Back to school: even Rodney Dangerfield couldn't take the sting out of those words when I was a kid. The back to school commercials would start running on TV at the end of July, it seemed, giving kids their first sense of what mortality might be like – the consuming knowledge that not only would all this (summer) end, it would be ending shortly.
Now I feel a twinge of nostalgia for the idea of back to school. There's a lot of possibility packed into the beginning of every new school year – new friends, new love, new experiences and adventures. That's why I love movies about school, because the best ones really celebrate the possibilities of being young. And the best best ones kind of revel in the joys of being young and stupid.
This issue of BIRTH. MOVIES. DEATH. is all about going back to school, whether it be the School of Rock – examined here as a celebration of being fat – or Ridgemont High. School doesn't just change kids, as we learn when examining the ways Kindergarten Cop changed Arnold Schwarzenegger's image. And the most important moments of our school years don't always take place at school, which is why we're going deep this issue into the cars of American Graffiti.
As always there's more BIRTH. MOVIES. DEATH. than what can fit on the page. Check out BadassDigest.com for extended versions of some of our articles and for other content that we couldn't fit.
Just remember to bring a Number 2 pencil.
