. Central to this film is Mitchie’s embarrassment at her middle class background and burning desire to be something more. Make no mistake, Disney hates the middle class. Sure, everything falls into place at the end and she learns to accept who she really is, but this comes after nearly two hours of watching her avoid her mother in shame and endure the taunts of her fellow privileged campers (among my favorites – “Come on girls, let’s leave her alone, I’m sure she has dishes to do,” and “this is rich! But, apparently you’re not!”). This is another master stroke of genius by Disney; they’re teaching a whole new generation of children to shame their parents into illusions of upward mobility. Know what the quick fix for that is? You guessed it: a trip to Disneyland!
MUSIC
Within five seconds of the film starting, it hit me: oh shit, this is a musical! Ugh. It hadn’t occurred to me prior to the opening credits when we’re told to go to Disney.com and download the lyrics to all the songs featured in the film so we can sing along at home (which is completely pointless because they just end up showing them karaoke-style at the bottom anyway).
The music is a collection of fairly innocuous, streamlined, heavily produced, slickly saturated pop songs, some of which approximate “rock” and even one of which flirts with “hip hop”. And every time someone opens their mouth to sing, it’s as though Cher’s vocoder from “Believe” jumped down their throats. They are all terrible. All, that is, except one….
At the camp’s first talent show, Tess performs a caustic, new wave-inflected dance number called “Too Cool”, the lyrics of which would be enough to put any insecure tween directly into therapy:
“I’m too cool, (too cool) to know you
Don’t take it personal don’t get emotional,
You know it’s the truth: I’m too cool for you!”
Whoa. And guess what? You can watch it right here:
It should be noted this is also my favorite part of the film.
A NOTE ABOUT THE JONAS BROTHERS
Watching this film only served to solidify what I had suspected all along: the Jonas Brothers are worthy of our fear. They’re like the devil spawn of an uninspired marketing meeting hatched before everyone returned from a coffee break to confess that they had “just been kidding” and “no, they didn’t really think Hanson-meets-the-Monkees 2008 would honestly work.” But it did.
These guys are immensely popular, and judging by the smug sense of self-satisfaction that oozed forth throughout much of this movie they honestly may believe they’re bigger than Jesus. As far as I can tell, they assume the following roles:
Joe Jonas – the heartthrob, the frontman, most likely to go to rehab and/or impregnate an Olsen twin.
Kevin Jonas – the comic relief, the “safe Jonas”?
Nick Jonas – the straight man, the anchor, the Leonardo to Kevin’s Michelangelo and Joe’s Raphael. Looks strikingly like Weasel (Screech deux) from Saved by the Bell: The New Class
CONCLUSION
We actually have nothing to worry about. Today’s kids are just being raised on the same shitty television we once were. Like the Monkees, the Partridge Family, Jem, and other music-related fare from the days of yore, personalities like the Jonas Brothers (and films like Camp Rock) will hopefully prove to be little more than training wheels for this generation’s own (hopeful) musical awakening as teens and adults: soon enough enough the wheels will come off and a whole new world will emerge. Or Joe Jonas will go to rehab, whatever comes first.
*Lead image found HERE
