I’d originally intended to publish this around the season finale of Euphoria earlier this year, but well … life and work had other plans!
But now that we’re in commencement speech SZN, I figured a lot of the legwork could just be transferred to be seasonally relevant once again. Ah, graduation, that hallowed ritual best portrayed by Richard Linklater in Boyhood. (If you recall the movie, you may remember that the actual ceremony is not portrayed at all. My point stands.)
I think everyone has their theories for why Euphoria has become such a cultural sensation — it’s the most-tweeted-about show of the decade according to the platform. Personally, I vacillate over whether I love to hate or hate to love watching Euphoria. The bombastic melodrama and heightened sensationalism of it frequently tip over into self-indulgence thanks to the unchecked vision of creator Sam Levinson.
But those same elements really seem to strike a chord both with Gen Z (judging from the memes) as well as millennials and older because the show isn’t afraid to treat high school drama as grandiosely as the characters experience it. Levinson, for all his faults as an artist, manages to approach the world with little of the irony that often accompanies stories about adolescence.
Someone once noted — and thus I cannot take full credit for the observation — that high schoolers are given to such self-aggrandizement because their struggles feel of outsized importance because they represent a large percentage of their life that given how relatively little of it they’ve lived. While these will later appear trivial with the benefit of retrospection feel of outsized importance, they feel like the biggest thing in the world as they’re experienced … and Euphoria captures this exceedingly well.
There’s also something else that I think is responsible for Euphoria’s success: it’s not afraid to depict the darkness and misery that most stories about high school gloss over. I touched on this a little bit in the piece I wrote about Easy A for Ebert Voices on its 10th anniversary, but there’s a remarkably untapped market for works that are willing to recognize not everyone feels the movie magic fantasy of high school. You can trace this development back to the 1980s when two things happened: conglomerates more interested in merchandising than artistry took over movie studios AND baby boomers started stepping behind the camera.
In many ways, Euphoria is returning the genre back to its pre-Hughes roots, a fitting regression for an era where teen sadness and hopelessness have reached a record high. It’s easy for us to forget that the concept of a “teenager” is only roughly a century old. In a more agrarian society, people had children so they could have hands to labor on their farms. People were children until they could work, at which point age mattered little. There was simply no conception of a transitory stage between childhood and adulthood. (If you want to dive deeper here, “The Social and Cultural Construction of American Childhood” by Steven Mintz is an essential read.)
That started to change in the post-war period, as Timothy Shary noted in his seminal book Generation Multiplex:
“More young people stayed in and graduated from secondary school, and with the arrival of postwar prosperity, more began attending college. Other factors contributed to the burgeoning presence of the teenager in the 1950s: the greater availability of automobiles which allowed youth to travel and thus achieve a certain independence; the recovering economy that gave many teens extra money for entertainment outside the home; the popular reception of rock and roll music, which clearly flew in the face of previous standards; and the permeation of televisions, which, while giving all Americans a new common entertainment medium, also kept more adults at home.”
Teenagers themselves had little say in their own stories, and their portrayal in the popular imagination was left to previous generations who refracted that image through their own fear of the young. Perhaps the era’s archetypal image is that of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, whose Method acting style of raw realism appears in open battle with the paranoid histrionics of someone else’s idea of a tortured young soul.
Euphoria regresses yet progresses, flipping the script on old anxieties while giving more of a sincere voice to those living them. It’s a conceptualization rare for mass culture because, to put it crassly, happier teens are more motivated consumers. There are many other examples of visual storytelling that acknowledge the hurt and pain of this gauntlet in life — but you will have to venture outside the mainstream to find them. Below are ten that scratch such an itch.
Perhaps the ur-text of this genre in contemporary cinema is Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (available to stream on Criterion Channel) — a number of you reading this may have been subject to years-long pressure campaigns to watch this movie. I make no apologies and will continue this advocacy with a special call-out here.
A British friend remarked that she was surprised to hear that I found a tale of a teenage girl in her nation’s social housing so emotionally resonant. It speaks to the particular time and place in which I first experienced Fish Tank: shortly after my own high school graduation when perhaps my cynicism and disillusionment with high school were at their zenith. Arnold offers little in the way of hope or comfort to those experiencing teenage tribulations. Heck, the film’s climactic sequence consists of a mother and her daughters connecting for arguably the first time in the film, and it’s over a freestyle dance to Nas’ fatalistic refrain. Life’s a bitch, and then you die.
The most counterintuitively appealing aspect of Fish Tank is its most dispiriting element. The teenage protagonist Mia, played with feral intensity by non-actor Katie Jarvis, is ultimately not special. She’s neither an object of pity nor a source of inspiration. For Arnold, she’s simply an ordinary girl — though that should not make us dismiss her story in the slightest. (After all, if your empathy requires someone to be extraordinary to receive a hand up, what kind of compassion is that?)
Mia dreams of escape from her miserable dregs, especially her drunken mother with a carousel of scummy men and her vicious peers. To get any semblance of space for herself, Mia often retreats to an empty flat where she dances her woes out. This movement proves cathartic for her … but her only. In a hokier movie, dance would become Mia’s lifeline for upward mobility. Yet Fish Tank offers an unvarnished look at working-class adolescence and refuses such fantastical notions. Arnold won’t even indulge that Mia is particularly good at dancing!
Just being at the center of your own story does not mean the world cares or has to treat you with the “main character energy” you think you deserve. It’s a lesson some of us learn later in life, but without the protection of class or more formal institutions like family and the state, Mia must face her grim prospects from a young age. You don’t necessarily have to buy into the nihilism of Fish Tank whole hog to find the film worthwhile. Arnold makes a compelling case for her extreme end of the teen story spectrum because she’s undaunted by the genre’s clichés and conventions.
“Some people don’t get over things,” said Kenneth Lonergan of Manchester by the Sea, “and those people deserve a movie too.” Fish Tank is a movie for those who feel like they didn’t get the joyous adolescence experience of choosing a path forward into selfhood. It’s one for those forced to grow up by forces outside their control. There’s comfort not from Mia’s story itself but in knowing that there are people like Andrea Arnold willing to portray the truthfulness that some of our challenges as teens are not instructive or constructive experiences. Sometimes they are just challenges.
Now, a few more films from the genre …
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