Youth on Screen. David Buckingham
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questions about growing up, the passing of time, and the relationship between the present and the past.
Chapter 7 looks at Skins (2007–13), one of the most successful UK youth television dramas of all time. It analyses Skins in the light of broader questions about ‘youth television’ – and, in particular, the issue of authenticity. I explore how the programme claims to speak on behalf of youth, not least through its claim to realism, and how the youth audience is addressed and defined. The final sections of the chapter look at how the producers attempted to draw in youthful audiences, especially through the use of social media, pointing to some of the possibilities and limitations of digital technology.
Chapter 8 concludes by reflecting on the historical dimensions of the various case studies and briefly considering the potential for representing youth in the digital age. Despite the rise of short-form online video, it suggests there is also growing interest in immersive, long-form material, and that film and television fiction will continue to be central to our understanding both of the idea of ‘youth’ and of young people’s lived experience.
Representing age
Age is surely a key dimension of social identity and, indeed, of social power; yet, in comparison with other dimensions such as gender and ‘race’, it has been relatively neglected in media analysis. It is as though age is seen as something that can be left to psychologists or to those who study media audiences (the people who do ‘children and television’ or ‘youth as consumers’). In the process, questions about the representation of age – about how the meanings of age relations are defined and constructed – are effectively marginalized. Equally problematically, this leaves the category of adulthood unexamined and taken for granted.
This book’s central focus is on the representation of age. While other aspects of social representation come into focus at different times here – most notably class and gender – it is the ‘youthfulness’ of these films and television programmes that is my primary concern. That is, I am interested in how the idea of youth itself is invoked and portrayed, both explicitly and implicitly. How are the qualities and characteristics of youth identified and defined? How, for example, is youth opposed to childhood, or to adulthood? How is the process of ‘growing up’ or ‘coming of age’ understood?
One abiding problem here is the continuing tendency to think of representation in binary terms. Representations are most frequently judged in terms of whether they are politically ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. In most instances, this comes down to a kind of ideological litmus test: conservative views of gender, race or class are either reinforced or destablized and challenged. If it’s not one, then it must be the other. Cutting across this is another familiar debate, about whether or not representations are accurate: ‘misrepresentations’ and ‘stereotypes’ have to be replaced with realistic images. However, the demand for political correctness can often conflict with the demand for accuracy: for example, positive stereotypes may serve useful political purposes, and accurate representations (for example, of disadvantaged people’s lives) can easily be construed as negative.
In his influential book Subculture, published forty years ago, the British sociologist Dick Hebdige argued that media coverage of young people could be understood in terms of one such binary distinction: either we had ‘youth as trouble’ – for instance, in stories about youth crime, drug-taking and violence – or we had ‘youth as fun’ – in images of youth as energetic, carefree pleasure-seekers.9 Hebdige was writing primarily about news coverage, although this binary can to some extent be traced through the fictional case studies here. The juvenile delinquent films I consider in chapter 2, for example, are predominantly about ‘youth as trouble’, while the pop films of chapter 3 are mostly ‘youth as fun’; and if the majority of ‘trouble’ narratives are about young males, those in chapter 5 explore the different kinds of trouble provoked or experienced by young females. However, in most instances, the picture is much more complex than a simple binary: fun can cause trouble, but trouble can also be fun; what troubles young people may not trouble (or even be apparent) to adults, and vice versa. ‘Images of youth’ cannot be so easily divided into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’.
The issue of representation obviously raises questions about realism. This is partly a question of visual aesthetics (for example, camerawork, mise-en-scène, the use of locations) and partly about narrative plausibility. I don’t explore either of these areas in any detail here. However, I do consistently return to an issue that is a central preoccupation in representing youth, that of authenticity. By this, I mean the sense not only that a text offers an accurate, or at least recognizable, image of young people’s lives but also that it somehow ‘speaks’ to and from their everyday experience. Authenticity in these terms is notoriously difficult to achieve; and the risk of failure – of being judged as somehow ‘fake’ or ‘phoney’ – is exceptionally high. Yet, as we’ll see, especially in chapters 6 and 7, the imperative of authenticity doesn’t necessarily imply documentary-style social realism.
As I’ve suggested, most representations of young people in mainstream film and television are produced for them rather than by them. They may invite us to enjoy the hedonistic antics of youth, but at the same time they may seek to provide cautionary tales or warnings or to reinforce moralistic ‘adult’ views. The central question, then, is the extent to which such texts provide a ‘youth-centred’ or an ‘adult-centred’ perspective, or both at the same time. Do they view youth in their own terms, as ‘beings’, or merely as ‘becomings’? Do they speak to or for young people, and how do they do this? Are we getting an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’ perspective, or some combination of these?
Answering these questions is unlikely to be straightforward: for example, a text in which young people occupy central roles might nevertheless take an adult-centric perspective. Many narratives about young people focus on their experience of ‘coming of age’, yet they often reflect an implicitly adult perspective – although coming of age can be seen as a corruption or loss of innocence as well as an acquisition of knowledge and enlightenment. This process of transition is itself frequently shown as precarious and risky, and its success is far from guaranteed. An incomplete or unsuccessful transition is likely to end very badly indeed – as is the case in several of the films about girlhood discussed in chapter 5. In other instances, adulthood may be seen as positively undesirable: the transition may be achieved, but only through surrendering autonomy and freedom, as in the case of some of the films discussed in chapter 4.
At the same time, all these texts are also bound to view youth or childhood retrospectively, from the perspective of the present. Implicitly or explicitly, this frequently involves a comparison between past and present, which takes one or the other as better, or as preferable. We create narratives about the ideals or the freedom we have lost or the misery and oppression we have escaped. These issues of retrospection and nostalgia run throughout the following chapters, although they come into particular focus in chapter 4, which looks at films explicitly set in the past, and chapters 6 and 7, which explore how characters are tracked across time in long-form television drama.
As I’ve suggested, many representations of youth on screen are not targeted solely at, or watched by, young people themselves. On the contrary, they often address both youthful and adult audiences