Among the many thousands of public domain works freely available from the Internet Archive are most of the teen delinquency movies of the 1950s — films like Teenage Thunder and Assassin of Youth that horrified Middle America with tales of marijuana, premarital sex and drag racing. In this more enlightened age, we look back on such films and laugh, astounded that a hilariously sensational mess like Reefer Madness could ever have been taken seriously.
How strange then, that the same ridicule is so rarely levelled at contemporary teen panic movies like InRealLife. On the evidence of the trailer embedded above, the film’s brand of frenzied propaganda is really no different to the one peddled to terrified parents in decades gone by. Only now, the villain of the piece is a decidedly modern foe: the internet.
Steel yourself for the evil that lurks within this terrifying new medium…
0:16 — Two young men read aloud from a list of internet search terms: ‘big tits’, ‘teen’, ‘squirt’. That’s right folks, today’s teenage boys are no longer content to masturbate to the thought of a chaste peck on the cheek from their sweetheart. Now they covet the mammary glands of adult human women!
Their pusher? A sinful new perversion known as ‘pornography’, which definitely did not exist prior to the invention of the internet.
0:21 — Another poor victim of the modern condition recounts his sorry tale: “I text him a lot, we tweet each other, and we talk on Google Talk a lot.” From behind the camera, a concerned and in no way patronising voice questions, “and have you had a boyfriend in real life?” The tragedy of his existence now brought into sharp focus, our young hopeful lowers his head despondently and replies in the negative.
We can only hope that a similarly condescending voice of reason was around in the trenches of WWII, to pull hand-written love letters from the hands of servicemen and chide them for living in a fantasy world.
0:29 — “I change my status to ‘awake’, and then I have a shower, come back, and change my status to ‘getting ready’”. While some might conclude that this young woman’s greatest failing is her proclivity for a fucking boring status update, she has in fact fallen prey to a far scarier foe: internet addiction!
You see, whereas teenage diaries have traditionally been meticulously edited works of literature entirely devoid of superfluous, self-involved bullshit (which is why they account for such a large proportion of Nobel Prize in Literature winners) the internet has allowed teenagers to become mundane and self-absorbed! This terrifying new development cannot be allowed to stand.
0:42 — Here we see a group of youngsters having fun in a park. Seems innocent enough, right? Wrong! These particular teenagers met on the internet, which means that even once they do get together in the real world to play Twister and generally have a good time, there’s something decidedly creepy and wrong about the whole affair.
Instead, teenagers must meet via the traditional channels: at the ice cream parlour, attending Sunday School, or in the process of painting picket fences.
0:50 — It’s time to bring out the big guns (and the scary stock footage of evil-looking computer servers) as a voice informs us that, “your history is archived, by a private company, on servers that belong to them, for commercial puposes that belong to them”.
Quite how this relates to the hysterical fear-mongering about pornography and online relationships we’ve seen so far is not made clear, but don’t worry because before you know it we’re back to more comfortable territory…
0:53 — Our enthusiastic porn consumers are still getting ample use out of their communal iPad, as they gaze at an image of a topless woman and continue to discuss their admiration for her breasts.
It’s hard not to yearn for a simpler time, when horny teenagers would stay up late into the night discussing the intellects of the opposite sex.
1:26 — As the soundtrack shifts from melancholy piano to frightening, discordant electronica (turning up the moral panic to 11 in the process), we see a fast-cut montage of the myriad horrors of the online world.
Chief amongst them is this haunting image of two Etonians enacting the Gangnam Style dance — a sight so vile that any right-minded person would, upon seeing it, surely demand for the reinstatement of national service.
1:48 — That horrifying image still seared into our minds, we’re left to ruminate on whether mankind will ever truly recover from the global catastrophe of teenagers gaining access to the internet.
And while we’re at it, we can keep up to date with the film’s release on Twitter, Facebook and its official website.