Deadly Class: Coming-of-Age as a Killer A television show analysis of Deadly Class (2018) Written by Vikram Nijhawan1,2,3 1 Department of English, 2Department of History, 3Department of Classics 3 Third-year undergraduate of Trinity College, University of Toronto “We live our lives behind these fictitious ideals of what we think other people will accept. Barricaded behind masks, honing our act.” (“Mirror People”, 07:10-7:25) Marcus Lopez Arguello’s monologue here reeks with teen angst, and would not be out of place in any high school-set bildungsroman. He could just as easily be Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, relaying this jaded introspection. But the relevance of Marcus’ words is compounded by the setting he inhabits – not just any ordinary high school, but rather Kings Dominion Atelier of the Deadly Arts. In Rick Remender’s television series Deadly Class, adapted from the comic book series of the same name, this is where the children of the most powerful crime syndicates on earth train to enter their respective family businesses. The milieu amplifies the usual growing pains of adolescents in the 1980s, by plunging them into a violent world at a formative age. The “masks” Marcus and his peers don are not merely to gain social acceptance, but also a necessity for survival. The academy’s cliques are organized by gang affiliation, and a normally benign schoolyard argument can take a deadly turn. Remender and his fellow showrunner, Miles Orion Feldsott, perfectly blend what would seem disparate genres, that of a coming-of-age story and a gritty crime drama. The fourth episode “Mirror People”, written by Feldsott, best exemplifies the mixture of these two worlds.
The Breakfast Club Meets Home Invasion The episode begins with our cast of characters locked in “prolonged confinement designed for behavioural rectification” (“Mirror People”, 04:30-04:35), as Petra describes it – or in other words, detention. The episode’s underlying premise echoes one of the most iconic films of the era, The Breakfast Club, where ambivalent teens from different social strata bond over their collective situation. Feldsott makes good use of the intimate setting, forcing characters with previously established tension into a room together. Throughout the adventure, Marcus and Saya acknowledge their romantic feelings towards one another, while the school bully Chico is constantly butting heads with the others. This adolescent drama is complicated, however, by the looming threat of Yakuza assassins, coming to attack our main characters while they are most vulnerable. The conceptual foundation of this episode, combining the Breakfast Club homage with a home invasion thriller, represents the convergence of these two worlds – a story of high school growth and one of violent criminals – which each plot point embodies. Screenwriters’ Perspectives Vol. 2 No. 1 2021
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