Late last month (and again last week), Simon Morris had a go at Hollywood for neglecting ‘mature’ audiences and instead producing ‘video game movies’ and ‘men in tights’ and ‘coming-of-age films’:
Back in the day, most American films were aimed at an adult market – the films of Hitchcock, John Ford, Billy Wilder, Sidney Lumet and Francis Ford Coppola. I’m not saying they were all wildly complex and sophisticated – I’m not even saying they were particularly intelligent. I am saying they were about mature people with mature issues – having a job; getting married; moral dilemmas; knowing something of the world.
Two caveats before I continue. First, Morris acknowledges that the films in this teen golden age are ‘strong on story and character’, and promote strong values. Second, Morris is right that there’s been a market shift to tentpoles for younger audiences. Morris sells it as a new phenomenon when it’s actually been this way since the 1980s – you can thank Jaws, Star Warsand (ironically) Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather for that – but he’s not wrong.
Photo: Summit Entertainment, A Lionsgate Company
But, in lamenting the loss of films about ‘mature issues’ – ‘moral dilemmas’, ‘knowing something of the world’ etc – Morris indulges in a bit of a coded attack on Young Adult cinema, one that’s become really common of late (and, admittedly, one Morris tries to minimise). Deride them as ‘video games’; call their themes superficial; decry the critics who give them airtime – the intended result is always the same, the dismissal of what young people watch because young people watch it. As an upstart millennial, I’m not too keen on this idea that ‘knowing something of the world’ is the domain of older audiences.
The latest trend in YA – the dystopian drama – is a pretty good illustration of why this idea is unappealing. Films like The Hunger Games, the recent Divergent, and the upcoming Maze Runner and The Giver are all action dramas with teens finding themselves, fight scenes and lots of kissing, and that’s cool and good; but they’re also all about ugly societies built on rigidly-enforced class structures, denied identities and the liberal use of state and corporate violence (often presented as uncomfortably comfortable partners).
The Hunger Games is the standard-bearer, obviously, holding a mirror up to society to show us how warped it all is. There’s immediate drama: Katniss fighting in the Games and becoming romantically entangled with two dudes, and that material’s strong, as Morris points out. But The Hunger Games also talks with great conviction and force about the way our society uses entertainment to propagate ideology; the way our economies and communities develop to stifle social mobility and keep people ‘in their place’; and the way we've grown a culture that treats the objectification and subordination of women as essential to their ‘humanisation’. Among other things. What I’m saying is that The Hunger Games is a) pretty great and b) about the world.
The Hunger Games also talks with great conviction and force about the way our society uses entertainment to propagate ideology.
Then there’s Divergent, the latest YA dystopia.Divergent’s lousy with problems – it’s got a bloated second act and a rushed third act, it’s dreary to look at and it’s hobbled by the need to set up the second and third parts of its story, to be dealt with in the sequels. But even with two-dimensional characters and a derivative narrative, it’s about the world, saying things that are relevant to audiences regardless of whether they’re ‘adults’ or ‘kids’.
Divergent’s neo-Chicago is a society built on an abstract, arbitrary personality test taken by the city’s teens when they come ‘of age’, a post-apocalyptic Sorting Hat that’s as much about ‘keeping people in their place’ as Panem's twelve impoverished Districts in The Hunger Games. There are five factions in neo-Chicago - Abnegation, Dauntless, Amity, Candour and Erudite – and the test identifies the one each young person ‘fits’ in; the community then strongly suggests that young people select that identified faction at the ‘Opening Ceremony’, joining it for the rest of their lives. But the teens don’t have to.
It’s the tyranny of that choice, illusory and irreversible, that hangs over the citizens of neo-Chicago, including teen heroine Tris, who selects the parkour class, Dauntless, despite her test identifying her as a system-threatening Divergent. Throughout the film, authority figures and sycophantic teens threaten Tris with homelessness or death if she fails as a Dauntless or is outed as Divergent. In so doing, our attention is constantly drawn to how neo-Chicago is built on exploitation, division and strict enforcement of class strata; even the cornerstone of its pseudo-federal union is a test designed to surreptitiously entrench division and inequality of knowledge, a political tool captured to serve those in power.
I’m not saying Divergent’s profound or revolutionary or smart or well-made. But the rhetoric’s there, and like The Hunger Games and those other movies ‘for’ literate 14-year-olds, Divergenthas something to say about the world we live in and is fired up about it. Laurie Penny recently noted in the New Statesman that it’s “always worth paying attention to what the kids are reading.” She’s right – we gain nothing from marginalising this stuff as second-class cinema, avoiding serious critical discussion of it and fetishising last century’s studio auteurs. All of this practically invites discussion, and it does no one a favour to slap it with the ‘for kids’ label and shunt it off to one side.
This isn’t demanding devotion. It’s just asking that we not dismiss YA cinema because it’s YA cinema. Films like The Hunger Games and Divergent may be pulp for young people, but even pulp knows something of the world.
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