Defining the Canon

I've got a piece up at The Atlantic about where Glee, for which I am immoderately excited, fits into the seminal depictions of high school cliques in the movies. While I was editing it, I had a horrified moment of doubt, about which I had to consult Kat: did I have to include the High School Musical movies in the contemporary teen canon, which I firmly believe begins in 1999 with 10 Things I Hate About You and reaches its apex in Mean Girls? We decided I had to at least reference it, but it was a useful gut-check about the difficulties of defining the canon in even a subgenre like high school movies. I believe High School Musical lacks the slight surreality (as well as, um, any sense of irony or actual high stakes) that marks the 1999-2004 period in teen movies, and may well represent the beginning of a new epoch. Which would be too bad. My teenage years may have been a musical lacuna, and have been right before the rise of television's creative revival, but Kat Stratford, Torrance Shipman, and Janis Ian were a pretty fantastic set of on-screen counterparts for a girl to have.