YA Film: Reading and Resisting Readings of Adolescence by Angela Insenga

I wish I lived closer to Angela. We share common interests in our study of Young Adult Literature and how the concept of the adolescent is played out in this literature and in popular culture. At the same time, we just don't end up in the same conferences very often. I am always grateful that she attended a conference at LSU and we become friends and colleagues from a distance.

She has written several times in the past for Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday.  Her posts are always interesting and you can find one on Art and YA literature here and another one YA literature and Critical Collaboration here. As always, I hope you browse the contributor page, there are many great post on that page. This week, Angela discusses YA Film.

​Thanks Angela.

YA Film: Reading and Resisting Readings of Adolescence by Angela Insenga

“The goddam movies.  They can ruin you.  I’m not kidding.”
--J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

​My YA Film students watched Barry Jenkins’s award-winning Bildungsroman film Moonlight (2016) last week. Before we discussed the contextual presentations of Miami, Florida and the narrative proper, we began by closely reading the most famous image from the text:  the trifurcated portrait of the protagonist Chiron at three stages of life—childhood, adolescence, and new adulthood. Like the film’s dominant color palette, this shot is a study in various shades of blue, each image reflective of the tripartite structure of the film pieced together, shards of a mosaic the movie animates. From observation, students noted that the center shard stands out most, since it is the lightest in color and contains most of the “important” parts of the face, especially the mouth, which is closed, as one pointed out. The center shot also presents barely healed cuts from an apparent beating.  

​Further, the image in the center looks largest, they said, and it, by virtue of color or size, “comes forward at the viewer.” Consequently, they hypothesized that the teen years would be most important and formative for the young male character. Their ten-minute discussion of a single image proved to me, again, that teaching students to interrogate motion pictures is always time well-spent. Of course, I’m by far not the first to teach film. I am one of the professors in my chosen field to ask students to move beyond assumptions related to what YA and YA film encompass and, crucially, how and to what end adolescence and adolescents are depicted.

​When students ask me what I mean by “YA Film,” I inevitably have “The Harry Potter talk” with them. Yes, those films—all eight of them--“count,” since they are filmic adaptations of texts written for adolescents and (re)present youth. Yes, Katniss Everdeen resides in this pantheon, as do Bella, Edward, and Jacob.  Percy is there, too. Old timers like Heidi, Anne of Green Gables, and myriad adaptations of little women hold great sway. And there is a plethora of John Green’s teens, given new life onscreen.  

But, I then explain, we will not watch any of these in my course, where our investigation of YA Film centers on abstract films that adults make about teenagers, and on how these art objects are (re)produced, consumed, and replicated by artists and viewers, spreading banal images of kids throughout our social, legal, and educational institutions. Instead of observing differences and similarities between, say, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, chafing about what was left out or added, we begin with the task of understanding adolescence as a social construct that has seldom empowered them.  It doesn’t sound nearly as exciting as The Hunger Games, does it?  Except it is--especially when we consider how film, the genre many teachers naively label the “ice cream” that should follow the “broccoli” of books (Foertsch, 2006), when left unexamined, has enormous power over the 12-18 and 18-34 demographic, “not simply reflect[ing] culture but produc[ing] it” (Giroux, 2001).

As early as 1996, Henry Giroux, critical pedagogue, writes, “representations of youth in popular culture have . . . habitually [served] as signposts through which American society registers its own crisis of meaning, vision, and community” and contends that “Youth as a complex, shifting, and contradictory category is rarely narrated in the dominant public sphere through the diverse voices of the young.” Because the anxieties of a culture are displaced onto (re)presentations of young people, images of adolescents can lack authenticity, rendering youth characterizations as but “empty [categories].” Giroux’s critical canon points to methods we instructors can use to empower students, to strategies that explode the dominant binaries in art that can govern their lives, making study of popular culture a political act wherein we can guide learners towards recognition of the wills to power that seek to control and form them. 

Likewise, recent scholarship on teacher training by Sophia Sarigianides, Mark Lewis, and Robert Petrone (2015) challenges us to question longstanding assumptions about youth that could prohibit critical connections and trust in classroom spaces where English is taught. My YA Film class plan weds what Giroux calls “film pedagogy” to Lewis et. al’s “Youth Lens,” which proposes critical rereadings of students’ lives to effect better instruction. Giroux, in his seminal “Breaking into Movies: Pedagogy and the Politics of Film” (2001) and in most of his ensuing work, seeks to empower adolescent viewers to revise themselves by (re)reading, resisting, and redefining as they view. Lewis et. al. also encourage reconsideration of what student teachers recognize as typical “adolescent behavior.” In the circle of Inquiry of my classroom, student-viewers are asked to move beyond solely academic parsing to become arbiters of the multifaceted ways that film entertains and enculturates. In sum, I invite my students into dialog with the culture that defines and often confines their experiences. I ask them, also, to locate their experiences in what they see, to interrogate erroneous, unsophisticated images of teenagers, or, conversely, to locate the resounding silences where the totality of their lives is put under erasure (John Hughes, prolific and beloved as he may be, never once represents people of color as anything other than caricatured, comic relief).

This semester’s YA Film class began with John Singleton’s third film Higher Learning (1995). While gripping in sections and often well-acted, was judged an ultimately uneven cinematic experience. However, it replicates all the requisite groups of college kids, each striated by class, race, and gender differences that the film glosses in favor of two-dimensional characterizations. The movie culminates in a shocking yet still timely act that left my students unsatisfied, as each juggled their belief that “some stereotypes are true” with others that point to their understanding of the need to sanction intersectional existence, even when they considered that Singleton’s movie was released a mere 3 years after the Rodney King verdict and L.A. Riots.  

Higher Learning is no parallel to its predecessor, Boyz in the Hood (1991), but I chose it precisely because of its weaknesses, especially since, as Singleton told Charlie Rose in 1997, while Boyz represents Black experience, he sought to represent America in Higher Learning. Via our discussion of Singleton’s vision, their own viewing, analysis, and reading of reviews composed at the time of the film’s release, students recurrently found slivers of themselves in the text across the isolate peer groups but also surmised that they had been “spoofed” in sections of the film, caricatured and put into boxes with labels that could hardly capture the complexities of their lives.  This film primed them for the investigation to come.

​The next two films—Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me (1986) and Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge (1986)—center on a dead body, the former a nostalgic, archetypal journey set in 1959 and the latter what I called an “unquest,” its context a 1980’s America rife with teens so indifferent that they feel and do nothing when a friend of theirs kills his girlfriend for “talking shit” and leaves her body on the bank of the town’s river. The film is “based on a true story,” (a weighty phrase we had to unpack), and its impact led Robert Ebert to call it an “exercise in despair” and “an emblem of breakdown” (Rogerebert.com, 1987).  Scriptwriter Neal Jimenez, further, indicates that his story “spoke to a mood that young people were feeling at the time—feeling detached from things and wanting to zone out” (Gilligan, 2017).  In Reiner’s classic, the tweens set out to find a body, hoping to become famous.  ​By end of their journey, which takes place on and alongside the town’s train tracks, solemnity takes the place of fame seeking, and the boys return home the day before they are to start junior high, sobered by what they have seen. The boy’s body, unmarred by the train, nonetheless marks the boys. ​

 This is seemingly not the case in River’s Edge, where the camera seductively pans along the full length of Jamie’s nude, strangled body in the first four minutes and then is viewed passively by teen “friends” who visit Jamie several times, one even calling her an “it.”  I paired these films with hopes that the stark contrast would lead to more robust analysis of the representation of tweens and teens in their respective historical contexts. In our class, the placement of the pale body against the brown ugliness of the bank, and no one’s move to cover their friend’s nudity, quite unlike the tweens who cover the clad male body of the peer they find in Reiner’s film, was the subject of much conversation, especially since Jamie’s body is a rendered a thing in a series of lifeless female bodies Hunter’s mis en scene deploys:  a naked doll thrown into the river and a sex doll used as a companion. Most of all, virtually all of my largely Millennial students reacted with open disdain to the apathy on screen, and in the process of spirited debate set themselves in direct opposition to the teens in Hunter’s film, disproving one of the widely generalized characterizations about their generation.

As we study this curated list of films, I hope to increase my pupils’ ability to read texts critically, to be sure, helping them to build film criticism “toolboxes.” But more than these required learning outcomes, my goals include inviting each into heightened recognition of the designs culture has on them, to explore how teachers, parents, and consumer culture can neatly package identity out of ignorance, greed, or even the best of intentions:  love. Then, even films that gloss complexities like Singleton’s, disgust them like the kids in River’s Edge, deeply move them to pity like the animated characters of Graveyard of the Fireflies may, or even cause them to discover how popular music in Pretty in Pink shapes and reshapes their lives, can matter more. These films, and others, become ones to enjoy through—and despite—deep analysis.  
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I still teach “conventional” YA (no worries!), but I do so in much the same way as I approach the films, encouraging via Inquiry both active reading and active resistance to adolescent representation as a part of the process.

I still teach “conventional” YA (no worries!), but I do so in much the same way as I approach the films, encouraging via Inquiry both active reading and active resistance to adolescent representation as a part of the process.

​Thanks Angela. Angela can be contacted at ainsenga@westga.edu.
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Until next week.