I'm an adult and I'm wondering if I can still like teen media

or if I SHOULD, at my big age

Image credit: Teen Vogue

The last time I watched Euphoria, I sat tensely as I watched Nate Jacobs give Cassie Howard oral. As I watched next to my partner, I felt as uncomfortable as I would have if I was watching it with my parents as a teen. Only for me watching at the time, I was pregnant, a parent-in-waiting, and I felt like *I* was the one who should have been looking away.

I remember talking with my husband about how weird I felt looking at teenagers doing drugs, having pretty explicit sex, and making the absolute dumbest possible decisions. The two of us essentially decided to give up on the series two episodes into season two. My question for the series has always been: who exactly is it for? Obviously, with teenage characters in a high school, teenagers feel enticed to watch it. But the very mature themes and gaze foist upon the series by my mortal enemy Sam Levinson¹ says that the people making it definitely want adults to watch it. Everything about the show, from its cinematography to its depiction of female bodies, indicates it was made with fully formed frontal lobes in mind.

This fact creates a strange cognitive dissonance within overthinking adults like myself. By consuming a show supposedly “for teens,” are we collectively contributing to the erosion of true teen media in film, TV, and literature?

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The insidious dissolution of teen media can be traced, in my opinion, back to Twilight. The first movie came out in 2008, and the last in 2012. This spanned quite literally my entire high school career into my freshman year of college. I wasn’t into the books that inspired the films, but I was a casual enjoyer of the movies. I didn’t live and breathe it like most of my female cohorts, who begged their parents to stay up to go to the midnight premieres² of each film as it debuted. The franchise’s success at the time of release isn’t the issue here. The issue came in the aftermath.

Despite the success of films/franchises like Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault In Our Stars, and The Perks of Being A Wallflower, television saw a steady decline of teen-centered shows in the 2010s. Fan favorites like Gossip Girl, Teen Wolf, Pretty Little Liars, and The Secret Life of the American Teenager reached their natural conclusions. My specific cohort of early-to-mid ‘90s young adults stayed with all of these series until their finales into our early 20s. Sensing this aging, the Young Adult (YA) genre morphed to accommodate this growth. Rather than depicting teens dealing with teen issues like teens, the YA genre shifted to more mature storytelling to match the age of the people who grew up reading and watching that media. Around this time as well, you have the rise of Kylie Jenner as the It girl — a teenager with a multimillion dollar makeup empire and an adult boyfriend in Tyga. You had teens and twentysomethings alike trying to emulate her atypical lifestyle.

The 2010s also saw the death of originality, with an influx of remakes, reboots, and revivals of shows that Millennials grew up watching. We’re still living in this now; Hollywood is aware that many of us are grown if not parents by now, and they’re hoping that we yearn enough for our youth that we’ll pay to watch things like The Proud Family, Wizards of Waverly Place, The Lion King, Gossip Girl, and Lilo & Stitch. The never-ending stream of nostalgia Millennials are fed by Hollywood — as well as our lack of upward societal mobility due to *gestures vaguely* everything — has contributed to the arrested development we feel toward the media we like. We want “same.” We want predictable. We want what feels familiar to us as an anchor in the sea of unpredictability we face everyday.

In literature, authors have noticed that the YA genre is in a much different place today than it was a decade ago; writers are creating stories that either approach teenage stories with adult voice or exclude teens altogether. I know people my age (early 30s) that still very much read YA novels. I wonder what about the genre keeps them coming back for more; it has to be chasing the high that Twilight gave them all those years ago. Maybe it’s the desire to read something lower stakes, nestled in the space between adult presentation and youthful mental state — the precarious space many Millennials feel they exist in. No matter the reason, the result is that YA no longer belongs to teens, but rather adults who want to feel the aliveness of their youth presented to them in a way that doesn’t feel school-age.

So it makes sense that in the wake of everything I just discussed that HBO would spit out Euphoria, a show pretending to be for teens when it’s very much for adults that still want to feel grown when they watch Sydney Sweeney’s breasts jiggling bare on screen.

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I’ve been thinking about this tension between teen media and adult consumption lately because I recently realized my two favorite movies of all-time are teen movies. In the #1 spot is Juno, the sardonic teen dramedy about a quirky teen girl who falls pregnant. The #2 spot goes to another Elliot Page movie³, Whip It, a film about a similarly awkward teen girl who discovers and joins her local Texas roller derby team. (The latter has singlehandedly given me the life goal of one day playing roller derby.)

As an adult, and now so intensely as a parent, I see these movies with fresh new eyes. I understand deeply the pain of yearning for more, of feeling wise beyond your years but treated like you’re a child. And I also now understand how difficult parenting is, and the ways our kids trigger our childhood traumas. More interestingly, though, I feel myself wincing when I think of how all-consuming some of the problems the protagonists in these films faced when I understand how miniscule they are in the grand scheme. It’s that maturity, baby. That and the benefit of therapy have me feeling wiser, newly maternal in watching teens onscreen navigate melodrama. I see characters like Daria Morgendorffer as rad and subversive and at once obnoxiously closed-minded, when I never felt the latter watching her as a teen. I’ve aged, but the characters haven’t, and thus I realize that I’m no longer being spoken to by these scripts.

That fact should be neutral, but because capitalism seeks to maximize audiences for profit, YA media has bastardized itself in the years since Whip It and Juno to include adults in teens’ business. Somehow, teenagers are no longer seen as a viable market unto themselves; their voices are swallowed by greedy adults who yearn for the past.

I do think adults should value and respect teen media; if it wasn’t made obvious by this piece, I believe teens’ voices matter. They shouldn’t have to be adultified in order to be seen, though. I think a barometer for authentic teen media is if you, as an adult, feel annoyed consuming it. You should be grimacing and punching air at how immature the characters are acting because you’re an adult who has learned from their mistakes.

THIS is what you should look like watching teens

I recently started the new Netflix series Forever, and I think it’s doing a decent job of portraying the leads as believable teenagers. It helps that the show was adapted by a Judy Blume book. How many Judy Blumes are still out there, though?

I think for teen media to re-enter the renaissance of previous decades, we as adults must consume it as a third-person observer rather than first-person character insert. As minors who are already given precious little in our society, the least we can do as adults is not rob them further of their safe spaces, however superficial they may be.

1. If Sam Levinson has only two haters on Earth, I am one of them. If he has none, I am dead.

2. I have not researched this, but is it safe to say that Twilight started the midnight/Thursday night premiere culture??? I don’t remember that being a thing before those movies.

3. These two movies and Inception are literally the only three Elliot Page movies I’ve seen lol I’m not a stan it’s just a coincidence!