The DUFF and the acceptance of being me

Ok, so the teenage genre in cinematography is for sure not the most reliable and award winner from all the different types but once every blue moon we get classics that define a generation based on their popularity and capability to reflect a generation. So we get cases like "The Breakfast Club" (1985) in the 80's, "Clueless" (1995) for the 90's, "Mean Girls" (2004) in the 2000's and so far the title for this new decade is been held by "Easy A" (2010), but nothing is written on stone as the decade was just starting and it wasn't a box office success even that was loved by the critics, and now we got "The DUFF" (2015) to enter to the competition as a modern tail of coming to age with enough references, charm and soul to make a new stand among others.

The title refers to a specific new label in the social hierarchy: Designated Ugly Fat Friend. The one that is less popular or less attractive making it easy to approach in order to get information from your more popular and attractive friends. Oh! High School. How things have changed since those days?

And actually they did. This new generation is ruled by social media and even still keeping the traditional stereotypes like jocks, nerds, popular chick, they have all mutated into more gray areas that can aloud that a jock can play video games or be a comic books reader for example. Or the nerds can be popular and accepted if follow the rules. Well, seems like high school is just an experiment in lower dosis of how adult life and society works. Maybe that's why everyone can feel related to this type of movies.

What is different is life perspective when you are in high school. Teenagers are a work in progress and as a come to age process they try to figure out their role in society and the world, defining their values, ideals and themselves. Thats why self auto estime becomes a main topic that is a thin line between success and fall down as start to create connections, networking, and mostly romance, sex and love, thanks to their crazy hormones that mostly make them act by instinct than using their common sense.

Thats why all these movies follow the same rule and bring the same cliches as is all about this process of growing up, turning from teenage into adult. So what makes them unique is the way they are able to define that current generation. And in the case of the one in the spot now, is getting good reviews and might be the case as shows the evolution of our teenagers, which still are avid consumer in the mall, and their lives still move around prom night, football practice, lunch time at the cafeteria, but with the twist that all of them are fighting now to find a spot in a viral world where everyone gets their 5 minutes of fame or gets cyber bulled.

Everybody feels with the right to judge and has been judge by social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, etc, so you theres no more contest of popularity but being the one with more friends or followers in those sites. New generations have lost their human emotions, using emoticons to express their feeling or reactions, but their faces remain without any expression other than looking at their phone.

And everybody is less or more popular/ attractive than others, depends on the situation so there are no tops or bottoms but everyone is in between and we all been through this process and have felt insecure and tried to take advantage of others but what makes it right is if by the end we just use it as an experience to learn and become better person that we were before cause we can't judge other without looking at us first and judge ourselves cause one thing is for sure, no one is perfect and what we see, specially in a viral world full of pics and videos, is just the best of worst from what others want us to see, usually just covering the real truth about us or what we think is the less of us, but most of the time the way others see us, differs from ours and just to prove that we are the worst judges from ourselves, specially if we don't get any good guidance from people who knows us or believe in us.

So in this scenario, we meet Bianca, a young girl that happens to be different as the social requirements. She likes horror movies, dresses like a tomb boy/ hipster style, lacks of social skills and loves science. But happens to have two best friends that are pretty, popular, and more into social accepted areas like sports and arts. So when she realizes that she's being used as a DUFF for her friends, thanks to his jock neighbor/ old time friend confession, her life is about to change.

And not because things will be different. She won't be popular, she won't change her likes or ideals, she will keep the same group of friends and her unique personality but what will change is her confidence in herself and most important, embrace what we are and bring the best of it, making self confidence the best attribute in anyone. And then she will become popular by its uniqueness, she'll get the boy and she'll find love but just as a consequence of herself, and as she describes is all about this journey to become that.

And so as Bianca, our lovely main character, the movie represents the same qualities of self discovering, making this high school phase a social try out for what everybody faces in their daily basis, but its charm and soul as individuals, fighting, surviving, loving, learning and failing, but mostly trying to figure out what is our place and what is next for us, as getting older, every new step will be a new challenge and a new moment that will define and change us, becoming a cycle and a pattern that turns high school into just an exercise for the rest of the life and as the movie implies, whatever happens in high school stays with us for the rest of our lives. That's what defines this movie and what defines us. So once you achieve that, then is when deserves to become a classic for your generation. We'll see what the box office says now and within the next years this DUFF might stuck with us for the generations to come as a new lesson of respect, acceptance and coming to age tale.