Cafeteria Culture

Adults Do It Too

Dispatches from Youth Culture, No. 6

Visiting a high school with some 2015 graduates recently, I learned that the cafeteria had a social geography: some kids were more likely to eat in certain areas of the room than others.  Mean Girls, the high school satire from 2004, has achieved cult-classic status with young people partly because it points to themes of social segregation at its fictional high school:

“You got everybody there,” a friend tells “Cady,” Lindsay Lohan’s new-girl character, giving her a doodled map of cafeteria tables, each labeled with a different stereotype. “You got your freshmen . . . preps, JV jocks . . . desperate wannabes, burnouts. . .”  Above all, she says, “beware of the Plastics”—the most popular girls in school.

Thirty years ago, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, another teen satire, pointed to a similar idea when Miss Grace, the school secretary, explained about all the cliques who admired the school-skipping hero, Ferris: “They all adore him!” she says after listing eight stereotypes.  “They think he’s a righteous dude.”

In the genre of what youth-culture theologian Jeff Keuss calls “transformation films,” main characters “rely on a rigid and stereotypical social structure where there are strict categories of people including nerds, jocks, beauty queens, smart people.  The emergence of a new identity,” he writes, “usually relies on this social structure in order to define itself.”

While that’s less true in Ferris Bueller—which isn’t so much a “transformation” film as a quirky comedy—it’s quite the case with Mean Girls.  Cady “transforms” from a newcomer-stranger to one who accepts herself and her newly unsegregated peers at the end—while still using the language of the cliquery she has transcended as a reference point.  “I had gone from homeschool jungle freak, to shiny ‘Plastic,’ to most hated person in the world, to actual human being,” she says.  “All the drama from last year just wasn’t important anymore.”

Why do movies featuring silly groupings tend to resonate so much with young people?  Could it be because we adults have a tendency to do this, too?

Consider an airliner’s coach seat, which, at roughly 87 millionths of an acre, is big enough for the gameshow of grasping at the tiniest social advantages.

At the airport last month, I was reminded of the number of social strata available for what Louis C.K. calls “sitting in a chair in the sky.”  To pre-board people with disabilities and families with children only seems right as a matter of justice and courtesy.  What got me was the array of arbitrary cake-layers that followed, with designations such as: the gold-status frequent flyers, the silver-status folks, then bronze, copper, helium, and Styrofoam, then the Plus members, the Plus Minus crowd, and the Plus-Plus-Minus Plus! people in that order.

Then came layers even more obscure, with names like Partner-Carrier Ultra Platinum PassengerPerks PointsExtra Deluxe status, or Beatified Elevated MileageExtreme Left-Handed PlanCardholding Oft-Flyers; and so on down the list of about 89 ever-smaller boarding calls.  Finally, we—the hoi polloi, non-frequent, budget-traveling also-flews—were called aboard, and to everyone’s surprise, we all landed at the same instant.

We classify ourselves by our cars, our phones, our vacations—even, on Route 167 and I-405 outside Seattle, by whether we can afford a fee to use certain lanes on the freeway.  Is it any wonder our kids learn to self-stratify?  How can they do otherwise if the grownups are doing it too?

“High school,” the band Superchic[k] sang a generation ago, “could be a Mini-Me of the rest of society. . . . Sadly, some will be eternally keeping score of popularity”—like who makes more money than whom, or who has a higher GPA, who gets on the plane a few minutes before everyone else, who makes it into which name-brand college or wears which corporation’s clothing.

Maybe we can model God’s intention for our lives instead: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

In God’s economy, our artificial one-ups are all meaningless: we all “get on the plane” at the same time, we all sit at the same “cafeteria table,” and wearing Abercrombie doesn’t score any more grace-points with God than shopping at Target or Goodwill does.  “We have a God who enters the world through smallness,” wrote Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution, “a baby refugee, a homeless rabbi, the lilies and the sparrows”—or, we might imagine, the ones whom no one invites to the table, or who can’t afford the extra twelve bucks not to stand in line.

Our kids are watching us.  Can we give them an example of a God who loves us equally, regardless of where we sit?

Sources include:

Jeff Keuss, Blur: A New Paradigm For Understanding Youth Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), 160-61.

Louis C.K. via Comedy Central at www.cc.com, accessed October 15, 2015.

Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), 321, via Google Books, accessed October 15, 2015.

This article appeared in the November, 2015 edition of The Circuit Rider, the magazine of Salmon Creek Church in Vancouver, Wash.  Visit Salmon Creek Church, which is a United Methodist ministry, at www.salmoncreekchurch.org.