Written by Drew Curle, Esq. 

I recently watched "The Lost Boys" for the first time. It was on TV, and it was very late. I did not really want to be watching this movie. And yet it pulled me in. This is because what I had assumed to be nothing but an 80's camp-fest is actually an insight into the mind of the contemporary hipster.

The plot is straightforward. Two brothers, roughly ages 10 and 16, move to a new town with their recently divorced and somewhat distracted mom. They attend a rock concert together, the older brother meets a girl there, the girl introduces him to her punk friends, and it turns out these friends are up to no good. By which I mean they're a gang of  vampires led by Kiefer Sutherland.

Now, the older brother is sort of a moron and doesn't realize this. He's too smitten by the girl, mostly, and also he wants to impress his new friends. But the younger brother reads comics and thus isn't a moron, so he figures it out quickly. Vampire conversions, unconversions, and plenty of bad 80's style violence ensues.

Where things get interesting is in the conversion process for the older brother. First of all, it's obviously significant that he meets the vampire clan at a rock concert, what with rock's ties to rebellion. They then ride dirt bikes too fast in the dark, nearly off a cliff. Dangerous, but within the realm of teenage abandon and false sense of immortality. They go back to the gang's lair and drink what older brother thinks is wine. Teenage drinking = classic rebellion.

The gang then go to a foggy railroad bridge—a great image by the way, both iconic small town and yet also dangerous feeling. Each kid jumps off the edge and into the abyss. Older brother is freaking out, until he bends down and sees that they grabbed onto the steel ties beneath the bridge and are dangling. A physically possible, if difficult, feat that the viewer sort of writes off as "well that works in a movie I suppose." Older brother awkwardly climbs down to join them. And then a train comes. It shakes loose his grip and he falls into the fog, only to awake in his own bed, groggy and—well, let's face it, hungover. Again, the rebellion echoes here.

After this, the older brother begins to sleep all day, stay out too late at night; he acts rude toward his family, he starts to wear sunglasses and leather. Younger brother notices all this and sees the signs of impending vampirism. He tries to warn their clueless mom, but she is too into her new beau to pay any mind. He is thus forced to enlist the help of the Frog brothers, local comic book geeks turned hard-boiled vampire hunters about younger brother's own age. We learn that the vampire gang was not concerned about death because they are immortal (classic vampire power, and classic teen misconception). Things build toward an inevitable climax in which the teen vamps are killed, mom's new boyfriend is revealed to be the head vampire (just before he gets his), and older brother and the girl he is into from the group are saved from full-on vampirism.

There is also a scene where girl and older brother meet in the gang's lair, and one of them is supposed to kill the other to complete the vampire ritual, but instead they have sex to some weird synthesizer music and shots of an ocean at night. It's an 80's camping trip all right.

So what does this all have to do with hipsters? Well, this is a movie about the fear of growing up (see: its name), and the problems that come with it. And hipsters are an entire sub-culture devoted to nostalgia for the days when they used to be able to believe that they wouldn't grow up. All the 80's styles, fixed gear bikes, wistful twee music, refusal to get real jobs, immense respect for "Where the Wild Things Are" and Arcade Fire—those are all ironic, or at least self-conscious, tributes to youth.

Look at it from the younger brother's point of view. His older brother is sucked into (no pun intended) a new friend group that has him out late, doing dangerous and illegal things, but the older brother is too into his new girlfriend and new friends to notice how he's changing at home. The gang is always pushing older brother to do the next dangerous thing, ultimately turning him into a half-vampire after he drinks some alcohol. 

Meanwhile, mom is totally blinded to all this by none other than the head vampire in town, who is her own love interest. And since the entire adult population of the town, and indeed the world, is blind to the vampire problem, we are forced to conclude this is the condition of all adults. Older brother is only a half-convert to the adult world (just as he is only a half-convert to the vampire world), so he picks up on things partway through the movie. But it takes the full-grown mother until the final scene in the movie to figure things out. 

The moral: romantic love/sex blinds you to the real dangers in life, which only the (just barely) pre-pubescent kid and his comic-reading friends are aware enough to notice. The move to a sexualized world is, of course, the key dividing line between the innocence of childhood and becoming an adult.

This movie's message is that the innocence of childhood is superior to the dangers and complexities of adulthood. Its conceit is that it's better because otherwise you become a vampire or are eaten by one. But on a symbolic level, this movie suggests, isn't that true? As Arcade Fire said, "Businessmen drink my blood/Just like the kids in art school said they would." Or as Wes Anderson put it in "The Life Aquatic," "Eleven and a half was my favorite age."

This is a movie about characters that are every hipster's favorite age, that is set in their favorite decade, that features their favorite hairstyles and clothes, and that explores their favorite theme: how they "miss the innocence I've known/Playing Kiss covers beautiful and stoned" (h/t Wilco).

Editors Note: Perhaps there is a follow up piece about how Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter provides a moral geography for transcending the allure of nostolgia and defeating one's own personal demons. 

Drew Curle is a lawyer at the Chicago Legal Clinic. He doesn't do twitter. You could follow him in real life. But that would be stalking.