There would be too many characters. We college girls have so many friends, and they usually don’t fit one stereotype. The “sassy gay friend” is also resentful of his suburban upbringing and was valedictorian of his high school. The “nerdy girl friend” is killer at beer pong, and the “good guy friend” who audiences have been trained to root for as a romantic interest remains a good friend, and at some point might date the “theatre major”. In fact, most of us have a handful of “good guy friends,” none of whom we end up engaged to at any point. Then there’s that nice girl in your discussion section who’s from Philadelphia and knows your cousin, and there are your two sweet premed neighbors who play techno music at crazy hours, and the freshman in your sociology class who you just want to hug, and you see already how expensive this movie would be. Clearly it’s worth it.
We do work. Movies that are set in a school environment tend to disregard this basic fact of college. The fact is, we do a certain amount of work. We take exams. Our lectures are not thinly-veiled metaphors for our love lives. More importantly, we talk about our work. I ramble on about my classes every day. I’ll go to get falafel with the boyfriend and we will discuss economics the entire time. I don’t think this is particular to my school either. Movies would have us believe that the primary purpose of going to college is to go to crazy frat parties, but we actually, like, learn things here. And then go to crazy frat parties. Obviously. (Frankly, I go to crazy frat parties and run into friends and start telling them how I learned yesterday that the word “whore” has the same root as the Latin word “carus,” meaning dear one! Which is also the root of “caring”! So that would probably be hard to work into a script.)
Texting happens. We don’t really communicate in person anymore. I mean, we do, but a lot of our most critical interactions occur via SMS. A girl isn’t going to run to a guy’s dorm room in the middle of the night and proclaim that they belong together. She’s going to send him a text about what he’s doing that weekend. Girls don’t debrief each other about the previous night’s events over brunch as often as they do over a three-way-text. Is the main character going through some kind of emotional breakdown? She’s going to text like, five of her girl friends (which is too many friends to have to cast, by the way), and completely unload on whoever texts back first. The film Trust handled this well (although it was completely different subject matter).
We don’t get happy endings. I suppose, if they set the film during senior year, they could end the film with graduation. That’s the closest thing to a happy ending I can think of. College is messy, guys. You don’t know whether you’re dating someone until a month into the relationship! People break up, they go on breaks, they get therapy, they study abroad, they do all kinds of really complicated things, none of which are going to be satisfying to an audience. Sorry, audience. Try being us.
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