A Birder's Guide to the Commodification of Teens(TM)

I made Johana watch "A birder's guide ot everything," which is a new coming of age drama about some high school birdwatchers that is now available on iTunes and Time Warner On Demand and is premiering in theaters next week.  I didn't like it.  It's not so much the bird-related aspects of the film which I object to, although they are pretty ridiculous - elite birdwatchers crashing down a trail on mopeds, a labrador duck sighting, a presumed white-winged scoter on a suburban street dismissed as commonplace, Ben Kingsley magically knowing what park a migrating bird will next stop at after it's been flushed, ducks migrating during t-shirt weather in the northeast...

No, it was more the rote "serious" teen film cliches, plucked from John Hughes' fictional Schermer, Illinois and given a fresh application of post-American Pie heteronormative raunch.  The nerdy oversexed best friend character could be the Max Casella character from Doogie Howser, MD, except he says "vagina" every other word, because Teens(TM) are the universal consumer, the docile body of the film industry's inexorable need to recycle the same tired representational forms ad infinitum.  Hence the reviews that call this film an heir to Stand By Me (only because it isn't self-consciously pastiche enough to fit in the same genre as Super 8, though it feels at times like a cynical retread of many of the character formulas in that film - the troubled protagonist with the dead mother, the love interest thrust I to the aggressively homosocial boys' club as a matter of happenstance/narrative convenience.  And of course there's the desexualized asthmatic Asian male sidekick, because what would a teen movie be without a little mild racism-cum-ableism?

What's interesting about the film, then, is not the film itself, which is pretty awful, but rather its marketing -- it's being promoted by the heavyweights of what I am coming to think of as bird-capital's NGO wing -- the National Audubon Society and many of its local affiliates and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, both of which likely see the film as a means by which to promote and popularize birdwatching, especially among Teens(TM).  The inter penetration of the for-profit and the non-profit are fairly constant within the world of North American birdwatching - viz partnerships between, say, the Cornell Lab's ebird project and Carl Zeiss optics, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.  But there's something about the boosterism that sticks out, and if I do wind up writing more seriously about birds, birdwatching, and capital, it's something I want to keep thinking about - the ways that capital is invoked as salvific, the capitalist realism of not just ecotourism discourse but conservation evangelism as well.