As I was completing the outline of this book in late 2019, a news story about youth and screens briefly hit the headlines. âPolice attacked during machete brawl at Birmingham cinema,â it proclaimed.1 Apparently, a group of Asian youth â possibly queuing to attend a new British film called Blue Story â had been involved in a fight in the foyer of the Star City multiplex at around 5.30 one November afternoon. About 100 people were involved, several police officers were injured, and five young people were arrested. The cinema chain Vue promptly withdrew Blue Story from its theatres across the country, although it eventually relented, and the film went on to enjoy reasonable box-office returns.
Directed by the young Black British director Andrew Onwubolu (also known as Rapman), Blue Story is set in the mean streets of Peckham in South London. It focuses on two young African-Caribbean men and their steadily deepening involvement in drug-related gang violence. The film was Onwuboluâs first feature and was a developed version of a short drama series he first created for YouTube in 2014; his subsequent YouTube hit Shiroâs Story (2018), reportedly shot for just ÂŁ3,000, had gained around 8 million views for each of its three episodes. While Blue Story was financed by the BBC and eventually picked up by Paramount for global distribution, its origins reflect the changing circumstances of media production in the so-called digital age.
Nevertheless, there is also something curiously old-fashioned going on here. The âbrawlâ surrounding Blue Story recalls the rioting in UK cinemas that accompanied the release of one of the oldest films Iâll 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 âracistâ, while other commentators invoked the rather predictable charge of âmoral panicâ.
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 â the films that reach cinemas, commercial streaming services and broadcast television â are produced by adults. The same is true for âyouth televisionâ, 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 â 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 âthe way we wereâ, 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 âyouthâ and âscreensâ
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 âstorm and stressâ, 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. Hallâs 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 âsex dangersâ 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. âYouthâ 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 âperformedâ in different ways and for different purposes in different contexts.3 To some extent, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has asserted, âyouth is just a wordâ.4 Even the words that appear to mean similar things â âteenagerâ, âadolescentâ, âjuvenileâ, âyoung personâ â tend to carry different connotations and to serve different functions.
Over the past seventy years (the period covered by this book), itâs 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 â provoking anxieties such as the continuing concern about the âsexualizationâ of children. Meanwhile, youth itself seems to be extending: young people are leaving the family home at an older age and âsettling downâ 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 â such as âtweensâ and âadultescentsâ â 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 âyouth mediaâ â computer games or rock music, for example â increasingly seems to reflect a broadening of the youth demographic. âYouthfulnessâ 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 âas young as you feelâ5 â although young people themselves may also resent adults trespassing on âtheirâ 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 âyouth filmâ. 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 âyouth filmsâ or âyouth TVâ. However, this begs the question of how we might determine what a âyouth filmâ 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 âyouthfulnessâ (whatever that is) necessarily the defining quality of such characters, or even a major theme of the films in question.
âYouth filmsâ, we might argue, are those which tell us stories specifically about youth itself â and, very often, about the transition from youth to adulthood. However, most of them do so for au...
