Where Are You Going Where Have You Been

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Research Paper

Many times teenagers think that life is a big party. It is a life that everyone is supposed to live. In both of the works, "Where are you going, Where Have you been", and Smooth Talk the character, Connie lives in that perfect world, where the summer is hot, nights are long and where fun is their goal. It is also a time where many teenagers start to develop and explore their sexual desires. Connie felt just that way, she wanted to experiment her first sexual experience. Besides teenagers being sexually active, another obstacle in their teenage lives is the parent-child relationship. In her world it seemed like her mom wanted to make her life miserable. In the film Smooth Talk we meet Connie, a teenager who wants be free, wants to be wild. In the short story "Where are you going, Where Have You Been?" we also meet Connie, a teenager, that wants to be free from her parents' world.

Smooth Talk is basically the story about a teenage girl by the name of Connie who wants to experiment her sexual desires at a young age. Throughout the movie she shows a wild behavior as she flirted with boys and went window-shopping. In the movie, Connie showed her mother that she was different from her. Connie's life changed one day when her parents and her sister left to a pick nick and she stood home by herself. A stranger arrived at her home wanting to take her for a ride. In the beginning she thinks about it but later on she got scared and changed her mind. After coming back with Arnold Friend, the stranger, she tries to fix her conflict with her mother.

The film was a life experience movie. It was a life experience movie because of the lesson I interpreted at the end. In the movie, Connie, the main character, played by Lauren Dern, has a very spontaneous or "wild" lifestyle. Soon she finds out that the lifestyle that she wants is not what she expects. Arnold Friend, played by Treat Williams, makes most of her desires true. It was a great movie because of the plot of the story. Connie has an identity crisis because her character changes throughout the story making it a thriller and emotional movie. As a teenager like Connie, I also want a wild or spontaneous lifestyle. The difference between us two is that I take into consideration that I have two younger siblings and I have to be a role model for them. Connie on the other hand, doesn't have younger siblings and she can do what she wants.

The movie has much strength in my opinion. One of the great strong points is the characters' attitude. Joyce Chopra, the director, had done research including some documentary films about the teenagers' lifestyle that helped her built the Connie character to perfection. In contrast to Connie's teenage research done by Chopra, the "Pied Piper of Tucson" which Joyce Carol Oates first read about in "Life" magazine inspired the character of Arnold Friend. This shows that both characters were created different, Connie by research and Arnold Friend as an inspiration. The "Pied Piper of Tucson" only job was to seduce and sometimes murder his teenage victims. According to an article published by the New York Times, March 23, 1986, the Pied Piper of Tucson was not a teenager but a man in his mid thirties. It was also said that he used rags to increase his height.

Another of the strengths of the movie was that it was about a true-life circumstance. Usually mostly all movies to short stories have a happy ending. The case for Smooth Talk was a little bit different. The end of the movie wasn't tragic but surprising. When Connie got out of Arnold