Mature For Their Age

Written by Jillian O’Farrell | Designed by Emily Snisarenko | Photographed by Sophia Kysela

Reforming the Way Teens are Represented in Film and Television

A human’s frontal lobe, the part of the brain that controls decision-making, does not fully develop until about age 25. For this reason, adolescents think and behave differently from adults; they’re known for being impulsive, emotional, foolish. However, the current generation of teens present a slight antithesis to this stereotype.

Today’s adolescents struggle with anxiety more than any other issue, likely to a greater extent than any other generation. But, this angst doesn’t seem to manifest into the reckless behavior we associate with teenagers. Instead, these teens retreat to screens.

The average teenager spends over seven hours per day on screens for entertainment. While social media use contributes to a large portion of this, they also consume high levels of television and film via online streaming services.

I was recently sitting in a cafe next to a table of high school girls and decided to ask them about their favorite shows. Before I even finished the question, they answered: Euphoria.

For the first eight Sundays of this year, the HBO teen drama series Euphoria broke records as millions of viewers tuned in to watch groups of teens navigate life. The 60-minute episodes include themes like sexuality, addiction, and abuse. Euphoria’s characters possess an emotional complexity that is usually absent from mainstream teen dramas; relationships of all types—sexual, platonic, romantic, familial—tangle between characters in complicated, at times uncomfortable, ways. Writer-director Sam Levinson chose to take an unfiltered approach to explicit topics to portray life’s rawness, particularly during adolescence.

However, when I asked the girls which character they relate to most, or if any of the characters remind them of anyone in their life, they couldn’t find any matches. They admire each character’s uniqueness but struggle to accept Euphoria represents high schoolers—even if an extreme version.

“They’re like never doing homework or anything,” remarked one of the girls.

Studies show that Gen Z is “growing up” slower than past generations despite most media narratives. In a 2017 study, less than half of teens in the U.S. reported being sexually active; in the 1980s, when teens over the age of 14 were asked the same question, 60% of males and 51% of females said they’d had sex.

The girls, who I learned were sophomores at a local high school, agreed that sex felt like a bigger deal to them than the characters in the shows they watch. In these shows, “it seems like everyone is doing it, but it’s not like that in real life,” they said.

However, one of the girls mentioned her eighth-grade sister also watches teen shows, including Euphoria. She felt her sister’s understanding of teenagers and high school was skewed by the characters and plots of the shows. Because she does not have first-hand experience contradicting media portrayals, her sister accepts shows and movies about high schoolers as truth—a subconscious standard to strive toward.

But there’s a larger issue that exists; not only are viewers watching adult storylines, they’re watching adults.

Casting directors hire adult actors for teenage roles to dodge child labor law limitations. In the state of California, children can only work for eight hours a day and cannot remain at their place of employment for more than ten hours total; the window becomes shorter depending on the actor’s age and school enrollment. These restrictions make production slower and more expensive. Hiring adults also offers more flexibility for on-screen sex; films can include scenes where “teens” engage in sexual activity without confronting the complex moral and PR concerns of using actual underage individuals. Unless it’s essential that the actors look as young as the characters, like in the Netflix series Stranger Things, directors generally avoid working with real-life teens.

In 2017, Vice calculated the average age gap between actors and their characters for 11 popular teen shows and movies. The CW series, Riverdale, presented one of the largest gaps, with a little more than an eight year disparity. The original Gossip Girl resulted in the smallest gap—only an average of three and a half years older. Overall, the average difference between actor’s age and character’s age was about six years. By this math, it is commonplace for a sophomore in high school—a 16-year-old—to be played by a 22-year-old adult.

It goes without saying: a 22-year-old’s body looks significantly different from a 16-year-old’s body.

When Lady Bird debuted in 2017, headlines praised director Greta Gerwig for deciding to show actress Saoirse Ronan’s acne on-screen. Critics celebrated the film’s quest for teen realness and imperfection, but Ronan was 22 years old at the time of filming. As with most Hollywood productions, any deviation from common practice is considered a creative risk, including a cast of accurately-aged actors.

The systemic misrepresentation of an entire age group inevitably shifts society’s perception of adolescence; older generations don’t understand what it means to be a teenager today—physically or mentally—and when they create media based on those misconceptions, teens have no choice but to compare themselves.

For this reason, portrayals like Sex Education are so important. The show is about a high school boy who runs an informal sex therapy clinic for his classmates. Episodes contain a lot of sex, but it’s not glamorized. The scenes are amateur and awkward—almost hard to watch. When characters discuss the topic or explain their interactions, they’re equally graceless. But they’re high schoolers, that is the reality.

Teenage years are messy, insecure, confusing, but it’s also a time of passion, exploration, and self expression— entertainment media needs to accurately reflect both sides. Movies and TV shows play a large role in normalizing sex, but it’s essential that this is done in a healthy way.

Like any type of entertainment media, teen dramas are still used as a form of escapism; viewers want to experience something different, more interesting, than the life they live everyday. But, we cannot sexualize teenagers as we do adults; we cannot present teenagers as experienced in adult situations when they’re not.

As much as we love watching 25-year-old Rachel McAdams strut to first period in a mini skirt and three-inch stilettos, it would make more sense if she were strutting to a nine-to-five instead.