Youth on Screen. David Buckingham
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going on here. The ‘brawl’ surrounding Blue Story recalls the rioting in UK cinemas that accompanied the release of one of the oldest films I’ll consider in this book, Blackboard Jungle, almost sixty-five years earlier. In both cases, the violence resulted in outraged newspaper headlines and swift action from the authorities. In this instance, there was no evidence that the young people involved had actually seen the film, or that they even intended to do so. For his part, Onwubolu condemned the response as ‘racist’, while other commentators invoked the rather predictable charge of ‘moral panic’.
Furthermore, like Blackboard Jungle, Blue Story is essentially a cautionary tale, and a fairly traditional one: the two well-meaning heroes are driven by love, friendship and loyalty, even as they are pulled into the inevitable spiral of gang violence by ill-intentioned older members. Some critics praised the film for its authenticity and gritty realism, although it also uses rap to comment on the action in a much more distanced way. Yet the film is far from being a celebration of youthful violence, and it can hardly be said to glamorize the lives it portrays.
Debates about the influence of the media on young people, and the representation of youth on screen, take different forms at different times and in different locations. These may seem like perennial issues, but they are also historically specific: youth in the USA in 1955 is not the same thing as youth in the UK in 2019. Nevertheless, youth has always had a unique and ambiguous status in film and television. Right from the origins of cinema, countless films and television dramas have offered sensational and seductive representations of young people and their lives. And young people have also been an increasingly significant and lucrative audience, with considerable amounts of disposable income.
Yet, to state the obvious, representations of youth in film and television are rarely produced by young people themselves. Of course, young people do make their own films; and, while there is a long (and partly hidden) history here, the advent of digital media has significantly extended the opportunities for young film-makers. Even so, almost all commercially produced movies about young people – the films that reach cinemas, commercial streaming services and broadcast television – are produced by adults. The same is true for ‘youth television’, and indeed for most novels about youth.
Furthermore, these representations are addressed and marketed not only to young people themselves but also to adult audiences. For young people, particular movies or television dramas might appear to sustain subversive desires – desires to challenge or escape adult authority, to indulge in illicit pleasures, or to enjoy forms of power that are rarely possible in real life. For adults, they may provide retrospective fantasies about ‘the way we were’, although they sometimes seek to question or disrupt any easy nostalgia: they may remind us of what we have lost, but also of places and time periods that we might not actually want to revisit. As this implies, representations of youth on screen may tell us as much (or more) about adulthood as they do about youth itself.
Troubling ‘youth’ and ‘screens’
The idea of youth has a considerable symbolic potency. It is typically associated with notions of energy, idealism and physical beauty; yet it is also frequently represented as both troubled and troubling. The term itself has ancient origins, but modern ideas of youth owe a great deal to the work of the social psychologist G. Stanley Hall. Writing at the start of the twentieth century, Hall regarded youth (or adolescence) as a particularly precarious stage in individual development. It was a period of ‘storm and stress’, characterized by intergenerational conflicts, mood swings, and an enthusiasm for risky behaviour. From this perspective, the discussion of youth often leads inexorably to concerns about drugs, delinquency, depression and sexual deviance. Hall’s symptomatically titled book Youth: Its Education, Regimen and Hygiene (1906) includes extensive proposals for moral and religious training, incorporating practical advice on gymnastics and muscular development, as well as quaint discussions of ‘sex dangers’ and the virtues of cold baths.
Youth, then, is popularly regarded as passing stage of life. Young people are typically seen not as beings in their own right in the present but as becomings, who are on their way to something else in the future.2 Adults may pine for their lost youth, or create fantasies about it; but youth is only ever fleeting and transitory. Yet, in all this, there is a risk that the child may not successfully manage the transition to what is imagined to be a stable, mature adulthood. As such, at least in modern Western societies, youth is often regarded as a potential threat to the social order.
Of course, there is considerable diversity here. ‘Youth’ is not a singular category but one that is cut across by other differences, for example of social class, gender and ethnicity. Constructions of youth are historically variable and often reflect wider cultural aspirations and anxieties that are characteristic of the times. Both the representation and the actual experiences of youth can vary significantly between national settings; and, as anthropologists remind us, if we look beyond Western industrialized societies, our conceptions of youth may have very little relevance. Like gender, age can be seen as something that is ‘performed’ in different ways and for different purposes in different contexts.3 To some extent, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has asserted, ‘youth is just a word’.4 Even the words that appear to mean similar things – ‘teenager’, ‘adolescent’, ‘juvenile’, ‘young person’ – tend to carry different connotations and to serve different functions.
Over the past seventy years (the period covered by this book), it’s possible to identify a continuous drawing and redrawing of boundaries, both between childhood and youth and between youth and adulthood. The question of where youth begins and ends has become increasingly fraught. Some argue that childhood has increasingly blurred into youth – provoking anxieties such as the continuing concern about the ‘sexualization’ of children. Meanwhile, youth itself seems to be extending: young people are leaving the family home at an older age and ‘settling down’ in terms of stable jobs and relationships at a later point. Many official definitions of youth now extend into the late twenties, and in some instances well into the thirties. New categories – such as ‘tweens’ and ‘adultescents’ – have emerged in an attempt to pin down what appears to be the changing nature and significance of age differences.
This blurring of boundaries is also increasingly apparent in the marketing of media and in media representations themselves. The appeal of what were once seen as ‘youth media’ – computer games or rock music, for example – increasingly seems to reflect a broadening of the youth demographic. ‘Youthfulness’ is something that can be invoked, packaged and sold to people who are not by any stretch of the imagination any longer youthful. Contemporary media marketing seems to imply that you can be ‘as young as you feel’5 – although young people themselves may also resent adults trespassing on ‘their’ territory and develop new ways of excluding them.
This is equally evident in relation to film and television. Scholars have tied themselves in knots attempting to define ‘youth film’. The films and TV programmes I consider here all feature young people in central roles, but not all of them would be generally categorized as ‘youth films’ or ‘youth TV’. However, this begs the question of how we might determine what a ‘youth film’ actually is in the first place. Is it a quality of the film itself, or of its intended or actual audience? Not all films about young people are necessarily made exclusively, or even primarily, for a youth audience; nor is ‘youthfulness’ (whatever that is) necessarily the defining quality of such characters, or even a major theme of the films in question.
‘Youth films’, we might argue, are those which tell us stories specifically about youth itself – and, very often, about the transition from youth to adulthood. However, most of them do so for audiences of both young people and adults. Indeed, it’s possible that a great many films that we might perceive as ‘youth films’ implicitly view youth from the perspective of adulthood. This is the case, I would suggest, not just when it comes to some of the well-known ‘classics’ I consider here, such as American Graffiti and Badlands, but also with allegedly juvenile comedies such as American Pie and Porky’s, which also attract substantial adult audiences.