As I look back at one of the more nostalgic pieces of 80’s cinema, I would like to examine the highest merits of Teen Wolf: how the intro music resembles John Carpenters Halloween: a steady basketball dribbling replacing the muffled breathing, or the blatant symbolism of the single brilliant bulb in the gym resembles a full moon as a harried Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) prepares to shoot a free throw.
There could also be any number of conversations about how Teen Wolf illustrates the epidemical greed of the 1980’s, where everything is for sale, even your best friend’s wellbeing, so long as a buck can be generated from it. A Marxist lens could even be placed over the interactions between the student and teacher dynamic, particularly when looking basketball coach Bobby Fonstock’s (Jay Tarses) indifference to the game and the players, using them more as sounding boards for his financial problems and using them as a well from which to absolve his gambling debts and fiduciary missteps that lead him to announce “The IRS is breathing down my neck.”
There’s also grounds to see Teen Wolf as an allegory for teen social competition, where everything about an appearance defines the person as he or she navigates through high school hallways, fulfilling expectations both superficially and socially. In the same vein, maybe there’s also an element of race exploration here, demarcating the most obvious target of difference that has “landed on [Scott Howard’s] face,” a part of his body he is unable to remove or obscure from the public. At first, this analogy seemed a bit farfetched, even to me when I thought of it, but it’s rather convenient – or coincidental – that Scott Howard dons the number 42 on his basketball jersey, and while Jackie Robinson wasn’t a basketball player, he was the first of “his kind” to play amongst others who saw him as “some kind of an animal.”
I would love to expound on the various social, economic, and racial commentary that is laden within Teen Wolf, but, despite my fondness for the flick, I can’t get over the “When you want it, you’re going to have great power” advice that Harold Howard (James Hampton) passes onto his son about becoming a werewolf. I’m not against the generous lifting that this line has done from the Spiderman comic books so much as I’m a bit confused about this “great power.” It seems that the greatest power Howard inherits is playing basketball well, and while it’s admirable for a guy under 5’3” to dunk, I’m not sure if I’d term this “great.”
Couldn’t he have begun lurking in the night and saving people from burning buildings? Or, perhaps combine his talent for leaping over defenders into rescuing cats from trees? In the end, there doesn’t seem to be any practicality to this “power.” Even his ability to surf the top of the Wolfmobile is cheapened by his friend Stiles (Jerry Levine), who has already done the same. Perhaps Stiles couldn’t do a prolonged headstand, but he was surfing at night, in sunglasses, when power lines are hidden by shadows and potholes aren’t nearly as evident to the naked eye.
I don’t even want to get into the issue that being part wolf would probably not help you with anything involving a basketball solely on the grounds that their opposable thumbs would be far more of a hindrance than an advantage, but that’s a post for another time.
