The phrase “young adult” carries with it some rather odd and contradictory implications. We often use it to describe that awkward phase in one’s life between the adolescent preference of maintaining Peter Pan-esque arrested development, and fully accepting adulthood and all the disappointing and perplexing realities that accompany it. In the current film industry, “young adult” as a genre is something a bit more vague in concept, but in practice it’s all too specific. It refers to a subset of films that essentially follow the formula laid forth by works such as The Hunger Games and Twilight. This formula has little to do with the way the plot unfolds, the primary genre the work belongs to, or the general subject matter. Instead, it reflects a marketing strategy. Take a mature story, and dumb it down for the kiddies.
Most films that are explicitly labeled “young adult” are movies aimed at young teenagers that contain just enough violence and sexual situations to push them over the PG threshold and into PG-13 territory. Much like their audience, these movies have a tendency to deal with sex and violence in an immature and rather oblivious way. This sounds like the byproduct of writing something with a young audience in mind, an innocent perspective perhaps, but far too often these movies contain shockingly bizarre and perplexing connotations under the surface that defy logic and common decency.
By now, I’m sure I seem like a prude out to expose young adult entertainment as indecent or immoral, and I assure you this couldn’t be further from the truth. What I’m decrying is how shockingly irresponsible (and sometimes, incompetent) the writers of these films become the moment they decide to tackle subject matter that airs more toward the adult side of YA.
In truth, the impetus for this rant is the release of a film so oblivious to the consequences of its concept that it unintentionally lays the groundwork for a rather shocking supernatural thriller, without following through. What was supposed to be a cute YA Twilight Zone romance quickly became a film about a serial rapist; one that we’re meant to relate to. This travesty is likely playing in a theater near you, and it’s called Every Day.
Perhaps Every Day flew under your radar. When last I checked, it’s made around $3 million against its $5 million budget. This isn’t exactly a stellar return, and it certainly indicates either that I’m not alone in finding the implications of Every Day rather disturbing, or that it appears to be a rather dull film.
Like many YA films, Every Day began as a well-intentioned book, one that was aimed at non-binary teenagers. Based solely on Wikipedia’s plot synopsis, I deduce that the book probably dealt with its premise in a more logical and restrained fashion, but as I’m unwilling to read an entire YA novel, I’ll never be able to say that for sure. Our main character is Rhiannon, a shy teenager nauseatingly named after a Fleetwood Mac song. One day, her prick of a boyfriend is possessed by an entity named A, and over the course of that 24-hour period, he’s the best boyfriend a girl could ask for. The following day, her boyfriend returns to prick status. Curious about Rhiannon, the entity known as A, who wakes up in a different body every morning, begins to use his host bodies to stalk her. In the wonderful world of YA entertainment, nothing is more romantic than stalking.
Predictably, A and Rhiannon fall in love, and here’s where we run into problems. When A wakes up in the body of a person, that person is to a certain degree conscious of their surroundings. They exist in a sort of alternate dimension or limbo facsimile, but A has assumed complete control of the host’s motor functions and consciousness. After A leaves a host, they’re left to wonder if their experience was a strange, uncomfortable dream, or if they were possessed by some sort of demon. The original intention of this concept was to write a love story where this supernatural element serves as an allegory for gender fluidity, but when sex between A and Rhiannon is introduced, the story seems to forget that A’s host bodies are in many ways victims.
The story tries hard to offset the fact that children are being possessed and having sexual experiences against their will by portraying A’s situation as an unfortunate affliction that the rest of us need to accept. So, in short: rape is cool sometimes, especially if there are supernatural circumstances, and gender fluidity is cool too. I agree with one of those, however, by lumping them together in a rather weak narrative metaphor, the film fails to accomplish anything in regards to establishing empathy toward a marginalized group.
Young adults looking for a romance aimed at their demographic will either come away hating the film, or liking it just fine, and it’s very unlikely this film will truly promote a newfound respect for rape. For this audience, it’s just another movie. For those who take the time to really think about the film’s message, I foresee two potential reactions: shock, or utter fascination with the film’s incompetence. My reaction was closer to the latter.
There’s something immensely entertaining about this wave of YA entertainment that I can’t entirely put my finger on, but for the most part I feel like they tend to be well-paced and relatively short. I feel that those two qualities are the backbone of any campy viewing experience. If a film is a horrendous turd, but it moves along briskly, I feel less like I’ve wasted my time. It becomes a more palatable turd.
Every Day is far from the first YA film to make me simultaneously cringe and laugh at its absurdity. Last year’s Everything, Everything was quite the misguided train wreck, and while it appeared on my year-end worst-of list, that doesn’t mean I didn’t morbidly enjoy myself.
Everything, Everything is almost a fairly interesting girl-in-the-plastic-bubble story. It’s about a girl named Maddy, who apparently has an immune disorder that prevents her from being able to safely leave the house. Her mother is in the medical field, and she sets up their house like a glass cage. Maddy is a bright, inquisitive young girl, and she falls in love with her new neighbor Olly.
Maddy runs away with Olly, and becomes very ill, returning home. Her mother takes a very “I told you so” attitude about this. Maddy then discovers that, while she does have a compromised immune system from living in a glass cage for most of her life, the disorder she’s identified with was a fabrication. Her mother decided that, after losing her husband and son in a car accident, it would be better to hold on to Maddy by lying to her than to lose her to the inevitability of growing up.
Maddy’s mother comes across as a loving, if overly cautious parent until the moment of the big reveal, making this twist rather sudden and unbelievable. Her mother delivers a lackluster humanizing monologue about how she only did this out of fear of losing her daughter, Maddy becomes upset, and she leaves home.
I do not buy this shit for a second. The film has all the makings of a contrived thriller, but makes no use of that potential. The ending is rushed and unsatisfactory, and Maddy’s mother probably should have been portrayed as an Annie Wilkes-style psychotic criminal. We can’t have this in a YA film, and the softening of the implications serves to destroy any chance the film had at being even remotely competent.
Heading a bit further into the mainstream, we have the Twilight series. If you’re unfamiliar, I’ll fill you in on everything you need to know in just a few sentences. Twilight involves sparkly, angsty vampires, a werewolf love triangle, and enough unwarranted brooding to bore you to tears. The relationship between the two leads is borderline abusive, and the films fail as a romance because of an author who’s more interested in writing young adult pseudo-porn than crafting a competent story. It’s an exercise in poor taste that advocates for giving that reprehensible ex just one more shot – again, and again, and again. Twilight inadvertently deals with cycles of emotional abuse, but its conclusion is that this abuse is acceptable so long as fairy-tale “true love” is present.
The author’s intentions are probably not sinister. It’s painfully obvious that this was just supposed to be the YA equivalent of those seedy Harlequin romance novels. A sort of “baby’s first porn.”
YA in general has a tendency to feel like a watered-down version of far superior entertainment. This leads me to what is likely the most competent film series in this subgenre: The Hunger Games.
Based on the best-selling book series, The Hunger Games is Battle Royale-lite. Both films are about teenagers fighting in an island arena to the death for both the entertainment of dictatorial politicians and the advancement of society. In Battle Royale, the primary purpose of the game is to put those disrespectful kids in their place. In The Hunger Games, the purpose is more politically motivated. In both, the reason the powers that be chose to make children fight to the death is shaky enough that it feels like an excuse to remake The Most Dangerous Game.
There’s one more key difference between the adventures of Katniss Everdeen and the Japanese adaptation: Battle Royale is a great film. It could have been meaningless violent pornography, but it instead chose to explore the absolute horror of forcing children to slaughter each other by showing the audience every severed limb and every spurt of blood. There’s plenty of dark humor present, but it takes this subject very seriously. Battle Royale does not let you forget the shocking and disgusting realities of its premise, and it manages to be rather impactful.
The Hunger Games, on the other hand, spends two movies on teen-on-teen violence, and two movies (based on a single novel) on the politics surrounding the games. What transpires in the arena is nothing even remotely shocking; just bloodless Hollywood-style action sequences. It doesn’t exactly glorify the games, but it sure does sanitize its concept. This refusal to show or imply how dark and disturbing the games are completely nullifies the impact they would have on the audience. The experience becomes like watching a Mission Impossible entry. You know there’s violence happening, but the action movie editing hides the severity of the scenario. This severity is what gives a film like Battle Royale its impact.
My final example here is that of Me Before You, or as I call it, I Love You, Please Kill Me Because Wheelchairs Suck. 20-something Louisa is hired to take care of Will, a filthy rich former banker now paralyzed by a motorcycle accident. Will is obnoxiously grumpy, but he slowly falls in love with his caregiver. Once it’s established that the two are in deep, Will catches pneumonia and his health declines a bit. This leads him to decide that it’s finally time to make the trek to Switzerland for the sweet release of assisted suicide.
He tells Louisa that he feels it would be unfair for him to continue living as her boyfriend and patient simultaneously, because she should be out living her life rather than taking care of an invalid that she loves deeply. Also, he just can’t bear life in a wheelchair, because he can’t maintain his superiority complex with such a visibly obvious disability.
Louisa is naturally rather heartbroken, and pouts for a while as Will prepares for his suicide mission. In the end, she conveniently shows up just before his final moments. They say a tearful goodbye as he slips away, and Louisa continues on with her life.
Me Before You presents itself as a typical doomed-relationship drama, and that’s ultimately its downfall. Will is constantly whining about how much his life sucks, and the moment someone comes along and brightens up his life, he feels he must regress into his depression and end his own life. His rationale strongly resembles that of a teenager considering suicide. Everyone around me would be better off if I was dead. I cannot think of anything in mainstream film that’s as socially irresponsible as romanticizing suicide in a film aimed at teenage girls.
After analyzing entirely too much YA entertainment, I’m tempted to come to the conclusion that rape, death, physical and mental abuse, child murder, and suicide are subjects that should not be tackled in films aimed at a young audience. However, there are plenty of films for the younger crowd that explore these topics, and do so in a way that provides their audience with an opportunity not only to consider these concepts, but to process them. It’s very possible to tackle weighty subject matter aimed at this demographic in a responsible way. Pixar actually does a remarkable job at this, but Pixar is aimed at an even younger audiences, and can also rot in hell.
The reality is that these films exist in the same in-between state that their viewers do. Often, they feel as if they’re written by young, inexperienced authors, and demonstrate this by their immature perspective. The bulk of these are almost certainly penned by adults looking to cash in on current YA trends, an unfortunately cynical circumstance that I can’t overlook. Add to this the studio mentality that disturbing implications will slip by its viewers, because they’re “young and stupid,” and you have a crop of films that have such little faith in their audience’s intelligence that it’s basically exploitation.
I don’t believe that irresponsible YA films are harmful, intentionally or otherwise. They’re still just movies, and what’s actually taken away from their message is a reflection of their audience, not their creators. This doesn’t make these movies any less exploitative and bizarre, and in my case, it makes them far easier to sit through because of the silliness of it all.