Boarding School

Like many dorky young women, I really wanted to attend boarding school when I was a kid. Not really, probably, since I was scared to be too far from home, but there's that boarding school mystique. I think I was mainly attracted to the idea of creating fictive families and communities that kids rather than adults controlled. That said, a lot of the fiction about it deals with how hard it is to deal with the social dynamics of cruel peers 24/7. Sometimes in murderous ways. Here is my favorite boarding school fiction. Am I forgetting anything good?

1) Harry Potter books and movies. This is what I was hoping for as a kid: a side of the genre that focuses more on kids doing their own thing without too many adults around to interfere.

2) Hex. Hex is the Psycho of television. It's really fun, really daring, and at the very end it gets a little wacked--can't we just cut out the psychiatrist from Psycho and the last half season from Hex? Nonetheless, I loved it. It's kind of murderous.

3) Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is still one of my all time favorite books. I don't know how I romanticized boarding school at all given this book. Young girls die, everyone's cold and underfed, it's cruelly authoritarian, and you get left there by yourself over Xmas. And your only friend left after your other friend dies leaves to get married and you never hear from her again.

4) Picnic at Hanging Rock. Somehow, thirty years after this was made, I still thought this was a true story, so I'm pretty disappointed to discover it is not. The Blair Witch of the seventies, plus boarding school, and crazy aboriginal shit, and some bizarre lesbian undertones. A really great movie.

5) Center Stage and Suspira. Sometimes being a dancer is a free ticket to boarding school. Then it's just an issue of whether you become anorexic or get murdered.

6) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I kind of hate Stephen Daedulus but I put up with him because of Leopold Bloom.

7) Toy Soldiers. South Park spoofed this recently to hilarious effect. Rudy, aka Sean Astin, is at a boarding school that gets taken over by terrorists. I can't remember why, but they use all the skills they honed playing pranks and avoiding adult supervision to defeat the terrorists from the inside. Good times.

8) X-Men. And another utopic boarding school, this time for kids who don't function in their own families and boarding school becomes more of a metaphor for fictive family than experimental community. I love X-men.