Confused about High School Musical 2

I’m confused about the message of High School Musical 2.

In the first movie, the kids learn that being yourself is key to develop individual potential. Troy (Zac Effron) and Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) learn to break free from who their friends see them as, and to mold themselves as they see fit. The result, after a few hilariously villanous machinations by Sharpey (Ashley Tisdale), is everyone realizes that the free development of talent leads to a better, richer world.

Effectively, this movie is one big movie for the superiority of Free Trade to Autarky. With lots of dancing.

HSM2 confuses me. Its about the future, and Troy wonders how the future might play out. The story seems to tell us that the pursuit of one’s future is bad if it causes you to disregard what your friends think. This is the opposite of HSM1’s moral!

A generous interpretation would be this: its a good idea to go against your friend’s opinion of you if and only if they aren’t directly hurt by your actions. In the first movie, the friends are hurt by Troy and Gabriella’s involvement in the musical, but ultimately, through the magic of team work, the wildcats win the game, the academic decathelete win the tournament, and the musical goes great. In other words, developing your talent is good if and only if NO ONE ultimately gets hurt.

In the second movie, Troy gets offers that none of the other get, and there is a real (well, as real as it gets in a TV movie) chance that Troy will grow apart from his friends and girlfriend. This is such an opportunity wasted to teach people a valuable lesson. That there is ultimately trade-offs in the world, and as such we should be happy when our friends move ahead in life, and not bitter and resentful.

You may object to this line of reasoning because these opportunities afforded to Troy are artificial — they are the result of Sharpey’s plan to corral Troy for herself. True, and it is this that i think HSM2 did the right thing in the end: manipulations like this shouldn’t be rewarded, and at the end Sharpey received her comeupance. But i’m still convinced that the issue of ‘breaking free’ from high school friends is a very real one, and was skirted by the movies’s writers.

Regardless of my objections, the movie became one of the most watched in the history of cable TV. Its an entertaining show and each and every song will likely be memorized by literary millions of kids around the world. Congrats!

‘Hairspray’ and the inevitability of change

In one of the last scenes of the 2007 film version of hairspray features a crowd-pleasing number “You can’t stop the beat”. The musical is about Tracy Turnblad, a big girl with big dreams and an even bigger heart.

The social issue tackled in the how is black integration in society. The backdrop is a local kids dance show, the Corny Collin’s Dance show.

As the musical suggests in its last song, America has got ’so far to go’ when it comes to economic outcomes for blacks, compared to whites and even other minorities. Sadly, i’m not a public econ or a labor econ guy, so i’ll reluctantly(!) restrain myself from those questions.

What interests me is how the characters in the show react to the supposed inevitablity of change. The show suggests that some people are visionaries that see the future in different way, while others are status-quo characters, that protect the current state of the world.

How do the visionaries ‘win’? They win because
1) they can accurately foresee latent demand (i.e. people like to see ‘good’ dancing, regardless of who is doing it)
2) they are willing to risk their careers and, even lives to see their vision come true.

Another way of putting it is that they are cultural entreprenuers that arbitrage opportunities to make a better show. Its MORE than this, however. It isn’t the usual micro story of selling a good to the market with the higher willingness to pay. Here, there is no real danger, no RISK.

In Hairspray (as in real life), there is a real risk in the sense that they dared imagine a world that doesn’t exist. They dared imagine a show that caters to this new world.

Its this kind of courage that happens in real markets everyday, which makes thinking about markets so thrilling. Well, ok. Maybe not as thrilling as Hairspray.