by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Sexting in Suburbia — which may have had a theatrical release, or at least
originally been slated for one, since the imdb.com page on it has a poster with
the alternate title Shattered Silence
and lists an MPAA rating (PG-13, “for mature thematic material including
a disturbing image, some language and sexual content”), though I watched it in
what was billed as a “world premiere” on the Lifetime channel — apparently
takes its inspiration from a real-life case in 2008, in which Ohio high school
student Jessica “Jesse” Logan killed herself after months of being bullied
following the mass Internet posting of a nude photo of herself she had e-mailed
to her boyfriend, who had cross-posted it and sent it “viral” out of revenge
after they broke up. In the movie, directed and edited by John Stimpson (the
unusual spelling appears on his on-screen credit as well as imdb.com) from a
script he co-wrote with Marcy Holland, the put-upon girl is Dina Van Cleve
(Jenn Proske; her imdb.com page doesn’t reveal her birthdate but she looks
about a decade too old to be playing a high-school student), star of the girls’
field hockey team at Westfield High School (when I saw the name I reflected on
the mysterious “Westfield Shoppingtown” company that quietly bought all the
major malls in San Diego County and wondered if they had set this up as a
charter school!) and an “A” student in line for a college scholarship who was
also elected homecoming queen.
Only at the homecoming after-party her
boyfriend, Mark Carey (Ryan Kelley), tries to get her to have sex with him, but
she’s still being a virtuous little girl and refuses. Indeed, she bails on the
party and comes home to her mom Rachel (Liz Vassey, top-billed) well ahead of
schedule, but once she’s home she goes into her room, undresses and sends Mark
a weird sort of consolation prize, a nude photo of herself which she takes with
the camera on her cell phone. Meanwhile Mark, put off by a girl who wouldn’t
put out for him, finds one at the party who will: Skylar Reid (Kelly Goss),
blonde sex bomb and Dina’s principal rival for the college scholarship and
stardom on the field hockey team. Mark and Skylar become an “item” and Dina’s
naked picture appears on cell phones throughout the school — posted by Dina’s
friend Claire Stevens (Rachel Parsons) after Skylar intimidates her into it by
telling her Dina’s actions risk getting the field hockey team disqualified from
championship play. Dina’s new-found notoriety gets her the full-tilt bullying
treatment, from graffiti all over Westfield High calling her “whore” and “slut”
to being openly shunned by just about everybody in school — someone even dumps
a large supply of condoms in her locker, and she opens it and they come
spilling out Mark happens to be passing by and offers to help her pick them up,
to which she replies, “Haven’t you hurt me enough already?” Eventually the
pressure gets to be too much for her and she hangs herself in her bedroom.
The
movie doesn’t take a linear approach to the material: it begins with mom Rachel
showing a house to a couple who are thinking of buying it (like her own house,
it has a leaky kitchen faucet), and she’s so late that by the time she gets
home her daughter has already killed herself — and just in case we were
encouraged by the ambiguity of the opening scene to hold open the possibility
that mom had arrived home in time to rescue her daughter and cut her down from
her D.I.Y. noose in time to save her life, we next see a wake at school in
which Dina is awarded a posthumous letter in field hockey. The film cuts back
and forth throughout its running time between Dina’s worsening situation — the
last straw is her being fired from the team and losing her college scholarship
— and scenes taking place after Dina’s death, in which Rachel enrages the rest
of the town by going after Dina’s killers, specifically by investigating who
distributed the photo over the Internet and then trying to get the police to
prosecute them on child pornography charges (since Dina was still only 17 when
the photo was taken). The opening parts of Sexting in Suburbia alternate between the deliberately depressing and
the just plain silly, but once the basis outlines of the story are established
it becomes surprisingly chilling and gripping drama, as the same mysterious
people who bullied Dina and pressured her to kill herself now turn against
Rachel. She gets multiple copies of a death threat, one of those criminal
missives with letters clipped from magazine headlines and pasted on a fresh
piece of paper to form a message, and the next time she goes to her daughter’s
grave she finds the tombstone vandalized with “Dina — Slut” and the posthumous
athletic letter set fire to and burned.
Through part of the movie I had thought
it would have been more powerful if it had started with the framing sequence
and then stuck with Dina’s story, as the bullying and harassment got worse and
worse and her ordeal took on a Kafkaesque intensity that made it all too clear
why she finally broke down and killed herself — but the dual-track construction
Stimpson and Holland actually used creates a powerful sense of drama as Rachel
becomes a passion-driven revenge figure, anxious not only to find out who was
responsible for hounding her daughter to death but to indict the whole high
school and, indeed, the whole town for allowing it to happen. At the same time
the movie is a powerful indictment of the Internet and the “zero tolerance”
climate that between them has made adolescence even rougher than it was when I
went through it, when there was still room for error — a chance to make the
stupid mistakes of youth, learn from them and go on with your life temporarily
sadder but permanently wiser. The key line is spoken by the avuncular
African-American woman guidance counselor Rachel talks to in order to make
sense of her daughter’s needless death — and the counselor says, “The Internet
is forever.” Even if Dina had overcome her bullying and found the strength to
live, That Picture would have followed her through the rest of her life,
turning up in unexpected places and probably costing her more than one job.
(I’ve had at least two people whom I interviewed for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine ask me to take their stories
off the Zenger’s blog, one
because it was coming up in searches by potential employers and costing him
jobs, and the other because she had joined the military while “don’t ask, don’t
tell” was still in place and she was afraid it would turn up and get her
discharged. I told both these people that I would remove the articles from my
own site but I couldn’t guarantee them that it wouldn’t stay lodged in some
other part of the Web and still turn up to hurt them.)
Dina’s “sexting” her
boyfriend was a reckless and stupid thing to do, but it was precisely the
reckless and stupid thing teenagers often do and grow out of — only in the
modern age the electrons and pixels preserve all the old stupid mistakes we made and wanted to share
online. I’ve often warned people, “If you wouldn’t stand on a streetcorner and
yell it out to all passers-by, don’t put it online.” At the same time I’ve
often wondered how much of my own online conduct will come back to haunt me — especially if a future U.S. government dominated
by Right-wingers decides to mount a new McCarthyite purge of the entire
country, and finds the job far easier than McCarthy did because every petition we signed, every e-mail we sent, every
protest we ever went to is documented on the Internet and all they’ll have to
do is search willy-nilly and collect enough “evidence” to destroy people’s
lives en masse. Indeed, while the
Internet is often hailed as a venue of personal freedom, it’s also the ultimate
tool for dictators: whereas the secret police of the Soviet Union and their
Eastern European satellites could only mount their security cameras everywhere
and scare their people into thinking they were being watched 24/7, the Internet
really can watch people 24/7:
modern computer technology can allow machines to collect evidence of political
dissent far faster than the ordinary humans of the KGB or Stasi or SAVAK ever
could. Sexting in Suburbia makes
powerful comments on the vulnerability of anyone who posts anything to the Web and also the hermetic
environment of a small town, in which virtually everyone turns against Rachel
and she loses business because of her dauntless but deeply threatening effort
to find the person responsible for driving her daughter to suicide by
mass-distributing her nude photo.
What a pity that, after building to a really
powerful drama in which the whodunit aspects of their plot actually add to the
intensity, Stimpson and Holland can’t leave well enough alone and have to end
their movie with two outrageously melodramatic twists — the texter turns out
not to be Skyler (as we’ve been led to believe all movie) but Skyler’s mother
Patricia (Judith Hoag), whom Rachel had ironically been turning to for support
(they’ve been friends since before their daughters were even born) but who’d
come to hate Dina because Dina was getting the star position on the hockey team
and the scholarship Skyler thought was her due — and when Skyler finds out and
turns against her mom, Patricia says the chilling words, “You’ll understand
when you have children of her own.” Skyler responds by stealing her mom’s car
and going on a wild ride that’s either ordinary teenage recklessness or her own
suicide attempt, and she ends up alive but in a hospital and likely never to be
able to walk again — and there’s a bizarre final scene at a school assembly in
which, partly as a sign of respect and partly targeting the technology as the
real culprit, Claire suggests that all the students give up their cell phones
for the rest of the semester. The over-the-top silliness of the ending mars a
movie that sometimes seems stupid (when Dina dies, the first scenes of Rachel
after the suicide are marred by a sappy soft-rock song, and when the homecoming
party occurs the band there is playing equally mediocre pop-punk) but sometimes
is genuinely powerful and truly does justice to its subject, the multifarious
ways humans work out to be cruel to each other and the extent to which the
Internet has just facilitated the grim work of people senselessly destroying
each other.
