Enfield High School graduates get a lesson on movies

ENFIELD — Brianna Carlin, the Enfield High School valedictorian, told most of her 370 fellow graduates and their numerous family members and friends who came out for Friday evening’s graduation ceremony, that a friend had asked her not to make a boring speech.

So she focused on high-school movies, something that everybody can enjoy — except possibly someone with freshman year of high school bearing down on them.

“I remember being terrified for high school, for how it was depicted in the movies,” Carlin said.

Students are often shown in films as “one-dimensional characters,” she said, such as an athlete, “a theater, band or orchestra kid, or maybe just popular,” with no overlap between groups.

“In reality, however, students fall into more than one of these categories,” she continued, using her best friend as an example of someone with multiple abilities and interests.

“High school ended up being so much more than the movies made it out to be,” Carlin said, describing utterly unexpected experiences such as doing an autopsy on a banana that had “died” in a fire during a freshman forensics class.

The Class of 2023 also experienced challenges no movie writer had conjured, many due to COVID-19.

“I still remember the dread I felt every time I had to turn on my camera, as if I was not in a class with the same people that I had been since seventh grade,” Carlin said.

But for all the marks the movies miss, she found some flashes of insight in them as well.

“High School Musical,” for example, “taught us to defy societal expectations and follow your passion,” she said.

“‘Sixteen Candles’ shows just how surprising people can be, while the film ‘Dead Poets Society’ demonstrates the importance of accepting people as they are, as well as standing up for what you believe in regardless of consequences,” she said.

“When you take a chance like Charlie in ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower,’ amazing things can happen as a result,” she said.

While she acknowledged that the title character in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” may not be the most reliable source of life advice, she quoted approvingly his observation, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Like all graduations, Friday’s featured plenty of life advice. But there were moments when it was clear that the words coming from the podium had feeling behind them.

Salutatorian Madison Bohan became emotional shortly after saying, “I know I would not have been able to make it through without my friends by my side.”

“These relationships have shaped us,” she said, her voice breaking. “And they reminded us that no matter where you went, you are never alone.”

A pleasant surprise was that the graduation was not shaped by the weather. After two changes in the starting time designed to thread the needle between predicted weather events, few, if any, drops of rain fell during the speeches.