Anyway.

The video settles into itself pretty quickly and stays the same for quite a long time. The songs the video is set to are kind of trance-like and ethereal, but their beginnings and endings cue something like divisions that help the film feel like a kind of sequence or procession.

In the beginning, I have to admit, I was pretty frustrated with it. I couldn’t make out all the spots, the skaters, or sometimes even the tricks. I couldn’t really be sure of anything, and that bothered me.

That’s because I was still trying to watch it like a skate video.

See, one thing that’s really hard to do is step outside of a culture once it has been engrained into you. Sometimes, it’s difficult even to see the extent to which you’ve been assimilated.

When I watch a skate video, I want all the things that I’m used to. I want to know people’s names and examine their skating. I want to be impressed, I want to be proud, and I want to critique everything. I want to see what people have been doing lately and what ideas they’ve come up with. I want to see good skating and I want to see equally good production.

If the video isn’t based on individual’s sections, I want to see how energy increases and how emotions rise to create memorable sessions. I want to see how skaters build off of each other and get inspired and motivated and feel compelled to do crazy shit after seeing their hommies lace something. I want to see dudes get wrecked and then get back up with determination and will power and conquer the things that flung them on their ass.

But I only want some of those things only because I’ve been indoctrinated into a rollerblading worldview that encourages me to want to know those things.

More importantly, the videos I find entertaining are entertaining precisely because they satisfy the expectations rollerblading culture has set up for me.

Laid-out backflips aren’t cool anymore. Neither are pencil tight spins. I know they’re not because they’re not in the videos anymore. And the top guys you see skating don’t do shit like that. (If you think about it, that’s partially how we know they’re top guys).

What we see from our top pros and what we watch in skate videos very significantly guides our preferences. In a subtle way, they suggest to us what’s cool and what we should like.

And in a way, that’s a fairly forward-looking worldview. We watch videos and examine the skating of others as if we’re constantly shopping around for what we might want to do the next time we go out and skate. It’s also kind of extroverted or “outward-looking” in the sense that skate videos help shape the preferences we use to judge and evaluate the skating of our friends and homies.

Teen Dreams isn’t like that. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s a look back into the past. And it treats the entire experience of skating like a dream remembered.

It asks you to zone out and get a little bit introspective with yourself. It asks you to quit caring about people’s names for a little while, and remember all those days and nights of skating over the last ten years. It wants you to get in touch with the reasons why you care about skating and how much you’ve been through with it: all the great tricks, all the bad falls, all the great nights, all the partying, the hangovers, all the ex-girlfriends, scabs and wrecked shins.

After a little over an hour of that kind of entrancement, the video cuts back to the high definition color and usual focus that we’re all used to. It’s a drastic shift from dream-like trance to the bright colors that pan across the sky and buildings like a kind of daybreak, an awakening from deep sleep.

It encourages us to see the world with renewed sharpness and clarity, like the way you feel strangely gleeful inside the morning after the bad night when you decided NOT to shoot yourself.

It also reminds us that the world always moves forward, but also that there’s no trip too far from which you can’t come back.

Like I said at the beginning, a lot depends on your preferences. If you look for Teen Dreams to do for you what a skate video does, you’ll almost certainly be disappointed.

If you look at it as a trigger that can catalyze your own memories and experiences, I think you’ll be rewarded.

For me, Teen Dreams is the first art film I’ve seen that didn’t make me want to set myself on fire. And I think that’s saying something.

As always, thanks for reading.

-fs