Zac Efron: A Love Story

PSA: Disney Adults are weirdos, except when they're championing the High School Musical trilogy x

Earlier this year I wrote about Zac Efron. It was a lauding retrospective and ode to his variety as a dramatic and comedic performer after his career best turn in The Iron Claw. Below are trimmings from that piece I thought too personally tangential to include, but upon re-reading I feel justified in their sincerity and wanted to rework and share (lol). It’s also maybe the cheesiest thing I’ve ever written - hehe x

Born in 2000, I spent the first six years of my life in a proverbial empty concourse. Not yet burning any fuel from inspiring art or media that would launch me into the world and help me discover myself, I was drifting around with nothing to attach myself to. My life finally then began with the release of High School Musical (2006). 

The HSM Disney trilogy is a formidable, triple-threat-ening franchise that Gene Kelly himself wouldn’t be able to deny, had he lived to see it. (Kenny Ortega is my Jacques Demy.) A formative obsession informing so much of my young life, it became the axis around which my sense of the world rotated. It lit up my existence: its soundtrack was the first CD I ever bought; its earnest storytelling was the first I actively attached to without the introductory reference of an adult - HSM was my first real relationship with film, with music, with culture. And at its centre was Zac Efron.

Leading this moralising odyssey about aspiration, staying true to yourself, doing right by the people in your life, and dealing with change and compromise for the first time, Troy Bolton was a world-building agent for me at age six. He was the all round Good Guy: talented, passionate, valiant, and magnanimous to all those other-ised around him. Team captain of his “Wildcats” basketball team by day and drama club singer by night, he was both a leader and a dreamer, baby. His star potential was recognised by the adults in his life and a chosen-one path of responsibility and achievement imposed upon him, but he ultimately asserted his own trajectory. His expression of self-determination was motivational (by the mid 2000s the That’s Your Dream Dad, Not Mine was already a hackneyed character development point for a conflicted young lead - One Tree Hill was before my time, and I have come to respect the nobility of Nathan Scott’s foundational fight against his father’s mooring - but Efron’s credo was invigorating).

Beyond a juvenile crush, it was the soulfulness Efron conveyed on screen that was a revelation. Efron’s performance translated such stirring, full humanity as his character tried to make sense of diverging passions and instincts, conquer the Sisyphean task of pleasing everyone in his life, and generally face all that felt uncomfortable and insurmountable at a crossroads juncture. An epigraph quote preceding Joan Didion’s prolific essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem is an assertion from Miss Peggy Lee: “I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein, and Cary Grant”. That latter positioning of a Hollywood star in equal company with a supreme scientific mind, historic world leader, and the divine seems ridiculous but it always felt congruous to me and strikingly, sincerely relatable, as I too share an outsize gratefulness towards an actor for their enlightenment! (It seems insulting to look to the Hills for guidance on how to be a grounded human; Hollywood in reality is of course a site of scant moral fibre, radical ideas, or sense, but when its denizens occasionally triumph in their primary role as artists there are touching reverberations.) There was a robust life lesson in resilience dinned into me in childhood that I carry with me to this day, that I attribute to Troy Bolton. I learned courage from Zac Efron!

Perhaps I’m just looking for something to validate my sentimental projection but Lee’s quote codifies something real, affirming the capacity for a real star to christen an intangible power upon an audience, deliver a kind of energy transfer and personal address from the celluloid to your senses; one that can embolden you, show you what is possible and what you can overcome. With HSM as an all-singing, all-dancing apparatus of reified hope, Efron became my personal testament to the embodied magic of cinema, and thus of moving through life with conviction and joy. At any age artists can have spirit-guiding impact, but at the tender, impressional age of six, they can immediately take on the instructive dimensions of a personal mentor-come-imaginary friend, the sort of the welcome authority of a cool third parent, and instil hope in a not yet jaded young mind, setting you on your way. For me, Efron’s earnestness was validating. You can be cynical about the corniness of these movies (they are, after all, children’s films presenting extremely legible, happy-ending-bound arcs) but they preserve rudimentary lessons we are socialised out of as adults. With every re-watch I get something new from the stinging texture of this bildungsroman, or at least am reminded of something significant I forgot. HSM taught me how to distil power from art’s fictions and let it free you in your real life.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion also wrote “John Wayne: A Love Story”, an essay about the American icon in his final years, handling all he represented in culture but also what he symbolised to her personally throughout her life. Speaking to the indelible impact a star can have on specifically a sensitive, curious young girl, first encountering him aged 8, she wrote “...it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne, saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow’. As it happened, I didn’t grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow”. In the summer of 2006, the sight of a different Wildcat would create a lasting impression on me. Holding dominion in my dreams in an unparalleled way, Efron’s performance still affects me. He is the nexus between the soft spot in my heart where childish hope resides and my firm adult constitution that has to reckon with vicissitudes. Didion continued, “I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams”. Efron was so consequential to me, and perhaps my whole generation. His performance across three colourful chapters translated a contagious certainty that can never be corrupted (and nostalgia’s dangerous revision of fallibility is not inflating my reverence here). He illuminated the experience of feeling fully and reaching for everything, despite everything - and braced you to do the same.

“When [ZAC EFRON] spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralysing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl [VANESSA HUDGENS] and go riding through the draw and find himself home free” - Joan Didion