Actor-Network Theory At The Movies: Reassembling The Contemporary American Teen Film With Latour 3030312860, 9783030312862, 9783030312879

Table of contents :
Foreword......Page 6
Opening Credits Roll: Spoiler Alert......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Contents......Page 13
List of Figures......Page 16
Leaving the Cinema: Contemporary Teen Narratives’ Medial and Agential Shift......Page 18
ANT Goes to High School: At the Movies with Bruno Latour......Page 27
Outline and Argument of the Book......Page 38
Filmography......Page 41
Translating the Transition: The DUFF and the Makeover Film Subgenre......Page 47
Referentiality, Representation, and Non-Mimesis......Page 50
Case Study: The DUFF......Page 53
Disassembling The DUFF: Discipline......Page 55
The Makeover......Page 65
Character Organization: Types and Updates......Page 80
Media Use: Translating the Bully and the Extensions of Teens......Page 83
POSTSCRIPTUM......Page 90
Filmography......Page 96
The Teenager as Adult and Winter’s Bone as a Teen Film for Adults......Page 101
“A Method and Not a Theory”—A Short Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory......Page 105
(White) Trash Ecology: Abject Objects, Abject Father, and Spaces of Obsolescence......Page 107
Real Estate......Page 119
Act Local: Cinematography and Music......Page 121
Absence......Page 127
Education......Page 134
Responsibility as Rebirth: TeenAgency as Teenage Heroism......Page 138
POSTSCRIPTUM......Page 143
Flimography......Page 148
A Black Tech Teen Hood Film: Technology and Drugs as Quasi-Objects in Dope......Page 153
Quasi-Object and Quasi-Subject......Page 155
Case Study: Dope......Page 157
Repurposing Language, Reclaiming Meaning......Page 161
Mapping by Movement: Repurposed Spaces......Page 162
Appropriated Objects and Media......Page 168
Transferring Agency: Bitcoin | Etrade | Weapon......Page 172
Hybrid Aesthetics | Hybrid Identities......Page 185
Ethnicity | Language | Education | Agency......Page 188
POSTSCRIPTUM......Page 194
Filmography......Page 199
Images and Inscriptions: Visual Hybridity as Meta-Commentary in The Diary of a Teenage Girl......Page 203
Case Study: The Diary of a Teenage Girl......Page 204
Teen Films and Female Sexuality......Page 205
Visualization......Page 210
Teenage Inscriptions: Voicing and Visualizing the Self......Page 212
Une Ecriture Feminine, Une Ecriture Adolescente: Writing the Body, Writing the Self......Page 220
“Everybody Wants to Be Touched.” Victimization vs. Agency, Male and Female Desire......Page 227
POSTSCRIPTUM—The Laboratory of the Self......Page 238
Filmography......Page 243
Looking Back to the Future: Conclusion and Outlook......Page 248
POSTSCRIPTUM: TeenAgency......Page 254
Filmography......Page 256
Index......Page 260

Citation preview

Actor-Network Theory at the Movies Reassembling the Contemporary American Teen Film With Latour Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank

Actor-Network Theory at the Movies

Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank

Actor-Network Theory at the Movies Reassembling the Contemporary American Teen Film With Latour

Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank University of Cologne Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-31286-2 ISBN 978-3-030-31287-9 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31287-9

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design by eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

With gratitude to the genius of Laura Mulvey, Sigrid Lange, and Stefanie Schrank for the lessons they have taught my eyes, mind, and heart. Dedicated to Henni—may the teen film in which you will star one day be the most exciting of all.

Foreword

Studies of youth in movies and other media have enjoyed fruitful progress since I first started my research in the mid-1990s. At that time, a few foundational books had been published, and journal articles were appearing that suggested the “teen screen” was no longer reviled for puerile depictions of sex quests and stalker killers. Cinema’s maturing address of adolescence, which began in the post-World War II era, yielded an increasingly serious academic interest in how youth were not only targeted as a market (which the industry understood for decades) but how they were represented by these media products. The resulting analyses were thus concerned with the social roles, politics, sexual dynamics, economics, and psychology of teenagers, an amorphous segment of the population that draws endless concern from parental figures, moral guardians, corporate capitalists, educators, and demographers. The academic study of youth in cinema has remained primarily the domain of these representational concerns, yet this volume presents a further evolution of the field with its theoretical applications to the teen genre. The meticulously detailed accounts of recent teen films here engage with the work of Bruno Latour at a sophisticated level, providing

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insight to the use of Actor-Network Theory and related concepts within a codified realm of media while also revealing the ongoing complexity with which adolescence is portrayed in cinema. Sonnenberg-Schrank takes on a delightfully intriguing array of topics within adolescent media concerns, such as makeover narratives, gay conversion therapy, racial tensions, and even ecology. This resulting re-appreciation of teen cinema through employing a comprehensive social theory is refreshing and innovative. The examples considered are admittedly contained within the American realm, which does tend to dominate the global market, yet the key texts are not selected merely for their popularity. In the chapters that follow, you will see how Latourian concepts and ANT can inform our understanding of youth and how they may understand themselves, and furthermore, you will discern the rich contexts these films propose for understanding American culture in the early twenty-first century. This study is obviously not monolithic but rather expansive in its evaluation of the potential for studies of “youth” and “media” as those terms continue to undergo revision in our ongoing history. The promise of work such as this is inspiring indeed. Cocoa, FL, USA

Timothy Shary

Preface

Opening Credits Roll: Spoiler Alert This is a book about film—more specifically about US American teen films (also known as teen movies or teenpics), and about theory. If it were a film and not a book about film, this would be the moment for a spoiler alert. Every film that is worthwhile can be spoiled by someone revealing to you its one climactic surprise, its engine or outcome. Having a film spoiled grants you an entirely different satisfaction. If you already know the what you are more likely to be interested in the how, if you know the one trick, you are more likely to look for others, maybe more subtle ones. Darth Vader is actually Luke Skywalker’s father, Norman Bates enacts his dead mother, and the Planet of the Apes was Earth all along; fine, so how does each respective film unfurl to reach these crucial revelations? A spoiled film is neither a ruined film, nor is it automatically more fun, but spoilers do have their benefit. Here comes mine that gives away the entire premise in few sentences: As a child of the 1980s, I grew up during the advent of the golden age of the genre; I became an avid viewer of teen films in the late 1980s, never

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stopped watching them, and witnessed how they evolved in the past three decades (along with the scholarship and criticism that addresses them). Part of teen films’ allure is how they constitute a, or perhaps THE, most mutable Hollywood subgenre. It stays the same while constantly undergoing radical changes, difference and/in repetition. However, the genre’s changes since the early/mid-2000s, i.e. its consistent diversification into different forms and media, necessitate a diversification of the analytical tools with which we approach them as scholars, viewers, fans, and teens [future/current/former]. Enter Bruno Latour, a French philosopher, one of whose central ideas I will grossly over-simplify as follows: Don’t be general, don’t give a panoramic overview to create a vast horizontal landscape of facts and references, but become as specific as possible and take the thing and its material relations seriously. Develop the context from within the text—not the other way round, where context is taken as a given and the task is placing the thing in there. Look as closely as possible and let your object of study, your matter of concern lead the way instead of leading it into explanation. Don’t be an explainer of what things mean, be a meticulous notetaker on what they are and do, and only then comment on something like meaning. This is what I will try to do in the pages to come, hoping to allow teen films the complexity they are often not granted as aesthetic artifacts in their own right. If this were a movie screening, then the trailer reel and the movie’s exposition would be the following notes on teen film in general and an introduction to Mr. Latour—the actual feature begins when the two of them converge and the theory becomes a practice. The architecture of the book is intended to invite you as a reader to move freely between the chapters: Read them as essays on different films, or as a coherent chunk, in which a methodology forms itself in the making. I’d like to see the book read as an open system of practice and discourse that invites to supplement, expand, and enlarge the network— to use these critical registers or mobilize further Latourian propositions for an engagement with (teen) films. [And if you do, I’d be excited to read it.] Cologne, Germany

Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank

Acknowledgements

If this were a movie and not a book, this would be my “I want to thank the Academy” moment (the part that isn’t important for you as a reader, but very important for me as its author). Thanking the academy is indeed what I am about to do first, as I originally developed this project as a doctoral dissertation that was accepted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne in 2017. I am thankful to my two supervisors Hanjo Berressem and Norbert Finzsch. Hanjo can see a cake in half-baked ideas, and he granted me and many others the freedom to pursue seemingly (and sometimes, actually) nonsensical ideas that might or might not turn into great projects. He was an inspiring supervisor, is a generous colleague, and someone whose company is a pleasure in so many ways. Norbert Finzsch helped bring focus especially during the final stages, and he deserves credit for being a soulful force of nature, reminding me and many others that there is an ethics and a politics to any research project and that the work is as much about doing the work as it is about developing a stance. Thank you also

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to the members of my commission—Sigrid Lange, Nicolas Pethes, Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche, Sabine Sielke, and Andreas Speer—for your time, feedback, and thoughts. During my time at the University of Cologne’s English Seminar, I had the privilege of meeting and working with peers and colleagues whose input and friendship strongly shaped this project and the years I spent with it. In alphabetical order, I wave to these dear and brilliant people: Nils Bothmann, Jasmin Dücker-Herrmann, Michael Göbel, Moritz Ingwersen, Kelly Kawar, Olga Tarapata, Eleana Vaja, and the members of the Tuesday evening Oberseminar. The helpful spirits of our department deserve more than an honorable mention: Marlene Mück, Mario Laarmann, Konstantin Ketteler, thank you very much for scanning scads of books (who knew how much Latour had actually published…) and for being nice, fun, and interesting people, and especially Markus Pinell for cleaning up the manuscript and my coworker and faithful research assistant Jonas Neldner who must be credited here for his help with the nitty-gritty, his insightful comments, and his probably semilegal ways of “finding” hard-to-get films for me. I am grateful to a number of people besides those already mentioned who shaped my experience at the University of Cologne in different capacities. Regine Romberg and Peter Brenner were exceptional teachers whose lessons in and beyond the classroom will remain profoundly important to me. Bärbel Eltschig and Sabine Folger-Fonfara need to be acknowledged for their kindness, for leading the way, and for untangling a Kafkaesque jungle of bureaucracy and administration. I want to thank Lina Aboujieb for her encouragement, flexibility, and friendliness. Not only am I excited and humbled to publish my book with one of my favorite houses, but working on this project with her, Emily Wood, and their crew at Palgrave Macmillan was pleasant from the first email on. Lina’s focus and input were crucial to turn this into a concise (I hope it is) book—it’s appreciated very much. My consulting editor Daniel Fitzpatrick had a huge impact with his careful eye, his hard work, and dedication. I’m delighted that a chance meeting after a concert in Dublin led to a visit to the cinema and a dinner the next day and the quick realization that among our shared interests,

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teen films and critical theory rate high. Daniel helped to make this a better book. Thank you. Extra special thanks to Timothy Shary and Nadine Boljkovac, the readers for this book. Timothy wrote several brilliant books on film (teen and otherwise) that have paved the way for pretty much everyone interested in teen film and, of course, for my book, too. I value Tim’s generosity and counsel, his encouragement of my project and that he pointed out where it might be improved on. As secondary literature and human being, he is impossible to not cherish. Nadine’s beautiful book Untimely Affects not only discusses affect, but deeply affected me and my own attempt at doing film studies with a different way of looking at films and, by extension, the world. Tim and Nadine, thank you for your work, which I adore, and for your support and contributions to this book. Let’s go to the Ethiopian restaurant sometime. Thank you to my friend Jan Niklas Jansen, who doesn’t enjoy films that much, doesn’t really watch films, but watches them for me and read (multiple versions of ) this text (multiple times). Niklas’ ideas, questions, and comments have challenged me to think better since 2001, for which I am thankful more than I can express. Benjamin Walter always seemed genuinely excited about what I said or wrote about films, which motivated me greatly, yet another benefit to having him in my life as a friend, as his comradeship was invaluably important to me in the last two decades. A big hug to Su, who watches films in ways my theory-corrupted eyes can no longer watch them, for her perspective and for the fun that she is. To Christoph for involving me in his David Foster Wallace project to a degree that reminded me during a writer’s block that I enjoy writing very, very thick descriptions of interesting texts. And footnotes. And for being one of the few actual teens-and-then-twens whom I could observe living inside their own teen film realities. And of course to Stefanie. That tomato is you. Love. Cologne 2019

Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank

Contents

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Introduction: Actor-Network Theory at the Movies—Watching Twenty-First Century US Teen Films with Latour Leaving the Cinema: Contemporary Teen Narratives’ Medial and Agential Shift ANT Goes to High School: At the Movies with Bruno Latour Outline and Argument of the Book Filmography Bibliography Circulating Reference: Making Over the Makeover Translating the Transition: The DUFF and the Makeover Film Subgenre Referentiality, Representation, and Non-Mimesis Case Study: The DUFF Disassembling The DUFF: Discipline The Makeover

1 1 11 21 24 25 31 31 35 37 39 49

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Character Organization: Types and Updates Media Use: Translating the Bully and the Extensions of Teens POSTSCRIPTUM Filmography Bibliography 3

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Actants | Objects | Participation: Teen Film Ecologies The Teenager as Adult and Winter’s Bone as a Teen Film for Adults “A Method and Not a Theory”—A Short Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (White) Trash Ecology: Abject Objects, Abject Father, and Spaces of Obsolescence Real Estate Act Local: Cinematography and Music Absence Education Responsibility as Rebirth: TeenAgency as Teenage Heroism POSTSCRIPTUM Flimography Bibliography Quasi-Object | Quasi-Subject: Technology, Drugs, Language, Ethnicity A Black Tech Teen Hood Film: Technology and Drugs as Quasi-Objects in Dope Quasi-Object and Quasi-Subject Case Study: Dope Repurposing Language, Reclaiming Meaning Mapping by Movement: Repurposed Spaces Appropriated Objects and Media Transferring Agency: Bitcoin | Etrade | Weapon Hybrid Aesthetics | Hybrid Identities Ethnicity | Language | Education | Agency

64 67 74 80 81 85 85 89 91 103 105 111 118 122 127 132 133 137 137 140 142 145 146 152 156 169 172

Contents

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POSTSCRIPTUM Filmography Bibliography

178 183 184

Visualization, Images and Inscriptions Images and Inscriptions: Visual Hybridity as Meta-Commentary in The Diary of a Teenage Girl Case Study: The Diary of a Teenage Girl Teen Films and Female Sexuality Visualization Teenage Inscriptions: Voicing and Visualizing the Self Une Ecriture Feminine, Une Ecriture Adolescente: Writing the Body, Writing the Self “Everybody Wants to Be Touched.” Victimization vs. Agency, Male and Female Desire POSTSCRIPTUM—The Laboratory of the Self Filmography Bibliography

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Conclusion Looking Back to the Future: Conclusion and Outlook POSTSCRIPTUM: TeenAgency Filmography Bibliography

233 233 239 241 242

Index

187 188 190 194 196 204 211 222 227 228

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5

Introducing a typology and taxonomy: football players, cheerleaders and mathletes are all literally on the same page Both women achieve imaginary completeness by recognizing themselves in their specular reflection A mosaic of screens, becoming the visualization of a hybrid human-media-machine The anthropology shot subdivides the totality of teens into separate groups and classes. This quasi-geographical map is from Mean Girls Trash ecology: the burnt-out meth lab and discarded cars in Winter’s Bone Winter’s Bone’s first picture: the sublime Ozarks trashscape Frank B. Nuderscher, The View from the Studio, oil on canvas, ca. 1920 On the outside looking in through the glass barrier Responsibility and response-ability. Animals as non-human actants

42 58 72

73 92 107 109 120 125

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Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 4.9 Fig. 4.10 Fig. 5.1a and b Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8

Sonny and Peanutbutter, doubled and completed by their reflection in the mirror Entangled ecology: objects, human and non-human life in Leave No Trace “No verticality or underground.” Traversing the Bottoms on BMX bikes Geeky bricoleurs: Super Nintendo still life “Nobody‘s going to suspect a thing. We‘re just geeks doing what geeks do” School as a space for science and crime Hybrid visual architecture: the drone footage Proliferation of images in an attention economy The all-seeing human and non-human eye/i: iphone panopticism Excess, exhibitionism, narcissim and voyeurism: meme culture Post-continuity stylistics The Barbie dolls as cinematographic objects in Seventh Grade Birthing and wagging penis animation: defusing and emphasizing sexual content Mirror scene in the cluttered boudoir Cascades of images: reenacting the polaroid The immediacy of the inscription device: a page from the book where Gloeckner/Minnie tests automatic-machinic typing as opposed to consciously writing Becoming hybrid: Minnie morphing into her cartoon counterpart King Kong and the white boy: Minnie’s comic strip “The Making of a Harlot” Literalization of the metaphor: Minnie is high on LSD Holy sisterhood: snacking on communion wafers in Lady Bird

126 130 149 153 157 158 161 163 163 164 172 181 200 202 206

208 210 215 218 224

1 Introduction: Actor-Network Theory at the Movies—Watching Twenty-First Century US Teen Films with Latour

Leaving the Cinema: Contemporary Teen Narratives’ Medial and Agential Shift American teen films have been reliable cinematic companions for US teenagers since their inception after the end of World War II, when both the teenager as a term with its current meaning and as a distinct societal group came into being.1 As a body of film, they are traditionally both 1The preconditions out of which “the teenager” emerged after World War II are retraced in-depth by Jon Savage in his transcultural overview Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875– 1945 (2007) and by Bodo Mrozek for the 1950s and 1960s in Jugend Pop Kultur (2019); also see Kelly Schrum’s Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture (2004). Analyzing the circumstances in which the American teenager as a cultural construction took shape, Thomas Hine points out that the invention of the term teenager in its current use in 1941 was a move to turn adolescents into a distinct group to which commodities can be sold, but also that this development is at once a genuine twentieth-century phenomenon, as well as a genuinely American figuration: “America created the teenager in its own image— brash, unfinished, ebullient, idealistic, crude, energetic, innocent, greedy, changing in all sorts of unsettling ways. … The American teenager is the noble savage in blue jeans, the future in your face. Teenagers occupy a special place in the society. They are envied and sold to, studied and deplored” (2007, 10). For an overview of the American teenager and their cinematic representation, also see Considine, Shary, Driscoll, Tropiano, and Smith (who also offers an excellent recent overview on teen film scholarship [2017, 6–20]).

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Sonnenberg-Schrank, Actor-Network Theory at the Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31287-9_1

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consistent and dynamic to a high degree: On the one hand, they are by definition organized around the coming-of-age experience and revisit similar and recurring tropes, settings, rites, and types; on the other hand, they narrate them in a multitude of ever-changing ways and media. As Hollywood’s take on the bildungsroman, the literary roots of the teen film can be traced back to the gradual acknowledging that took in since the Enlightenment that the subdivisions of human development need more gradation than the distinction into children and adults. In different fields, the in-between stage of adolescence was addressed, from Rousseau’s educational philosophy to G. Stanley Hall’s groundbreaking work on Adolescence (1904), to literature, and law and instigated the process from which eventually “the teenager” emerged. While the cinematic roots of the modern teen film go back as far as the first quarter of the twentieth century and representations of thenburgeoning youth cultures (e.g., in the flapper film), the first wave of teen films is a postwar phenomenon, coinciding with the discovery of the teenager as a new market that demands new product. Industries in this thriving postwar economy reacted quickly to the awakening consumerist desires of the new marketplace, catering to a hungry teenage demographic with tailored-to-fit products. At the frontline was Hollywood with an increased output of narratives that can now be acknowledged as the starting point of the modern teen film and cinema’s counterpart to young adult fiction. Driscoll observes that historically “film and modern adolescence emerged at the same time and have consistently influenced each other” (2011, 5). Now a massive and heterogeneous body of films, subgenres, and cycles, teen films have since those early days targeted and depicted adolescent audiences with quite specific protagonists, settings, themes, rites, and institutions that are connected to the coming-of-age experience. The dominant modes in which youths on screen were represented in the first big teen film waves from the mid-1940s to the 1950s shifted from “clean teens” to “juvenile delinquents,” indicating how America’s youth has been the canvas for manifold, quickly changing, and often contradicting projections ever since. The teen film’s heyday, when its form (both in terms of narrative and mediality) was firmly established, was the prolific 1980s and 1990s, the era when the genre arguably peaked

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through a slew of constitutive, genre-defining, commercially successful, and culturally influential texts. In the last decade, however a medial shift can be observed, away from the cinema as a space and the feature film as its predominant form, and a shift away from the enclosed diegetic worlds of teen films toward a different involvement of the audience, which can be usefully termed agential shift. Both the medial and agential shift can be illustrated by a recent example: In 2017, the TV series Riverdale, started airing as an adaptation (or rather re-interpretation or remediation [Bolter and Grusin 1999]) of the famous Archie Comics, a comic book universe organized around and geared to adolescents, which takes place in the fictional All-American small town of Riverdale. Established in 1939 and branching out into a multitude of franchises and different media, Archie Comics and their characters have become ingrained in the collective memory of American pop and youth culture, famous for their saccharine wholesomeness, embodied by Archie Comics’ own The Archies, arguably the first virtual pop group, and their aptly titled 1969 #1 hit “Sugar Sugar.”2 Besides the surprisingly—surprising in comparison with other teen series and the reputation of the Archieverse—dark tone, themes, and the excessive visual style of the show, Riverdale is characterized by its vast number of explicit and implicit references, both visually, in content, in the screenwriting that is rife with witty in-jokes and allusions to literature or films, and even in the casting, featuring some of the biggest stars of 1980s and 1990s teen films and television, such as Molly Ringwald from the John Hughes cycle, and Beverly Hills 90210 ’s late Luke Perry, who in the show play Archie Andrews’ conflicted parents—a meta-casting almost that posits the show as the offspring of the “parent” texts. Such postmodern referentiality is common fare in popular culture, yet the textual interplay in this example goes beyond mere (self-)reflexivity. What I will argue here is that the techniques of citation and appropriation are not a play on, but a part of our reality. We see characters talking about a world (ours and theirs) that is both in the process of being made and making itself, intertwining intraand extradiegetic fictions and realities and making such distinctions no 2 For

the development of the Archieverse as well as its efforts to go with the times by gradually opening its diegetic cosmos to new characters and themes echoing respective cultural shifts especially regarding race, gender, and sexuality, see also Sonnenberg-Schrank (2015).

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longer possible. The following dialogue between Riverdale’s main characters exemplifies how the show constantly makes its position in the corpus of cinematic teen narratives visible and self-awarely reflects it: Jughead: The drive-in closing, it’s just one more nail in the coffin that is Riverdale. No. Forget Riverdale. In the coffin of the American dream … The Twilight Drive-In should mean something to us. People should be trying to save it. Veronica: In this age of Netflix and VOD, do people really want to watch a movie in a car? I mean, who even goes there? Jason: People who want to buy crack. Jughead: And cinephiles and car enthusiasts, right, Bets? … Also, you guys should come to closing night. I’m thinking American Graffiti. Or is that too obvious? Betty: Maybe Rebel Without a Cause? (from Riverdale, season 1, episode 4, 2017)

Their conversation is a more general commentary on the development of cinematic production and consumption, but it is particularly concerned with the status of the American teen film. In its traditional form, the teen film has lost its arena and perhaps even become a thing of the past, relegated to nostalgia while it is simultaneously reinvented in new forms and new media. While Rebel Without a Cause (1955) can be seen as an urtext for teen films, American Graffiti (1973) is already a nostalgic look back on a bygone era in which teenagers move through a carcentered postwar California of drive-in cinemas and drive-in restaurants, accompanied by the ever-present score provided by car radios. Both films address the importance of the moviegoing experience as part of the transitional coming-of-age experience: In American Graffiti, the drive-in cinema functions as an allegorical place of desire for the past (as it does in Riverdale); in Rebel Without a Cause, the teens’ reaction to the power of the big screen is played out in the planetarium scene where the protagonists’ feeling of being overwhelmed metaphorically by their difficult adolescence is literalized by showing them overwhelmed by the weight of the entire cosmos as well as by the cinematic apparatus which projects it onto the screen in unison. Like the scene from Riverdale, both films

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are concerned with the relation of teenagers and (teen) films, their mediality, and locales. By having the characters reflect about the demise of the drive-in, the once so significant locale, and by attaching this to the demise of towns and small-town America, the myth of the car (and thus, by extension, the American Dream), and by having them at the same time connect this demise to a shift in media and technology (“In this age of Netflix and VOD”), the medial shift is both acknowledged and coconstructed. The fact that the show in which the characters discuss this medial shift is delivered to spectators by these very channels not only makes this a metafictional comment about the teen narrative’s shift away from both the original comics (and by extension, magazines and printed matter more generally3 ) or about the traditional narrative feature, those films that were screened in the very movie theaters and drive-ins that have apparently become obsolete; even more, by doing this from within the medium of VOD, the comment emphasizes the repercussions of the medial shift to a postcinematic era: A teen series commenting on the decline of traditional teen cinema—a development, to which it itself also contributes. There is still substantial demand for cinematic teen narratives supplied by the Hollywood industrial complex, but they have modified in correspondence to (and in order to accommodate) changing modes of consumption, as well as a shift from analog to digital. This also entails a spatial or environmental shift from location-bound cinemas, or TV broadcasts determined by programmers, to consumer-determined viewing, uncoupled from any fixed location or temporal requirement, but also to some degree from the more conclusive and self-contained narratives of the traditional ninety-minute feature. What we are more likely to encounter are potentially infinitely renewable continuing serial narratives. In this altered media landscape, teen films’ modes of existence have evolved into the present state where teen narratives find articulations in a diversified set of forms. In the last ten years, two main trends can be identified then in terms of targeting a teen demographic: television or

3 For

the past decade, the number of titles in the teen magazine segment and their sales and circulation have declined drastically, mostly attributed to the Internet, social media, and a changed media use in general. Also see Haughney (2013) or Ilyashov (2016).

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VOD series, and—as sub-category of a broader Hollywood trend—teenfocused blockbuster event cinema, often based on franchises, typically with an inherent seriality, for instance Twilight (2008–2012), Hunger Games (2012–2015), Maze Runner (2014–2018), or Divergent (2014– 2016). Hybrid forms such as the Twilight Saga have become emblematic of this medial transition. The individual installments of the series function as self-contained films, but they differ from the traditional teen film: As adaptations of a series of novels, they are already in the realm of remediation (or from a less media studies-driven angle, in the realm of franchising and branding) that goes beyond the more self-contained film. In addition to being a singular cinematic event, each individual film is also a vehicle to sell a wider pool of products and to continuously test the viability of an ongoing film series as well as any potential offshoots. In that regard, the Twilight films already follow a narrative and economic logic of seriality and expansion; they both echo and enforce the medial shift the teen film has undergone.4 Serial formats and franchises may be the last decade’s two dominant trends, but they are not by any means the only current forms for teenfocused narratives. The one-off stand-alone teen film is not a dying art; they are still produced and consumed; and a visible proliferation of the modes in which the coming-of-age trope is narrated has taken place. As commercial interests focus on serialization and expansion, there are many instances in which the teen film no longer needs to be restricted by the more formulaic requirements of mainstream cinema and TV (mainstream in the sense of being produced and/or distributed by major companies, but also with regard to their content and composition). We increasingly find articulations through what is typically recognized as an independent, art house, or more auteur-driven cinema, a cinema which for a long time only exceptionally overlapped with the teen film. In other words: if the center drops out, the margins can thrive. The other significant transformation is what I will term here the agential shift. Talking about agency generally has to happen on two levels: Diegetic agencies need to be addressed, the cinematic teens are not only interesting for what they are, become, and stand for, but for what they 4 Also

see Nelson (2017) on the franchise teen film as industry strategy.

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do and for the agencies that flow through them, that make them do what they do. Their quests for autonomy and self-actualization in this regard become stories about the denial or assumption of agency (teenagency, so to say). The second part of the agential shift pertains then to the extradiegetic associations of a narrative. The above-quoted passage from Riverdale illustrates a change in the way many contemporary teen narratives communicate with their audience as a certain degree of familiarity with the genre, its history, types, and tropes has become prerequisite. A few scenes after the one quoted above for example, Veronica will say to her adversary Cheryl: “Don’t worry. You may be a stock character from a ’90s teen movie, but I’m not.” In order to fully grasp what this entails, the spectators have to bring with them a specific knowledge, a set of understandings rooted in the tropes of the teen film and its various histories, and to some extent, they complete the meaning themselves. This also shifts the status of the spectator: from a more passive mode of consumption, affectation, and identification, to more active, more selfaware forms of engagement that expand upon those former modes and histories, radically reshuffling the agencies of/connected to/identifiable in these narratives. Such strategies to create polyvalence can also be considered as a way to address “former” teens, those adults who came of age during a different teen film era and whose popcultural memory can be triggered by alluding to what to them is nostalgia. In that sense, they lead to “teen films for adults” or “all-age teen films.”5 These two shifts, the medial and agential shift, for which the TV show Riverdale is but one exemplary point of culmination, have developed over time. Both shifts are neither entirely new nor relegated solely to the teen film.6 The agential shift induced by the self-awareness and referentiality of the texts however allows for and necessitates a different mode of spectatorship and participation, a shift that has already been addressed within certain genre discourses, for instance due to the emergence of so-called 5 For

different modes of multimedia engagement and interaction, see Wee (2017). medial shift, the change of the entire cinematographic apparatus, and the connected cultural, technological, and societal transformations are widely addressed in media histories, in the field of Seriality Studies (see Eco [1989], Hagedorn [1988], Tudor [1993], Wünsch [2015], Beil et al. [2015], Bronfen et al. [2016], and Kelleter [2017]), the abovementioned conception of remediation or Henry Jenkins’ notion of convergence culture (2006). 6The

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postmodern horror films after Wes Craven’s Scream (1996; incidentally also a watermark teen film). The films covered by this umbrella term rely heavily on metacinematic elements in their use of knowledge of generic and formulaic conventions, and they helped contribute to shifting spectators’ agencies.7 The changed interaction with the spectator through the (assumed) familiarity with a corpus leads to a different kind of complicity between audience and artifact. The question then pertains to how the changed agency of the audience manifests itself beyond the deciphering of specialist knowledge—if it does not go beyond genre in-jokes and meta-referencing, it will undercut the polyvalence of the artifacts, primarily functioning for insiders and excluding those unaware of the quoted texts and the conventions of the respective subgenre. As mentioned above: techniques of citation and appropriation are not a play on, but a part of our reality. If for instance the typology and tropes are already established and assume the function here of an agreed-upon, basic knowledge which can be easily referred to in a self-reflexive manner, difference then becomes visible. Teen film urtexts such as The Breakfast Club (1985) have proposed archetypes and a taxonomy which over time has become influential standards. If the tropes, types, and other conventions along with those that are continuously added to the teen film repertoire over time are played out over and over again, they become inscribed as tradition by their multiplication and circulation. This repetitive circulation solidifies these conventions, regardless of whether a text challenges or affirms them, in a self-confirming discursive loop: If an archetype is repeated, no matter if as a parody, a copy, or as an update, it is continuously reinforced as a building block of popcultural vocabulary that constitutes a shared cultural archive. This dynamic implements a 7 In

his study Television and Youth Culture, jan jagodzinski uses the example of the TV series Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003) to illustrate an “ironic mode of address [that] speaks to the audience by inviting them to participate as knowledgeable and savvy viewers … film and television in their postmodern textual forms are unable to push this interactive dimension as far, so the narratives invite audience interactivity in other ways. Ironic self-referentiality has become the standard fare … The writer /director becomes a knowing participant who indulges in jokes and asides with the audience. This produces a suspension of the taken-for-granted past that the genre has established, or that has become hegemonic (often claimed as a return of nostalgia, in this case, to the horror genre)” (2008, 4–5), and supports Shaviro’s (2013) concern by extending the shift to literary theory, especially Roland Barthes (1974) and Umberto Eco (1989).

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regime of which such conventions are an intrinsic part, and it feeds into teen films’ prescriptive agency: the affirmation-by-repetition of conventions turns them into a language-like agreed-upon system of codes and signs. They are installed stably both within the medium, the individual texts, the diegetic realities, but also in the actual reality: When we speak about nerds, jocks, or cheerleaders, about the prom, being grounded, Ferris Bueller, detention, or the shopping mall, we use the same internalized references and referents as the fictionalized characters from teen films. The associated images, ideas, and connotations are already coconstructed through a dynamism of mutual feedback between teen films and teen realities that are in a constant process of generating and redefining each other. However, the reflection and/or perpetuation of such codes and conventions also makes them visible: These patterns emerge from teen films, and by emerging from them, they become identifiable as patterns in the first place. Consequently, these films can neither be perceived nor critically analyzed as unambiguous or as unilateral communication but must be assessed as parts of a dynamic collective network, in which a multitude of actants—an actant, simply put is something that acts or makes others act, is part of an action and thus produces difference—and agencies converge. Teen films not only refer to the experience of going through high school as a rite of passage that is common to most Americans, but also, and almost equally, to the shared experience of watching teen films as a mediation of this rite of passage—which thus becomes a rite of passage in its own right. In this sense, high school and/or the coming-of-age experience is negotiated cinematically and perceived as an experience that is intrinsically and inseparably coupled with its mediation and mediatedness. This consequently contains, adds, and opens more layers of referentiality in which it is no longer possible to separate teen realities and teen film realities into clear-cut spheres. Writing about Joseph Kahn’s Detention (2011), which falls into the category of highly referential teen films that can almost only be understood from the context of the genre, Steven Shaviro addresses the duality of reality and its representation as no longer distinguishable, from which arises a re-formed reality:

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There was a time when we found slasher films scary (say, the time of Halloween, 1978). Then, we became so familiar with the rules that we could only enjoy a slasher film ironically and self-referentially, “in quotation marks” (this is the moment of Scream, 1996, and all its sequels). This is the same time when postmodern academic theorists were reading Baudrillard, and deploring the alleged “death of the real.” But today, the situation has changed. For now we know that all those citations and remediations and so on and so forth are themselves altogether real, part of The Real. The exacerbated irony of the “postmodern” 1990s eventually imploded into what we can see today as a multifaceted immanence. We have moved on from Baudrillard’s “death of the Real” to Laruelle’s sense of radical immanence, or the Real as One. Irony is dead, not because of some supposed “new sincerity,” but because all the hierarchies of reflection have collapsed. Today, there can be no ontological privileging of referentiality and self-referentiality. There is simply no difference between reality and the mediatic representation of that reality, because the latter is itself entirely real, in exactly the same way that what it ostensibly represents is real. Hyperrealism has been transformed into Bazinian or Laruellian realism. (2013)

Shaviro’s assessment that there is no longer any “difference between reality and the mediatic representation of that reality” is intended as a general description of a post-everything (post-modern, post-irony, postcontinuity) ontology, in which “all the hierarchies of reflection have collapsed,” and not a phenomenon specifically located in the realm of teen culture. It is fitting, though, that he attaches his observation to the discussion of teen films from different eras. Indeed, the always intricate, practically inseparable relationship of teen reality and its representation illustrates that the teenager, much more than a biological stage in the development of a person, is a cultural construction; just like teen films and other human and non-human actors, it is enmeshed in an actornetwork that creates, or “inscribes” teenagers, who in turn influence, or inscribe the ever-fluctuating network in a constant process of association, inscription, and translation.

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ANT Goes to High School: At the Movies with Bruno Latour Inquiring where the teen film stands at present makes it necessary to take inventory of how the canon has been renewed, expanded, and regurgitated—in terms of format, media, modes of consumption, and production, but also as regards its content, types, themes, tropes, politics, and aesthetics. In order to accommodate the shifts, changes, and consistencies of the teen film, its discourse needs to shift too, and become flexible enough to follow and embrace its evolution(s) and diversification. I take Bruno Latour’s “cinematic language” as a cue here, especially in his contributions to Actor-Network-Theory where he relies on metaphors and key terms from drama and film, such as scripts, actors, setting, or roles to elucidate how the social as a collective or network is assembled. Bruno Latour’s body of work as both a prolific and eclectic philosopher connects science history, material studies, and critical ecology. Throughout his career, he has argued how pervasive separations between cultures, natures, and the sciences as well as the belief systems that have established all of these terms have inhibited the analysis of social and material practices and political ecologies by imposing distinctions that ignore what he calls “matters of concern” (as opposed to “matters of fact”) the tangled networks and hybrids as diverse as HIV/Aids, the atom bomb, and the ecological crises. In an interview, Latour says: I produce books, not a philosophy. Every book I am involved with is a work of writing that has its own categories and its own makeup. I cannot transform all of these books into a unified field of thought that would remain stable over time and of which one book would simply be coherent manifestations. On the other hand, I don’t believe in being irresponsible for what I have written. I agree that I have a responsibility for being compatible, like a software designer has to maintain compatibility. (Crease et al. 2003, 19)

What connects all of Latour’s publications is the displacement of divides in favor of a process-like mode of rethinking entities as collectives. After

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all, it is processed from which knowledge and facts emerge in the laboratory experiments, his preferred site of observation and non-metaphoric metaphor: Since the late 1970s (Laboratory Life, 1979 with Steve Woolgar), Latour has pursued the question how “objective” facts are produced. In his laboratory studies, he has shown that any objectivity depends on many variables as disparate as the devices used, funding, bacteria, and many other factors, is therefore not objective at all, and instead emerges from a complex interplay of numerous participants, be they human actants or the formerly mostly overlooked non-human actants— which can be objects, concepts, fictions, institutions, or other visible or invisible, tangible or intangible non-humans. The study of the laboratories of Pasteur or those he visits himself inform his “sociology of translation,” which will then morph into Actor-Network Theory and his “wish to devise an alternative definition for ‘sociology’” (Latour 2005, 2–3), and segue into his more recent preoccupations with the anthropocene and “Gaia,” ecology, the climate, and the state of the planet. The revocation of divides and simplistic binarisms at the heart of his work is the central element of ANT, as John Law reminds in his essay “After ANT” (1999): Essentialist divisions are thrown on the bonfire of the dualisms. Truth and falsehood. Large and small. Agency and structure. Human and nonhuman. Before and after. Knowledge and power. Context and content. Materiality and sociality. Activity and passivity … all of these divides have been rubbished in work undertaken in the name of actor-network theory. (1999, 3)

Actor-Network Theory in its development already is an entangled actornetwork, and a collective in the making, as it builds on other concepts, on Latour’s own former work, and on the cooperation with other scholars. Latour not only is always candid about his sources of inspiration, but also regarding the importance of the collaborative nature of ANT, thereby practicing what ANT preaches and illustrating the collective,

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processes, and translations as opposed to the singular auteur genius producing monolithic theorems.8 ANTs conceptual mode is not entirely unprecedented; the kinship with other concepts is most obvious between ANT and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome—and Latour freely admits that the actor-network is his equivalent to this proposition.9 In A Thousand Plateaus (1972), Deleuze and Guattari use the image of a horizontal root system like the ginger’s tuber-like growth without a clear center or a tree trunk as a metaphor for the non-hierarchic connections between entities in a network in which every point, no matter how close or disparate, is connected with every other point in decentered, localized assemblages. Despite apparent similarities, Michel Foucault’s dispositif needs to be distinguished from Latour’s notion of network, even though Foucault, too, defines the dispositif as a heterogeneous apparatus consisting of a system of relations in an interplay of discursive and non-discursive elements (1980, 194–197). For Latour, the actor-network is a more neutral concept, as “the dispositif is always critically linked to the notion of institution and carries with it a certain political program and certain evaluations of power and subjectification. The network in comparison is more positive about institutions and both as a term and as a concept tries to be as devoid of meaning as possible in order to arrive at a position where ‘no power’ means that power is everywhere and in everything,”10 allowing to overcome the subject as a category in a different political program. Criticism, such as the omission of intentionality and morality or being apolitical, have been addressed by ANT protagonists themselves (Latour’s version of ANT contains an explicit self-avowed “political project, … a search for political relevance” [2005, 260]; also see Felski 2015). In 8 Latour’s

intellectual biography is retraced in several introductions that systematically and chronologically cover his oeuvre, for instance Schmidgen (2015), Ruffing (2009), and the most recent by de Vries (2016). Foundational texts for ANT and the modifications that were inspired both by the success and the criticism ANT generated are not only Latour’s monographs, but also numerous texts by other key figures such as Michel Callon, John Law, Madeleine Akrich, Antoine Hennion or Annemarie Mol that are for instance assembled in John Law and John Hassard’s Actor Network Theory and After (1999) and Andréa Belliger and David J. Krieger’s ANThology (2006). For an overview of ANT (as opposed to anthologies featuring foundational texts) see Holzer and Schmidt (2009), Wieser (2012) or Mike (2016). 9 See the interview by Hugh Crawford (1993) and “On Recalling ANT” (Latour 1999b, 263). 10 Bruno Latour, personal communication, 18 June 2015.

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an interview, Latour addresses this when speaking about normativity: “I don’t believe that morality is something that floats on top of purely descriptive or merely empiric stuff. Morality is inside the things, and thus it can also become an object for empirical enquiries … to overcome this very distinction between facts and values, descriptive and normative, and to explore its political root” (Crease et al. 2003, 20). The beingdevoid-of-meaning and the putting-description-before-commentary are on the one hand important features of ANT and, on the other hand, ANT doesn’t by any means rule out these dimensions, but rather tries to provide a pre-judgmental account on which interpretation can then be built.11 Besides orbiting around itself in meta-theoretical discussions, Latourian ideas and ANT have entered the discourse and initiated a multitude of ANT-inspired approaches. While it suggests itself that Latour’s ideas have been taken up in other fields where the production of knowledge and social assemblages are analyzed such as science studies or social studies, the growth of the network extends its obvious habitat into disparate fields. Latourian concepts and especially ANT have become increasingly important in the humanities and are drawn on to generate different questions and approaches. Latour has worked in and contributed to science studies, sociology, philosophy, or ecology, but never overlooked that “sociologists have a lot to learn from artists” (2005, 82). Not only Latour’s rhetoric evens the boundaries between hard and soft sciences or arts and facts, in his oeuvre, there is a Latourian aesthetics, and an engagement with art. Besides the recourses to literature, painting, film, or photography, Latour has acted as a co-curator of exhibitions and has thus himself operated at the intersection of disciplines. About the rethinking of objects that is essential for his attempt to revoke traditional dualisms, he states: In the first denunciation, objects count for nothing; they are just there to be used as the white screen on to which society projects its cinema. But in the second, they are so powerful that they shape the human society, 11 See

Reassembling the Social (2005, 244–245). An exemplary collection of positionings both inspired by and critical of ANT is Kneer, Schroer, and Schüttpelz’s edited volume Bruno Latours Kollektive (2008).

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while the social construction of the sciences that have produced them remains invisible. Objects, things, consumer goods, sciences, works of art are either too weak or too strong. (1993, 53)

The metaphor of a cinema projection onto a screen to illustrate the (erroneous) conception how some kind of social reality is created by projecting “the social film” as a reality-constituting illusion is one of the aforementioned instances of his “filmic” language. “Objects, things, consumer goods, sciences, works of art” assume a problematic position when subjected to the dualism “too weak” vs. “too strong.” “Too weak” means objects—and among them works of art such as films—are just seen as descriptive, as objects that capture and describe a certain zeitgeist which is projected onto them, but are by themselves not considered much more than vessels, projection screens, canvases, and thus as not powerful. And they become “too strong” when they are seen as just prescriptive—as very powerful actants that are able to shape, alter, influence, but of whom only the agency is acknowledged, while “the social” from which they emerge remains obfuscated just like a hidden film projector. Both notions are valid as much as they are inept. They only become useful when put in relation: Of course, works of art are projection screens, allegories for, or images of something; they do represent or stand for something with their myriad layers of text, subtext, and meaning, and thus, they also can be read, and even without inviting their audience explicitly, they will be read. But if the equation ends here, we strip them off of more agency than mere representation and they would mainly be interesting for consumers (who unknowingly consume) as a commodity, and for semioticians (who knowingly read, decode, and explain) as an exercise in cultural history. We need to assume that they are also actors: They actively do something. They not only stand for, or are an image of a thing; they are things in their own right. While this is more common, e.g., for art historians to acknowledge when they deal with video/moving image art, scholars who deal with narrative cinema in close readings often ignore this or at least elegantly brush it aside.12 12The

redistribution of agency is fortunately beginning to enter film studies discourse: with recourse to both Étienne Souriau, and John T. Caldwell and other protagonists of Production

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For this rethinking of material-semiotic relations, Actor-Network Theory offers itself as a way to approach artifacts in a different fashion, as the basic assumption of ANT is that not only knowledge or scientific facts are produced by networks of human and non-human actors, but that every entity, unity, system, society must be understood as a potentially indefinitely complex network which is made, re-made, and performed by the dynamic relations that arise from the actions and interactions of human and non-human actors. Actors are entities that act, that make a difference (2005, 154), and they become visible when they cause other actors to act. At this moment, they enter an actor-network— and to understand or untangle it, we don’t need to (in fact, mustn’t) rely on preexisting knowledge or premade assumptions, we have to “follow the actors” and the traces they leave behind by becoming entangled in activity. Depending on the context, Latour uses agent, actor, and actant almost synonymously, I will stick with actant for its clarity in identifying action and agency and its species-neutrality. Among artistic forms and practices, film is the preeminent one to include and even necessitate a collective, both in the general language sense of “collective” as a multiplicity of people involved and in the Latourian sense of “a Collective of Humans and Nonhumans” (Latour 1999a, 126; which refers to the association/collective that forms as soon as humans “do something” and interact with non-human actants). The levels of mediation between a writer and a novel, or between a painter and a painting seem flatter, at least pragmatically: There is your painter, there is her idea, there is her material, and the chain ends with the finished painting. Ultimately, the equation is more complex, too, since the painter’s idea and material all include more interactions and traces, not to mention the chain that begins once the painting is finished which might include galleries, collectors, museums, catalogues, critics, or scholars. The distributed agency of a film in this regard makes it more mediated, which Studies, Volker Pantenburg suggests Cinematographic Objects as a way to re-think the filmic artifact through “a plethora of human and non-human actors that assemble to create a network of distributed agency which challenges any simple notions of the auteur” (2015, 12). A related redistributing of agency in this case to the spaces/spatial dimension of film is at the center of the research project Kinematographische Räume and its two publications (edited by Fohne and Haberer 2012, 2014). Also see Elizabeth Ezra, The Cinema of Things (2019).

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can be illustrated by simply looking at the credits rolling by at the end of a film. Dozens, if not hundreds of people, institutions, companies, technologies are involved in the cinematic apparatus. From the first idea a director, writer, or producer has to the finished film, it is an incredibly long, expansive, and expensive undertaking that involves almost innumerable steps (it is for good reason that projects sometimes get stuck in the so-called development hell): Someone to star, someone to point the camera, to edit, to train the animals, to testify that no animals were harmed, someone to keep track of everyone involved to write such a list, some source for the funds necessary, the machines and devices to be able to shoot at all, someone to sell and distribute the finished product and an audience who sees it, possibly pays for it, uploads it to illegal streaming sites on the internet, blogs about it—the associations and relations are numerous, diverse, and a widely ramified illustration of how agency is distributed. The number of human and non-human actants and interactions is huge in a film, since it so clearly is, and emerges from a collective of humans and non-humans. While it is imaginable that a poet writes poetry independent of the literary market and solely because she seeks expression without regard to what happens after the poem is finished (someone is quite certainly writing a poem in this fashion right now), it is hardly imaginable that a Hollywood film is produced in the same way—it is by default a collective artifact that transcends the singular author-individual or auteur, most obviously, but by far not exclusively, because it is so expensive so produce. A strand of film theory that shifts away from the focus on single agencies and takes the multi-dimensionality of agencies into account with the aim to deconstruct the entanglement of the cinematic artifact with dominant ideologies and the ways they inscribe themselves into it is the so-called apparatus theory, which tries to factor in the entire apparatus in which the production and consumption of a film takes place.13 ANT’s M.O., to reassemble actors, interactions, layers, and forces to account for collectives, offers itself as an approach to reassemble films as a collective effort in their complexity. ANT’s premise that the world does not consist 13 See

also Althusser (1970), Comolli (2015), Metz (1974), Baudry (1976, 1985), de Lauretis and Heath (1980), Rosen (1986), and Riesinger (2003).

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of clearly delineated subjects and objects, but is produced by interactions and dynamic relations calls into question binaries, hierarchies, masterslave dynamics by looking for the multiplicities of actor-networks. By suggesting Actor-Network Theory and ANT-related Latourian concepts as a pre-theoretical method to be a framework for the analysis of teen films, I want to transfer Latour’s ideas into a method for film studies related to approaches toward a material(ist) media theory.14 The position of cinematic teen narratives is more dynamic than normally granted to them: Teen film is not just descriptive; it is also prescriptive and inscriptive. Teen film depicts and shapes teenagers, their tastes, interests, desires, but it is neither only a mirror, nor merely normative; it is also shaped by interactions with the audience, and it produces new inscriptions in the ANT sense, which means “the result of the translation of one’s interest into material form” (Callon 1991, 143).15 Besides aligning cultural artifacts with sociocultural factors in contextual readings, writing an ANT account necessitates going back to the actual artifact. This means to bring the actants of each film to the foreground to “make them talk,” in line with ANT’s dictum to “follow the actors”: [I]t is no longer enough to limit actors to the role of informers offering cases of some well-known types. You have to grant them back the ability to make up their own theories … Your task is no longer to impose some order, to limit the range of acceptable entities, to teach actors what they are, or to add some reflexivity to their blind practice. Using a slogan from ANT, you have “to follow the actors themselves.” (Latour 2005, 12)

Actants “talk” by the differences they produce and they carry within them different scripts. A script, or the “prescriptions encoded in the mechanism” (Latour 2008, 157) is the way Latour “call[s] after Madeleine Akrich (1992), the behavior imposed back onto the human 14 Also

see Herzogenrath (2017), Bollmer (2019), Parikka (2012), and Phillips (2017). the Pandora’s Hope (1999a) glossary, Latour defines inscription as “a general term that refers to all the types of transformations through which an entity becomes materialized into a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace. Usually but not always, inscriptions are two-dimensional, superimposable, and combinable. They are always mobile, that is, they allow new translations and articulations while keeping some types of relations intact” (1999a, 306–307). 15 In

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by non-human delegates prescription. Prescription is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms” (ibid.). This means that an artifact, be it a speed bump, a knife, a key, a lecture, or a film, prescribes a certain way in which to use it on the material level, how to behave in order to comply with its “program of action.” Thus, actants also suggest ways to approach them: “It’s the object itself that adds multiplicity, or rather the thing, the ‘gathering’ … Leave hermeneutics aside and go back to the object—or rather, to the thing. [ANT’s] main tenet is that actors themselves make everything, including their own frames, their own theories, their own contexts, their own metaphysics, even their own ontologies … Hermeneutics is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself ” (Latour 2005, 144–147, 345). I propose ANT as a neutral and—this is important—pre-theoretical way to consider and bring together a multitude of approaches that enable us to draw from different fields and methods. Annemarie Mol’s essay about certain ANT terms and the state of ANT in regard to its theoryness underlines this essential trait: ANT is not a ‘theory’, or, if it is, then a ‘theory’ does not necessarily offer a coherent framework, but may as well be an adaptable, open repository. A list of terms. A set of sensitivities. The strength of ANT, then, is not that it is solid, but rather that it is adaptable. It has assembled a rich array of explorative and experimental ways of attuning to the world. The terms and texts that circulate in ANT are co-ordination devices. They move topics and concerns from one context to another. They translate and betray what they help to analyze. They sharpen the sensitivity of their readers, attuning them/us to what is going on and to what changes, here, there, elsewhere. (2010, 265–266)

Latourian ideas at the center present a foundation and starting point to open up to a larger discourse. The ANT position renounces the presumption that an invisible-yet-solid structure makes actants do things, and instead reshifts its focus on the individual actants and the network they produce as a collective. Observation, determining the actants involved, and detailed description make difference visible and representable in order to obtain new insights. Every description refers to a singular event, not to a rule or a pattern. Therefore, the ANT position

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allows on the one hand to treat films as complex, hybrid actor-networks by analyzing them and their actants and agencies thoroughly and slowly, and on the other hand also to treat films as actants in a larger network.16 Even though it is crucial to be slow and thorough, to put description before explanation, we mustn’t get lost in the amassing of detail that just produce more but not clearer insight: I confess the difficulty: Is it not counterproductive in the end to abandon the convenient shorthand of social explanations, to split hairs indefinitely about what is or is not a group, to trick intermediaries into behaving as mediators, to register the queerest idiosyncrasies of the humblest actors, to set up long lists of objects participating in action, and to drop the background made of solid matters of fact for the foreground of shifty matters of concern? How ridiculous is it to claim that inquirers should ‘follow the actors themselves’, when the actors to be followed swarm in all directions like a bee’s nest disturbed by a wayward child? Which actor should be chosen? Which one should be followed and for how long? And if each actor is made of another bee’s nest swarming in all directions and it goes on indefinitely, then when the hell are we supposed to stop? If there is something especially stupid, it is a method that prides itself in being so meticulous, so radical, so all encompassing, and so object-oriented as to be totally impractical. This is not a sociology any more but a slowciology! (Latour 2005, 122)

Complexity doesn’t have to be overly complicated, and it defies its purpose if it’s only there for the sake of complexity as a mere getting granular, a writing-down-of-everything, a micro-managing of the text instead of a striving for specificity. Despite the agency granted to the actants themselves, despite the neutrality of the starting position, we have to make decisions and selections constantly when writing an ANT account. The ANT position is not meant to be intrinsically objective nor does it contain an imperative to discard subjective readings, interpretations, and 16 Erhard Schüttpelz notes that every actant is always also an actor-network in its own right: “Everything that comes into play as ‘actor’ or becomes effective and visible as an acting factor by causing other factors to act, enters an ‘actor-network’ and can only take effect as an intertwining of actions—‘Actors’ are ‘actor-networks’ or linkages. And in turn, intertwinings, regardless of which sort, only take effect as ‘action-networks’—‘networks’ are gradually acting ‘actor-networks’” (Schüttpelz 2013, 10, my translation).

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personal stances as a way to approach scholarly critical analyses in favor of an allegedly non-subjective, non-interpretative engagement.17 On the contrary, Latour states: “what makes you think that ‘having a viewpoint’ means ‘being limited’ or especially ‘subjective’?” (2005, 145).

Outline and Argument of the Book Each of the following chapters will be organized around one of Latour’s interconnected ideas and mobilize it in the analysis of a specific teen film. Registers that are central for the genre, such as sexuality, ethnicity, gender, or class will be “reassembled” through concepts from Latour’s oeuvre, such as the rethinking of agencies and actants, the role of objects, or the notion of translation as connective movement. These categories are not rigid, but fluid and overlapping and build on each other in a succession that work toward the goal of finding a new perspective from which to do film semiotics or film studies with other accentuations and foci, since in my opinion, the ANT position allows us to ask questions that have not been proposed previously. Teen films are mostly evaluated and analyzed as consumer-driven cinematic commodities from a historical and/or sociological perspective, but less often as complex artifacts whose composition or aesthetics deserve attention. Their interplay of media and technology, and of cultural and social factors makes teen films potent artifacts that are charged with information about the culture and the time in which they are produced and consumed, but this property has canonically lead to a scholarly engagement in which cultural/film history often plays a bigger role than film studies. In order not to reduce these artifacts to echo chambers for zeitgeist in contextual readings, I suggest a 17 In

her manifesto-esque essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag already proposes such a non-interpretative approach beyond the content-fixated hermeneutics to American art criticism where she finds “[i]nterpretation runs rampant” (2009, 10): “What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms. … Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all … The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means” (2009, 12–14).

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different engagement, building on Bruno Latour and specifically ActorNetwork Theory: If we claim that a film has a message, agenda, function, perpetuates ideology and values, it is crucial to identifying where exactly this manifests itself, where in the production (and consumption) process it enters the equation, and by what means and which human and nonhuman actants it is brought there. This process of reassembling grants access to an inquiry into how a cinematic style is produced and what agency it has, whether it is an actant, and which actants constitute it, and, ultimately, what these film-objects are, what meanings they hold, what they are made of, what they do and how they do it. Against the backdrop of a changed media ecology, a different technological, aesthetic, and cultural landscape in which the traditional teen film as a cinematic event witnessed on a theater or TV screen has been expanded by a multitude of new medial outlets, I want to look at the contemporary teen film. My focus is explicitly not on the television series and franchise films but on the stand-alone feature, films that are produced at a postcinematic time when those other modes have already become the more dominant trends. The central films in my sample have been commercially successful,18 which is not saying anything about whether they are good or bad or interesting, but it means that they have resonated (and keep resonating) with commensurable audiences. More than based on their commercial performance or lack of critical analysis, I have selected them for what they are: Each film resonates with other (teen and non-teen) texts, but at the same presents significant and novel narratological, thematic, or aesthetic aspects that make it an important contribution to the teen film canon. The DUFF (2015) as a postmodern suburban high school comedy strongly engages with generic traditions, Winter ’s Bone (2010) operates as a rural teen film for adults, Dope (2015) with its urban high school setting presents an African American take on teen films, and Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) is organized around female sexuality.

18They

all have recouped their production budgets in their theatrical run and have earned between $2.2 million (Diary of a Teenage Girl ) and 43.5 million (The DUFF ) excluding any secondary exploitation.

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Chapter 2 discusses The DUFF as an exemplary Hollywood film and update of the well-rehearsed formula of the makeover film. I suggest circulating reference instead of a mimetic understanding of teen film to retrace that reference is not between world and representation, but runs along a chain of transformations. Latourian key terms like translation and transformation will be introduced here as important concepts to be repeatedly revisited in the subsequent chapters. In order to identify the translations, transformations, and renewals, my analysis not only focuses on plot and characters, but also on other actants (such as music, casting, relation between novel and adaptation, relation between teen film canon and The DUFF, agency of the audience and their media literacy). Building on the notion of how agency can/must be reshuffled, Chapter 3 discussion of Winter ’s Bone as a coming-of-age narrative relocated to the rather unconventional teen film setting of rural America introduces ANT as framework by which the less obvious; however, significant background actants are brought to the foreground, such as settings, light, camera and film stock, or on-location filming. The analysis segues from a description of the material level into the semiotic/symbolic level and illustrates that ANT as an approach for film studies allows a seamless movement between these levels as a “materialist hermeneutics” and “empiricist (film) philosophy.” In correspondence with the rethinking of actants and agencies, the classic Latourian question of how objects influence human behavior is the starting point for Chapter 4 and the discussion of Dope. Dope was released at the same time as The DUFF, and both films can be seen as updates of specific teen film traditions inserting the marker of technology as “updating agent.” While The DUFF is a renewal of the “makeover film,” Dope is a renewal of the “hood film” and its specific milieus, themes and questions regarding class and race. Dope must not only be read as an update of black teen films, but as one that is updated by very specific actants, which will be analyzed based on Latourian notions such as quasi-objects and scripts. The film’s construction and aesthetics echo the technology it negotiates on the plot level as human and non-human actants translate and redefine each other, objects become quasi-objects, and subjects become quasi-subjects in a constant process of interactions, inscriptions, and mutual influence.

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Following these chapters and their project of establishing a Latourian film semiotics based on multiplicity and hybridity, Chapter 5 discusses Diary of a Teenage Girl, the movie adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s autobiographical comic (2002). As mixed-mode film that incorporates animation, it is a formal hybrid and thus makes its own artifice even more visible—and with it, the inscriptions, apparatuses, and machines of tradition which produce it. The film’s perspective is unusual for teen films as it is organized around female sexuality in a non-exploitative way, and not as the object-of-desire from the heteronormative perspective of male sexuality. In a hybrid film with a hybrid gaze instead of a clearly gendered gaze, a new perspective on sexuality not only plays itself out on the level of the film’s action, but also on the formal level, and the ANT position allows to identify which actants produce or subvert a different gaze and serves as a reminder that gazes, like knowledge, are actively produced and not objective entities. This book is a twofold project: I will use ANT to expand the analytical tools for teen film scholarship—and the study of narrative cinema, by extension; I will use the American teen film as an arena to test out whether ANT is a productive contribution to film studies that allows to proceed differently and leads do a deeper, or different understanding, of these artifacts.

Filmography American Graffiti, George Lucas, Universal Pictures, USA, 1973. Beverly Hills 90210, Darren Star, CBS Television Distribution, USA, 1990– 2000. The Breakfast Club, John Hughes, Universal Pictures, USA, 1985. Dawson’s Creek, Kevin Williamson, Sony Pictures Television, USA, 1998–2003. Detention, Joseph Kahn, Sony Pictures, USA, 2011. The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller, Sony Pictures Classics, USA, 2015. The Divergent Series, Neil Burger, Robert Schwentke, Lionsgate Films, USA, 2014–2016. DOPE, Rick Famuyiwa, Open Road Films, USA, 2015. The DUFF, Ari Sandel, CBS Films, USA, 2015.

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Halloween, John Carpenter, Compass International Pictures, USA, 1978. The Hunger Games film series, Gary Ross, Francis Lawrence, Lionsgate Films, USA, 2012–2015. Maze Runner film series, Wes Ball, 20th Century Fox, USA, 2014–2018. Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray, Warner Brothers, USA, 1955. Riverdale, Robert Aguierre-Sacasa, CBS Studios, USA, since 2017. Scream, Wes Craven, Dimension Films, USA, 1996. Twilight Saga, Summit Entertainment, USA, 2008–2012. Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik, Roadside Attractions, USA, 2010.

Bibliography Akrich, Madeleine. 1992. “The De-scription of Technical Objects.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 205– 224. Cambridge: MIT Press. Althusser, Louis. (1970) 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. London and New York: Verso Books. Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1976. “The Apparatus.” Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory, vol. 1, 104–129. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1985. “The Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus.” In Movies and Methods: An Anthology, edited by Bill Nichols, 531–543. London: University of California Press. Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape. Beil, Benjamin, with Lorenz Engell et al. 2015. “Die Fernsehserie als Reflexion und Projektion des medialen Wandels.” In Mediatisierte Welten, edited by Friedrich Krotz and Andreas Hepp, 197–223. Heidelberg: Springer. Belliger, Andréa, and David J. Krieger. 2006. ANThology: ein einführendes Handbuch zur Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Bollmer, Grant. 2019. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. London: Bloomsbury. Bolter, David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bronfen, Elisabeth, Christiana Frey, and David Martyn. 2016. Noch einmal anders: Zu einer Poetik des Seriellen. Zürich: Diaphenes Verlag.

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Callon, Michel. 1991. “Techno-Economic Networks and Irreversibility.” In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, edited by John Law, 132–161. London and New York: Routledge. Comolli, Jean-Louis. 2015. Cinema Against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited. Translated by Daniel Fairfax. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Considine, David. 1985. The Cinema of Adolescence. Jefferson: McFarlane. Crawford, Hugh T. 1993. “An Interview with Bruno Latour.” Configurations 1, no 2: 268–274. Crease, Robert, Don Ihde, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Evan Selinger. 2003. “Interview with Bruno Latour.” In Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality, edited by Don Ihde and Evan Selinger, 15–26. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. de Lauretis, Teresa, and Stephen Heath. 1980. The Cinematic Apparatus. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1980) 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Continuum. de Vries, Gerard. 2016. Bruno Latour. Cambridge: Polity Press. Driscoll, Catherine. 2011. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Oxford and New York: Berg. Eco, Umberto. 1989. Im Labyrinth der Vernunft: Texte über Kunst und Zeichen. Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun. Ezra, Elizabeth. 2019. The Cinema of Things: Globalization and the Posthuman Object. New York: Bloomsbury. Felski, Rita. 2015. “Doing the Humanities (with Bruno Latour).” Recomposing the Humanities with Bruno Latour, Conference, University of Virginia. Foucault, Michel. 1980. “The Confession of the Flesh.” In Interview with Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, 194–228. New York: Pantheon Books. Frohne, Ursula, and Lilian Haberer. 2012. Kinematographische Räume: Installationsästhetik in Film und Kunst. München: Wilhelm Fink. Frohne, Ursula, Lilian Haberer, and Annette Urban. 2014. Display und Dispositiv Ästhetische Ordnungen. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Gloeckner, Phoebe. (2002) 2015. The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures. Revised Edition. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Hagedorn, Roger. 1988. “Technology and Economic Exploitation: The Serial as a Form of Narrative Presentation.” Wide Angle: A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism, and Practice 10, no. 4: 4–12.

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Hall, G. Stanley. 1904. Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. New York: D. Appleton & Company. Haughney, Christine. 2013. “Teen Vogue, a Survivor at 10 Years.” New York Times, February 3. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/business/media/ teen-vogue-a-survivor-at-10-years.html?mcubz=1. Herzogenrath, Bernd. 2017. Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach. London: Bloomsbury. Hine, Thomas. 1999. The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience. New York: HarperCollins. Holzer, Boris, and Johannes F. K. Schmidt. 2009. Theorie der Netzwerke oder Netzwerk-Theorie? Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius. Ilyashov, Alexandra. 2016. “15 Industry Experts on the State of the Teen Magazine in 2015.” Refinery 29, August 19. www.refinery29.com/2016/08/ 119065/teen-magazinesnostalgia-seventeen-ym. Accessed 25 August 2016. jagodzinski, jan. 2008. Television and Youth Culture—Televised Paranoia: Education, Psychoanalysis and Social Transformation. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. London and New York: New York University Press. Kelleter, Frank (ed.). 2017. Media of Serial Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Kneer, Georg, Markus Schroer, and Erhard Schüttpelz. 2008. Bruno Latours Kollektive: Kontroversen zur Entgrenzung des Sozialen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999a. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999b. “On Recalling ANT.” In Actor Network Theory and After, edited by John Law and John Hassard, 15–26. Malden: Blackwell. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: And Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” In Technology and Society, Building Our Sociotechnical Future, edited by Deborah J. Johnson, and Jameson M. Wetmore, 151–180. Cambridge: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 2013. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Latour, Bruno, Graham Harman, and Peter Erdély. 2011. The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE. Alresford: Zero Books. Law, John. 1999. “After ANT: Complexity, Naming and Topology”. In Actor Network Theory and After, edited by John Law and John Hassard, 1–15. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Metz, Christian. 1974. Language and Cinema. Ghent: De Gruyter. Mike, Michael. 2016. Actor-Network Theory: Trials, Trails and Translations. Los Angeles and London: Sage. Mol, Annemarie. 2010. “Actor-Network-Theory: Sensitive Terms and Enduring Tensions.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Soziopsychologie. Sonderheft 50: 253–269. Mrozek, Bodo. 2019. Jugend Pop Kultur: Eine transnationale Geschichte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Nelson, Elissa H. 2017. “The New Old Face of a Genre: The Franchise Teen Film as Industry Strategy.” Cinema Journal 57, no. 1: 132–152. Pantenburg, Volker. 2015. Cinematographic Objects: Things and Operations. Köln: August Verlag. Parikka, Jussi. 2012. “New Materialism as Media: Medianatures and Dirty Matter.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1: 95–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2011.626252. Phillips, John W. P. 2017. “The End of Ontology and the Future of Media Theory.” Media Theory: Special Issue Manifestos 1, no. 1: 122–136. Riesinger, Robert. 2003. Der kinematographische Apparat: Geschichte und Gegenwart einer Interdisziplinären Debatte. Münster: Nodus. Rosen, Philip. 1986. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Ruffing, Reiner. 2009. Bruno Latour. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Savage, Jon. 2007. Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875–1945. London: Pimlico. Schmidgen, Henning. 2015. Bruno Latour in Pieces: An Intellectual Biography. Translated by Gloria Custance. New York: Fordham University Press. Schrum, Kelly. 2004. Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920–1945. New York and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Schüttpelz, Erhard. 2013. “Elemente einer Akteur-Medien-Theorie.” In Akteur-Medien-Theorie, edited by Tristan Thielmann and Erhard Schüttpelz, 9–67. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Shary, Timothy. 2005. Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen. London and New York: Wallflower.

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Shaviro, Steven. 2013. “Detention.” The Pinocchio Theory, July 17. www. shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1149. Accessed 14 July 2017. Smith, Frances. 2017. Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press. Sonnenberg-Schrank, Björn. 2015. “Sex in Riverdale: The Construction and Disruption of Gender Roles in Archie Comics.” In Breaking the Panel! Comics as a Medium, edited by Klütsch, Nitzsche, and Schlensag, 87–99. Münster and Wien: LIT Verlag. Sontag, Susan. (1966) 2009. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin. Tropiano, Stephen. 2006. Rebels & Chicks: A History of the Hollywood Teen Movie. New York: Back Stage Books. Tudor, Oltean. 1993. “Series and Seriality in Media Culture.” European Journal of Communication 8, no. 1: 5–31. Wee, Valerie. 2017. “Your Audiences and the Media in the Digital Era: The Intensification of Multimedia Engagement and Interaction.” Cinema Journal 57, no. 1: 133–140. Wieser, Matthias. 2012. Das Netzwerk von Bruno Latour: Die Akteur-NetzwerkTheorie zwischen Science & Technology Studies und Poststrukturalistischer Soziologie. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Wünsch, Michaela. 2015. “Serialität aus Medienphilosophischer Perspektive.” In Genre und Serie, edited by Thomas Morsch, 173–192. München: FinkVerlag.

2 Circulating Reference: Making Over the Makeover

Translating the Transition: The DUFF and the Makeover Film Subgenre The DUFF (2015) is one of the most recent additions to a strand of teen films that can be usefully called makeover teen film. The premise of the makeover film is the conversion of a (or several) protagonist(s) from one group into another that entails the liminal experience of passing through transformational rituals. While self-evidently liminal experience and initiation are central to any coming-of-age narrative, in makeover narratives, they are played out in the form of catalyst events in which everything happens and everything changes are a means to condense the entire adolescent process, various instances of which include the loss of virginity as a placeholder for becoming physically/sexually adult, graduation as a placeholder for the transition of being a student to what comes after, or the one big night (often prom). In regard to the transformation around which most teen films are organized, the makeover film is the most literal and least metaphorical realization of adolescent transition as something that does not just occur, but is a process that is actively pursued, a self-actualization, orchestrated and performed with specific intended outcomes. The qualitative and agential © The Author(s) 2020 B. Sonnenberg-Schrank, Actor-Network Theory at the Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31287-9_2

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difference between coming-of-age and makeover is already contained in the terms themselves and their word classes: The first is a gerund indicating an ongoing process, and coming-of-age implies that the agency (coming) is that of the process, or the maturation (age), not of the affected adolescent object. The latter is a verb or a substantiated infinitive, implying activity and thus agency of a subject, if understood as active verb form (I make myself over) or of the objectified subject, if understood as passive (I am made over). The makeover film focuses on two components that set it apart from other types of transition narratives: 1. A character is identified as belonging to a certain caste-like group or class and is then made over in order to be able to transition into a different group, most commonly one that is higher in the social hierarchy of the teen and high school world. 2. In the very identification of the character as belonging to a certain group, not only the character’s group affiliation, but the hierarchy itself is identified and established—and with it, a typology and taxonomy: nerds, jocks, cheerleaders, and an array of other types are depicted as clear-cut classifications with allotted characteristics and ensuing social scripts. The permeability of the distinct groups differs, as with any form of social mobility. Beyond negotiating a character’s self-actualization, the makeover narratives thus also interrogate class and classism, and their impact on the individual.1 What gives the subgenre its name is the actual makeover: The character does not simply change affiliations and group membership, but has to undergo a change, and transform into the metaphorical butterfly. The agents and agencies of the numerous makeovers across teen film history vary, but distinctions can be established by looking at who and what motivates this transformation as either external or internal incentive. The external makeover corresponds to the traditional Pygmalion story: Someone from higher up in the social order of teens chooses a specimen from 1 Also

see Frances Smith’s analysis of gender and class interpellation in high school films (and the prom as locus specifically), who shows that “despite Americans’ traditional squeamishness about class, normative gender in the teen movie is always a classed discourse” (2017, 64ff.).

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a lower caste who is being made over—for love, as a bet, to demonstrate manipulative power and thus social status, or a combination of these factors. The other (internal) possibility is that a character out of their own volition feels the desire to cross over into a different caste and makes herself or himself over (for love, due to desperation, etc.). Either way, there is a process of schooling as the characters, and audience, need to have (or acquire) literacy and awareness of the high school class system and its semiotics in order to read and understand the signs and codes of the group they want to escape as well as the group into which they want to cross over by re-forming, re-assigning, and re-writing themselves. In this regard, the makeover film is not solely concerned with the inner workings of a character, but very much with the character’s engagement with her or his environment and the acquisition of what Pierre Bourdieu terms cultural and social capital.2 The (intradiegetic) ability to read oneself and others in terms of typology and taxonomy is key for the transition and for its need and willful causation. Such awareness is the premise for The DUFF, whose main character did not realize that a type called “DUFF” (an acronym for “designated ugly fat friend”) exists to begin with and much less that she fits this category, which she then seeks to escape. Across numerous makeover films over a long period of time, the basic narrative remains the same—at least concerning the outcome and conclusive evaluation.3 As regards the recurring types, plot and result, and their references, also structurally, the makeover films share resemblances that could in most cases be easily mapped onto a grid with particular characters, plot elements, and developments occurring at prescribed moments. Even though they may look different on the surface or introduce variations and differentiations of types or entirely new types such

2 See

Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972, 183ff.); “The Forms of Capital” (1986, 241ff.); Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984). 3The first adolescent makeover narratives might arguably be the Lillian Gish vehicle Broken Blossoms (1919) or the Clara Bow “flapper film” The Plastic Age (1925) as Driscoll points out (14–15, 22–24). Better known examples include Grease (1978), The Breakfast Club (1985), Pretty in Pink (1986), Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), Clueless (1995), She’s All That (1999), Jawbreaker (1999), 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), The Princess Diaries (2001), Mean Girls (2004), or She’s the Man (2006).

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as a DUFF, the function in the narrative of these characters, plot elements, and developments will correspond with preceding and anteceding incarnations. These resonances provide a connective tissue that ties each of the incarnations together: Their engagement with the canon and their way of “translating” certain elements—by updating, by keeping, by differentiating, and by self-reflexivity—is how reference keeps circulating: the figures of the made-over and the making-over need to be constructed, scripted, narrated, cast, and acted in certain ways in order to fulfill the same functions and convey the same underlying idea in a different cultural, historical, and film-historical setting. These transformations—not the transformed elements, but the nature of the transformation—are what ultimately reveals something about changing cultural and historical contexts. Not just the type is where we should look, but how that type was adapted: The way of the bully says much more than the mere presence of a bully. In earlier makeover films, the conflicts and different groups are—at least on the surface—less diversified. In films such as Pretty in Pink or Some Kind of Wonderful, the two juxtaposed groups are narrated as clear, almost rudimentary, rich-poor binarism. The more recent the film, the more diversified the groups and conflicts are (even with particular recent films that still, or again, are extremely class-conscious and highly concerned with rich-poor binarisms such as Lady Bird [2017]). The DUFF is a prime example of diversified groups and categories with its constellation of self-aware figures who are constantly accompanied and documented by their use of social media and who actively produce and perform their own typologies and taxonomy. However, even though their typology is less crude than rich vs. poor and the labeling enhanced by hashtagging as a cultural practice, this diversification is merely a transformation or translation, and not a fundamental change or novelty. Such connections allow to delineate how reference is circulating, and they establish the bond between the respective films.

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Referentiality, Representation, and Non-Mimesis At this point, teen film is such a well-rehearsed, albeit fluid genre, that every new addition to the corpus automatically is enmeshed with that corpus, but not necessarily with any form of reality that could be precisely determined. Considine already proposed that “it may well be that in perpetuating stereotypes of adolescence, the film industry, rather than merely mirroring reality, helps to create it” (1985, 277) and several waves of teen film and scholarship later, Driscoll assesses that a “mimetic understanding of teen film as a reflection of adolescent lives” (2011, 5) is limited, as the mutual influence of teen films and their audiences is more dynamic. Certainly, it is possible to find correlations of James Dean’s and Marlon Brando’s iconic 1950s film rebels with historically documented waves and youth cultures, their styles and signs; or to embed the Twilight films (2008–2012) and their sexual, religious, or gender politics in specific discourses of their production era. But instead of contextual readings that ask what a film represents, and treat it as the manifestation of something external to its diegetic cosmos which then via discursive practices inscribes itself into the film, I propose to circumvent mimesis and representation and determine instead what each specific film is— and whether the constellation from which it emerges and in which it is consumed really is such a stable and traceable reality-representation or object-word relation. Instead of representation, I suggest reference as a register to think about teen films as entangled in a complex interplay with a generic tradition and with their audience, indeed relational, however non-mimetic (or at least not solely mimetic). As a way to overcome what Bruno Latour calls “the old settlement,” the binarisms nature–language, world–word, or realism–construction and the chasms that open up between each two poles, he introduces his idea “to show that there is neither correspondence, nor gaps, nor even two distinct ontological domains, but an entirely different phenomenon: circulating reference” (Latour 1999, 24). In order to illustrate how reference circulates, Latour gives account of an expedition to Boa Vista, Brazil, and details how scientific practice and the work with very concrete matters of concern is then translated into

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words, graphs, tables, or papers—in the exemplary test case at hand, how soil samples from the Amazon are constantly transformed by an interplay of human and non-human actors (scientists, tools, machines, etc.) and change from matter to form to matter and so on: The forest as matter is translated into form or signs through tagging and mapping, which is then again translated and becomes “new” matter, e.g., a map, or color grids. This process of movements continues until there is a (preliminary) result, as for instance the summary in a finished article. Latour’s conclusion then is that reference does not run from word to object and vice versa, but rather circulates along a chain of transformations. Instead of debating the degree of realism of artifacts (or inscriptions) of any sort, the correspondence of thing and representation, the focus shifts to the “risky intermediary pathway,” that long process along the chain of transformations and how these translations and gaps come to be in order to ensure that the reference remains stable and thus circulating.4 Filmmaker John Waters in a different context explains how “the concept must change or the Xerox copy gets weaker and weaker until you can’t read it at all” (2019, 42), a fitting analogy for processes of updating in which a transformation has better capacity to retain reference to the original than a direct copy. Knowledge, facts, and “truth,” be they scientific, cinematic, or other, are not objective entities that exist autonomously, they are (1) produced, and (2) an activity that involves an interplay of materials and forms—as are works of art. By looking at the many markers and steps that connect a thing and its representation instead of trying to identify the assumed origin from which it is derived, the activity of knowledge production itself becomes visible where it is normally erased. The mimetic understanding of a film, taking it as a barometer for the cultural-historical context from which it emerges, means reducing art to purely social factors. But besides a reflection of physical reality certified by, contained in, or claimed by film (the way it produces a familiarity 4 “It

seems that reference is not simply the act of pointing or a way of keeping, on the outside, some material guarantee for the truth of a statement; rather it is our way of keeping something constant through a series of transformations. Knowledge does not reflect a real external world that it resembles via mimesis, but rather a real interior world, the coherence and continuity of which it helps to ensure” (Latour 1999, 58).

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with reality: real bodily actors, real police stations, real small towns, real New York, real high schools), the diegetic world can obviously also refer to something that might not be real, but “fictionally real.” It can allude to common knowledge and/or experiences and thus produce a truth effect that relies on resemblance, a—cultural or generic—verisimilitude (Neale 2005, 27ff.), meaning a familiarity with genre conventions, their signs, and signifiers. The chain of reference in this regard does not connect teen realities and teen films, but the different incarnations of related stories and characters within the genre. Moving chronologically backwards through the corpus, along the chain of mediations, transformations, and translations, will take us back along a timeline within the genre or a cycle, but not to a reality. A resulting conclusion could be that teen films do not refer back to teen realities, but to teen films—and to the teen film as a crucial element of teen realities. Teen film is not a mirror that simply reflects, documents, or processes a reality that exists independent from it. Its role is more dynamic: The teen film ultimately co-produces teen reality and is in turn co-produced by it.5 This interrelation of mutual influence of extra- and intradiegetic realities bleeding into each other becomes visible by looking at the types, tropes, settings, or actresses and actors in The DUFF.

Case Study: The DUFF The DUFF ’s Bianca Piper leads a relatively carefree life as a nerdy high school senior with an unconventional fashion sense who lives together with her recently divorced single mom, loves cult horror films, is a good student, and has two best friends, Jess Harris and Casey Cordero, who are considerably more popular and more conventionally attractive than she is. Despite her academic and popcultural smarts and maturity, she is 5There are sociological narratives that speak about teen realities going back to C. Wayne Gordon’s influential study The Social System and the High School from 1957. Using the methodology of Talcott Parsons’ action theory, Gordon analyses the social interactions of high school students and even though his frame, method, and era are quite different from the narrative fictional films about which I am writing, many of his findings, like types, tropes, rites, correspond exactly as known from Hollywood’s teen films.

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surprisingly naïve (or rather: she lacks literacy) in terms of High School Sociography. Thus, she is entirely unaware of her status in the school’s hierarchy until her childhood friend and next-door neighbor Wesley Rush (attractive, athletic, and sexually active) reveals to her that she is what is referred to in teen vernacular as a “DUFF”: Every group of friends has one. The one who doesn’t look as good, thus making their friends look better. The one who’s approachable and easy to talk to, because no one’s trying to get in their pants. And if you don’t know who it is, chances are it’s you … Guys can be DUFFs too … acting as, like, the gatekeeper to their better-looking friends. The guy with the info people go to before they make their move.

Hurt and humiliated by having been reduced to a sociological function, and on top of that one that relegates her to a low and not very desirable, quasi-parasitic or at least strictly symbiotic agency-less position in the hierarchy, Bianca decides to take action. She temporarily ends her friendship with her best friends and offers Wesley a deal: He shall be her makeover counselor while her end of the bargain is to help him get up his grades, as the academically failing Wesley is in danger of losing his football scholarship, which he hopes will be his ticket out of a dysfunctional and stifling home. Wesley teaches Bianca how to belong via a multi-step program and by introducing her to the social scripts of dressing, courtship, dating, and sexuality (in the form of practicing how to kiss correctly) so she is ready to pursue her love interest Toby Tucker. As is to be expected, both Wesley and Bianca learn more about themselves, each other, and their environment in the process and again as is to be expected, fall in love. After several detours, they end up as a romantic couple on prom night where Wesley eventually opts against accepting his homecoming king crown and instead takes off with Bianca. Before we get to this however, obstacles include Bianca’s ill-fated courtship of Toby (whose sensitive façade eventually lays bare a shallow character, as he just tries to use her as DUFF-gatekeeper to her friends) and Wesley’s involvement with his on-off girlfriend Madison Morgan, who is coded as rich, beautiful, manipulative, and spiteful (since rich and morally corrupt tend to go hand in hand). Madison is the film’s resident mean girl (and

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homecoming queen) who humiliates and cyberbullies Bianca to blackmail her away from Wesley upon realizing that the two are connected by a less superficial bond than the Darwinian fitness that logically renders her and Wesley eligible. Following the ending’s catharsis, as dénouement Bianca publishes an article about homecoming, her senior year experience and the figure of the DUFF in the student newspaper which goes viral and redeems all the DUFFs out there. She and Wesley go to different universities, but stay together as an uncommon couple that has overcome the imperative of high school’s social-sexual-romantic protocol to mate befitting one’s respective rank and have thus at the same time ensured heteronormativity (other than all other potential candidates in this relatively couple-free film, from Bianca’s and Wesley’s parents, to the love interests Madison and Toby) while simultaneously achieving individual autonomy. While the types as well as film styles (the settings, the mise-en-scène, the use of music, the editing, the camera perspectives) seem familiar and are congruent with their counterparts in comparable texts, what is interesting here are not the repetitions, but the differences. Repetitions establish a formula, but the variations of a formula highlight its demarcations. In turn, they enable a different perspective on the transformations and movements, how, for example, Bianca as DUFF differs from Pretty in Pink’s Andie Walsh or Laney Boggs in She’s All That as the made-over and how this will eventually lead to them fulfilling the same narrative, diegetic, cultural, or ideological function in their respective era and for their respective audience.

Disassembling The DUFF: Discipline The DUFF opens with a black background onto which along the Z-axis “CBS Films” in a plain serif-less font and neon-green letters with a faint neon pink shadow (creating a somewhat 1980s-looking 3D effect) moves into the frame. The font and color palette of the title card introduce a style that is both retro and contemporary in its re-using and update of a color scheme that is connoted eighties. As such, it is a reference that is easily recognizable and traceable and presents the first element in which

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the film connects itself to the canon, especially the defining 1980s texts, while at the same time translating it for a present-day audience and into its accustomed contemporary styles. Rather than reading this use of references and recycling of existing forms and elements merely as typically postmodern pastiche, this can already be seen as the installation of a link in the chain through which reference circulates back and forth. At the same time, and even before the audience is introduced to the visible high school setting it is sonically transported there with the symbolic wake-up call of the ringing school bell that intradiegetically and literally heralds a high school day both for the protagonists and for the audience in whom a wide range of connotations associated with school situations and with cinematic representations of school is evoked. For the audience, the bell does more than audibly signal that the film begins and the milieu in which it is set. It implements a regime, sonically and symbolically, much like the church bell or the factory whistle (or other institutions and embodiments of power, as Foucault analyzed in “Of Other Spaces” (1986, 27): The chime of the church bell for a long time has been a reminder both of the looming omnipresence of the church and everything it represents, as well as a reminder of the fact that it is the very institution that structures and organizes time by the very ringing of the bell and thus, by extension, structures and organizes the daily lives of those within its reach. The school bell as the multi-functional opener of The DUFF fulfills a similar purpose: In the diegesis, it structures the students’ days, their classes, and breaks and thus is a major agent of the discipline whose acquisition is the ultimate project of a high school education. Discipline is a central force field through which the characters in The DUFF move, however, as it will soon turn out, this discipline (or ideology) not only runs from top to bottom with the bell as a representative of school as an Althusserian (1970) ISA, an Ideological State Apparatus, par excellence. In an ISA, to which Louis Althusser counts the educational system, the family, and media (The DUFF as a mainstream film and thus as part of mass media must be consequently be seen as another ISA), the social order and the dominant ideology are reproduced and reinforced not only by institutions of power, but also by the society members themselves through a process of coercion, submission, and interpellation which leads to an identification with said ideology

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and ultimately produces subjects (with an emphasis here on the prefix sub, and in the sense of the Latin subiectus, subjugated, under the rule). Even though on the surface level the characters will have reached autonomy from that ideology at the end of the film, their finding and occupying their own niche within it—finding love, becoming a conventiondefying happy couple—can also be read as consent to that ideology and their having become subjects within it, thus reproducing the order. This proposition is specifically American, as it suggests an ideology of nonideology based on the myth that a pure and free subject exists outside of the absorption by any ideology—which of course is an ideology in itself, and a powerfully pervasive one at that: American individualism.6 The accompanying theme music that opens The DUFF likewise anchors the film temporally and stylistically and informs its audience about its popcultural position. After 41 seconds, the piece is interrupted by—naturally—the school bell that closes the bracket around the opening sequence to then segue into a pop song collage in which Bianca and her friends are introduced. The three-song medley in slightly over two minutes uses music to comment on the characters, to address the audience, to set the film’s pace, and to connect it to the canon. The fact that the songs’ eminent stylistic variation7 is juxtaposed with almost congruent tempi and identical time signatures—all three songs are straightforward four-four time—already hints at the imminent interrogation of an unchanging underlying structure in which what seems as makeover and as changes is merely style and surface: as diverse as Bianca and her friends may seem by look, style, and by entrance music, they all move through an order whose deep structure is not impacted by changes of and on its surfaces. 6 Also

see Smith (with recourses to Scott and Leonhardt, Fussell, Halle) on how “the USA continues to construct itself as a classless society” (2017, 66). 7The variation becomes even more heterogeneous when not only listening to the songs but also looking at the attached performers and their backgrounds: Junkie XL as a Dutch-American male artist, Nacey and Angel Haze are a white male dance music producer and an AfricanAmerican rapper and LGBT activist, to the Canadian musician and performance artist Peaches’ whose main themes are female empowerment, gender roles, and sexual identities. In his essay about Clueless, Ben Aslinger attests it to have “signaled an increased hybridization of teen listening tastes” (2014, 127) and “audience demands for more complicated constructions of sonic cultures” (ibid., 131), a hybridization we see continued and increased in The DUFF.

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Priming the audience for further central themes and the strategies with which they will be worked through, the first frame after the title card is the image of a computer screen on which “Malloy High School’s The Pitchfork,” the school newspaper, is being layouted while Bianca’s voiceover sets in: For generations of high schoolers, you could only be a jock, a geek, a princess, a bully, or a basket case. But times have changed. Jocks play video games. Princesses are on antidepressants. And geeks basically run the country. I thought we were living in a brave new world, a place without labels. But every so often, there’s that one moment in high school that changes your perspective on everything. And for me, it happened senior year, about a month before homecoming.

While this monologue is audible, the aligning of the newspaper article, the addition of author’s names (all articles have been written by Bianca and her two friends), positioning and resizing of pictures, illustrates Bianca’s claim how the formerly seemingly so clear delineations between the distinct classes have been eroded by showing images of some of the types she mentions: Football players, cheerleaders, and mathletes are, quite literally, all on the same page (see Fig. 2.1). The newspaper layout frame is only 17 seconds long, but already contains and prepares

Fig. 2.1 Introducing a typology and taxonomy: football players, cheerleaders and mathletes are all literally on the same page

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the decisive elements of The DUFF. It introduces a typology and taxonomy; furthermore, this classification and the vocabulary to talk about it overtly hark back to The Breakfast Club where these labels are used almost verbatim (“You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.”). From the onset, typology and taxonomy are not just used as shorthand to perpetuate known types or to signal to the audience in which generic tradition to read the following, but as central theme and narrative element: This will be a film that not only uses labels, but is essentially about labeling in all its facets. Bianca creates labels not just to refer to her experience (other than the protagonists in The Breakfast Club who coined the terms), she refers to them as preexisting knowledge that is rooted in an extradiegetic fictional source. By positing The Breakfast Club, this Citizen Kane of teen films, as a point of reference for both the concrete film, its film genre, and its audience, an understanding is established as the film characters and the audience share the same cultural archive and circulate the same inscriptions. Not solely production or invention takes place, but transformation and translation, which is also how the Breakfast Club reference contains a double address and can be understood by those who are familiar with the referent and those who are only familiar with its translations—or for whom it functions as a mere teen film citation system in the sense of a Bildungszitat.8 Beyond the intertextual link-up with a foundational generic text by the voice-over narration, the introduction of the school paper sets up an important premise: self-documentation. This ties in both with the notion of inscriptions, of translating one’s interest (or self-interest, to be more

8 Literally,

an “educated quote,” the reference to an acquired knowledge. According to von Polenz (1999, 382), the Bildungszitat that functions as a signifier for knowledge without necessarily referring to real knowledge. Eva Hölter identifies its function as constitutive for a distinct class of users: “The knowledge [of the literary canon] was relative and often restricted … to the familiarity with some facts and quotes, through whose usage and recognition the class that later came to be called Bildungsbürgertum legitimized itself and which served to understand and assess each other … an expression of a bourgeois culture that increasingly defined itself by ‘education’” (2002, 69, my translation).

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specific in regards to The DUFF ) in material form,9 and also with the theme of how discipline and ideology are not mainly implemented from top to bottom (the editorial staff is led by a teacher who assigns stories), but rather produced and reproduced by the teens themselves. Selfdocumentation has entered the pathologies of the DUFF teens as a form of internalized self-control in the sense of Foucault’s panopticism (1995, 195ff.). The unquestioned compliance with the imperative to document and disclose oneself, to make oneself available to the controlling gazes and scrutiny of the other members of the social order, is most blatantly embodied in Bianca’s antagonist Madison, constantly accompanied by her sidekick Caitlyn whose job is to capture Madison’s every move with a smartphone (Wesley: “Does she have to film everything?”; Madison: “Wesley, I’m what’s known as pre-famous. My life is an audition for reality TV. So, yeah, I need to chronicle everything. That was a good take for me. Get a wide shot too.”). The cartoonish exaggeration of Madison as narcissistic, compulsive self-documenter parodies power in the form of internalized control/selfsurveillance, but the seemingly democratic institution of a school newspaper (in which the disenfranchised can express their voice and which equally acknowledges members of all distinct classes, the mathletes, and football players), after all is also an apparatus that reproduces the same panoptic power by documenting/surveilling the adolescent subjects. This crystallizes in the homecoming dance—as the ultimate event of selfpresentation and status evaluation10 —around which Bianca’s newspaper article, her transitional makeover journey, and the film are organized. In this scene, one of the lead stories on the front page written by Bianca’s friend Jess is titled “How To Find The Perfect Prom Date,” in one of the final scenes the article Bianca was assigned to write about her experience of the homecoming dance is finally published (“Tales of a High School DUFF”). When the short opening is followed by an establishing shot to introduce the setting, zooming in from an aerial shot which shows the entire 9 See

also Callon “Techno-Economic Networks and Irreversibility” (Callon 1991, 143). see Amy L. Best’s work on the social rites embedded in school dances in Prom Night (2000).

10 Also

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school grounds embedded in a suburban area, to the archway at the school entrance with the school building behind it, before cutting to a busy hallway and finally to the close-up of a wall clock whose hands jump to 7.45 AM, this short montage is again accompanied by the ringing of the bell. Three anonymous teenage boys appear, coded as nerds by their clothes and banter that displays their sexual inexperience and interest in video games, and when realizing the time, their anxious expectation of what is about to happen lets them burst out with: “Oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, Showtime!” The boys appear here as a Greek chorus—part of the diegesis, yet commenting and interpreting it for the audience and acting as a link between the two spheres—and make it clear that the ensuing entrance of Bianca, Jess, and Casey is a daily ritual, a reliably timed performative act and one that caters to their viewing pleasure—or at least is looked at by them as if it did. While the girls are introduced via fast-paced metadiegetic montages in which multiple facets of their personalities are introduced in the quick succession of pictures, one of the boys brags that he would “bang [Jess] so hard that they would both need helmets.” His chauvinistic comment is somewhat defused by presenting them as inexperienced pubescent boys, not in the shape of the sexually aggressive alpha males as whom the athlete stereotype is conventionally constructed. Nonetheless, they are also performing their allocated gender role—among other things by gazing at the to-be-looked-at girls—maintaining the heteronormative masculinity they know they are supposed to enact. The performative aspect becomes all the more clear when one of the boys says: “Casey Cordero. I would play Call of Duty with her all night,” expressing his actual and much more innocent desire which is not to “bang her” but to play a video game with a female companion, to which his friends react surprised: “Wait, what?” He adds, nervously covering up this slip and reassuming his performance of heteronormative masculinity: “And bang her hard too, to the point of needing helmets.” Accordingly, the entrance scene in which the audience first gets to see the three girls has the camera fetishizing them in lieu of the three boys’ (and thus by extension the audience’s) male gaze and thereby implements a scopic regime: beginning as a close-up of their three pairs of feet in slow-motion, then quickly cutting back and forth between the three boys and further shots of the individual girls. Jess is introduced first, again in

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slow-motion with the camera moving upwards along her legs, cutting to her face and then to brief shots of her pursuing various activities. These images are accompanied by hashtags that characterize the girls and seemingly deconstruct the expected types: Jess Harris and Casey Cordero are not only demarcations of a demographic spectrum indicated by name and look (the WASPy blonde and the black-haired Latina), nor the mere objects of male desire (“Jess has the hottest ass. Casey has the hottest rack.”) and thus the two-dimensional “princess” type that conventionally ensues from female beauty, moreover Jess is also “#TheKindOne, Aspiring Fashion Designer, and Zen Buddhist” and Casey “#TheToughOne, [soccer] Striker, and Hacker.” Aesthetically, the film here adopts the fast pacing of contemporary use of social media, as well as its look and feel in the way that it employs typical graphic elements, such as hashtags and the tag labels attached to depicted people, to visualize the labeling that takes place while it takes place and conveying a sense of up-to-date-ness while simultaneously illustrating the main theme. Both the framing looks and language, by the boys’ gazes and their comments, as well by the tagging and hashtagging enforces the girls’ to-be-looked-at-ness instead of deconstructing it. Labeling is not subverted, or even done away with, but merely diversified, the empowerment of a female underdog ultimately will be equated with getting the guy, and self-acceptance will be coupled with male approval. Bianca’s above-quoted introductory voice-over monologue installs her as an autodiegetic narrator with the ability to address the audience, simultaneously from within as well as situated above the plot due to her knowledge of the outcome that neither the characters nor the audience have, thus turning her also into a metadiegetic mediator between film and spectator. Narrator-Bianca speaks in the past tense, looking back on what is now about to unfurl from the future point toward which protagonist-Bianca and the audience are moving, a retrospective position that contains the promise of a conclusion while establishing the underlying theme of self-documentation and self-writing. The autodiegetic narrator keeps the reference stably circulating between two distinct sign- or media systems (and several “Bianca systems”): The DUFF as the adaptation of the homonymous young adult novel by Kody Keplinger (2010) takes its architecture, plot, and character organization from a written

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story and never tries to overcome or hide this. After all, the fact that the author was 17 and thus an actual teen when she wrote the novel may not necessarily turn the narrative into a documentary with an in-built authenticity claim, but adds a further element of up-to-date-ness, just like the role of social media does. Bianca writing her article about being a DUFF mirrors Keplinger writing a novel, and consequently, even though the film’s visual language relies less on written text, The DUFF is very much concerned with words: its protagonists’ experiences and lives are shaped by words more than by actions, they express themselves by selfdocumentation, among others by writing, and the cinematography/miseen-scène heavily includes words. In every sense of the phrase, and to bear John Austin (1962) in mind, in The DUFF we are shown “How to Do Things with Words.”11 It is the most openly, the most self-awarely, and generally the most logocentric teen film in existence. When protagonist-Bianca appears on screen for the first time and narrator-Bianca states “That’s me,” her attributions are “#TheOtherOne, Cult Movie Fanatic, Honor Roll Student, and Adequate Violin Player.” It is comically over-illustrated how content Bianca is while still unaware of the perception others have of her, that she is a type at all, and that there is a name for that type. Wesley revealing to her what everyone else already seems to know is the instant in which the complication begins. It is not a gradual realization, but a sudden revelation, already alluded to in the opening voice-over monologue: “that one moment in high school that changes your perspective on everything.” The watershed and her loss of innocence sets in when she is forced into a category by being forced into a word, by being baptized and symbolically reborn. Bianca, in voice-over: “You know in Batman when that guy falls into the vat of acid and becomes the Joker? This was my ‘vat of acid’ moment. My best friends made me the DUFF.” Her Batman analogy recalls a powerful image from the pop consciousness of a drastic and involuntary transformation that is very obviously staged as baptism: A “guy” (it is important that he is nameless in Bianca’s comparison, parallel to her hitherto 11 Referring

to Austin’s influential essay from 1962, his contribution to speech act theory. The “performatives” or “illocutionary acts” as verbal utterances that not only convey information, but also constitute an action with real, material consequences are at the core of his theory of the performative.

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blank labeling as “#TheOtherOne”) falls into a baptismal fountain in the shape of a vat of acid and returns as a new and reborn figure with new ascriptions: a name and a role in the Batman universe. For Bianca, the ascription of the new name and the appendant role also turn out to be a christening. It is not acid, but language that absorbs her into a social order and into the symbolic order, in the same way the entering of the language is the child’s/subject’s entrance into the Symbolic in Lacanian psychoanalysis (2004). The recognition of the Name-of-the-Father /nomdu-père (1981) as Lacan’s byword for the normative order (i.e., the rules and restrictions that control and structure the unconscious, desire, and communication) simultaneously completes the entrance into a community with others and thus, the acceptance of that society’s law that constitutes the Symbolic, “the pact which links subjects together in one action. The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts … it is the act of speech which is constitutive” (1991, 230–232). The Name-of-theFather becomes the Name-of-the-DUFF: By being made to recognize it, Bianca is made to recognize the ideology she has been absorbed into; her world and her position therein has been impacted by words, or speech acts even. The labels that have been established by, among others, The Breakfast Club and continuously built on and diversified since, are used as a means to narrate the quest for autonomy and individuation and are an integral part of the (cinematic) high school experience. It is noteworthy that many of these fixed types or other elements of teen life such as prom or the homecoming dance have no equivalent outside of US culture, both as an archetype (the cheerleader and all its connotations, for instance) and linguistically: While every American high school student knows exactly what the jock or the bully are, how they look, dress, and behave, these labels are only translatable approximately. Whether these types and what they embody are genuinely American or at least a genuinely American film construct is to some extent a question of linguistic relativity: Do these labels exist in the American dictionary to refer to a specifically American experience or does the existence of such vocabulary reveal a linguistic structure that also informs the worldview of its speakers? Then again, in Bianca’s introductory monologue she states that

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she had “thought we were living in a brave new world, a place without labels,” when really this brave new world did not even exist in her own allegedly label-free thinking. The mere fact that “times have changed. Jocks play video games. Princesses are on antidepressants. And geeks basically run the country” simply shows that the allocated characteristics for each type have started to bleed into those of other types and that the types have become more hybrid, but not that they have been obsolete. She has been participating in speech acts, performative acts, and the reproduction of the permeating ideology (or non-ideology); the only difference is that she was not aware of it. She is not made to recognize a new development, only something that is a new realization for her, but that however has been enacted, performed, reproduced all along by herself and the other members of her social cosmos, the order of teens.

The Makeover The makeover as metaphor and vehicle for the liminal transition of a teenager draws on an established teen film tradition that is played out in the theme of navigating the social pressure in the culture of popularity that comes with being ascribed a label and then reaching autonomy by escaping the label. In her analysis of Clueless, Alice Leppert links the trope of the makeover to teen magazines and their “didactic and imperative” (McRobbie 1991, 104) tone with which they guide their readers through transformational beauty rites, simultaneously enforcing conventions and selling styles and products, conjoining “the makeover plot and the malleability of teen identity that is so central to Clueless and teen magazines alike” (Leppert 2014, 137). In the makeovers in canonic films whose commercial success and enduring influence endows them a position in which they can be seen as “didactic and imperative” at all, or as inscriptive texts between which reference circulates, several patterns are noticeable. Conspicuously, the made-over are in most commonly (white) females. While their agency, motivation, and the organization of their makeover vary, there are far fewer examples in which a male is given or

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feels the need to give himself a makeover.12 The rare occurrences of a male makeover—as for instance many stories about male nerds hinge on the makeover myth—work to the outcome of transforming the protagonist into an improved version of himself, which often means a cooler, more popular, more masculine, sexually initiated version, or one that prevails at sports or physical combat.13 The female makeover on the other hand in most cases presents an ugly-duckling-into-beautiful-swan transformation that often implies the compliance with conventional physical beauty as the arena in which a female can and has to transform and succeed. In correspondence, writing about The Breakfast Club, Bulman concludes: “After Claire gives Allison a beauty makeover, Allison and Andrew become romantically involved (an all-too-common scene in suburban high school films that suggests women must conform to standard measures of beauty in order to attract men)” (2004, 107). The eminent makeovers are canonically read as working according to similar principles—women making themselves over in order to cater 12 One instance is Grease in which both the John Travolta character Danny Zuko and Olivia Newton John’s Sandy Olsson make themselves over in order to become what they assume is the other’s ideal image of them. In Grease, this is not used as a central or even very important element, but rather as the effective and comic premise to then sing the iconic song “You’re the One That I Want.” Also, it is rather used to satirize the dichotomous stereotypization into “clean teens” and “juvenile delinquents” so typical for 1950s media and cinema narratives exploiting these types, as the film’s project as a campy musical that from the perspective of 1978 looks back on a fictional 1958 is a self-aware examination of clichés—on the level of genre, plot, characters, and style. It is noticeable that one of the few examples for a male makeover takes place in a frame that connotes it as over-the-top satire. While I read this framing as parody with the potential to subvert these 1950s values and roles by making them visible as constructions, Shary (2005, 46–47) and Considine (1985, 270) at the same time see it as a perpetuation of the conservative gender roles which both attest Grease. 13 Among the examples for a male makeover from various (sub)genres are Christine (1983), Once Bitten (1985), Can’t Buy Me Love (1987), Class Act (1992), Deal of a Lifetime (1999), SpiderMan (2002), or obviously The Karate Kid (1984, as well as the 2010 remake) when read as a teen film and not as genre film from the martial arts genre. Here, the predictable transformation of the dorky and nice kid that struggles to fit in after relocating with his single mom and who in the end becomes a karate champion beating seemingly stronger, more masculine competitors who are more prone to displays of alpha male violence, reinforces the dominant clichés of the makeover and its conventional gender organization. This kind of masculine transformation is central for many martial arts narratives going back to the classical boxer drama, but some texts merge the martial arts transformation with a coming-of-age transformation and an adolescent protagonist, as for instance Sidekicks (1992), the Karate Kid rip-off Showdown a.k.a. American Karate Tiger (1993) or Never Back Down (2008)—however none as clearly and as successfully as The Karate Kid franchise.

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to male desire—and in terms of Laura Mulvey’s conceptualization of the male gaze (1975) as the predominant way in which women are (re)presented in visual culture. The performative aspect of a makeover allows for further readings of how agencies of transformation (and the transformed and transforming) can operate outside of the male gaze, as for instance as an excess of signs and codes that, like drag performances, just as much subvert as affirm normative conventions of beauty and gender or even as “mockery of gender and class norms” (Smith 2017, 75), or as a less unilateral flow of transformative powers and rather as a mutual shaping process, especially as the making-over usually also ends up as made-over. The starting position most commonly is a female being “improved” and the confirmation that she has proven herself as improved and the validation for her improved self is the prize in the form of the (male) love interest, most commonly someone who was out of her league when she was still her old, unimproved self. It is apparent why and how this can be construed as problematic in its affirmation of cultural and societal biases and asymmetries, and how these stories double as allegories for the neoliberal imperative to self-optimize, which they visualize and thereby secure. While these political insinuations of most makeover films are not fundamentally different in The DUFF, the way the makeover narrative is updated and translated for a 2015 audience is interesting nonetheless— after all, in terms of audience acceptance and commercial success, the film has a similarly prominent position as Pretty in Pink or She’s All That had in their time and possibly serves a similar function.14 The DUFF makeover begins as a deal (bear in mind that this is preTrump USA, before “the art of the deal” had become a byword for the implosion of a political system and the epitome for capitalism in its sheer ugliness): “Here’s my offer. I will make sure you pass science if you help me with this,” says Bianca during a phys. ed. class after having overheard Wesley talking to a teacher after chemistry class and learning about his 14 In the 2015 box office rankings, The DUFF is at #76 with only two teen films ahead, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (2015) as the fourth installment of the established franchise at #8 and Maze Runner : The Scorch Trials (2015) at #36, as its second installment, also part of a teen post-apocalypse series (Source: Box Office Mojo website, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/ yearly/chart/?yr=2015).

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academic predicament. She does not approach him there and right away, on her turf so to say, a room designated for science, where he would perhaps feel vulnerable or intimidated and thus perhaps defensive, but on his turf, the sports field. Bianca approaching Wesley—especially in that tactical manner, like a true dealmaker—is not only asking for advice or a plea for help among peers or friends, it is an exchange of goods and services, cultural and social capital, the implementation of a contract, in line with the logic of neoliberalism. Wesley can use Bianca for his personal advancement and potential transformation—going to university, leaving his dysfunctional home—and Bianca can use Wesley for her ends, her transformation, i.e., making herself attractive for a boy and equating/mistaking this with/for autonomy: “I don’t wanna be anybody’s DUFF anymore, okay? I wanna be my own person. I’m tired of being the approachable one. I wanna be the dateable one.” There is a contradiction in on the one hand wanting to be “my own person” and the wish to have independency and agency and not to be defined as a mere symbiont, as someone’s friend, and on the other simultaneously wanting to be “the dateable one” (not dating one), as it expresses the wish to be the passive and looked-at female. This oscillation between active and passive is doubled in the figure of her mother, Dottie Piper. Ms. Piper is a single mom after the father has left the family three years ago, which at first was traumatic for her. In a short montage, she is shown on a ride-on lawnmower destroying belongings of her former husband and binge-watching TV, both while drinking alcohol, all well-rehearsed clichés about the hysterical female falling apart without a man and a not-so-subtle allusion to the degree of her crisis and her lack of strategies to handle being left. She turns her life around in a transformational (or vat of acid) moment when, as narrator-Bianca comments during her voice-over introduction, “one night divine inspiration struck.” When her mother watched an episode of The Simpsons in which cartoon patriarch Homer Simpson is facing his potential death and goes through five stages to cope with his imminent demise, the so-called Kübler-Ross model (or “five stages of grief ” [1969]), she is inspired to come up with a self-help book about “The Five Stages of Divorce,” a concept resulting from the one-to-one application of the Simpsons scene (or rather of the KüblerRoss-model-via-the-Simpsons-scene) to her own situation, propelling her

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to the status of self-improvement celebrity. Her success and newfound purpose have reinstated her self-esteem and she is now finally able to set up online dating profiles with Bianca’s help to become romantically involved again. Like Bianca, she was forced into a situation by a man (being left by, not having left her husband) after which she has to gain a sense of self and go through a liminal five-stage transition into autonomy; but her autonomy is also equated with being dateable (after becoming useful/successful) again. The proposition that drunkenly watching a TV show, with smeared mascara due to crying, can lead to a moment of divine inspiration visualizes how reference jumps back and forth, how it is translated and assumes different forms while always retaining its relation: A concept from psychology is taken up in a TV show, from there seeps into the mind of a spectator who then transforms it into self-help literature. This progression can be read as a self-reflexive comment which self-awarely posits The DUFF as a link in chain through which reference is continuously circulating: It is not so much novelty or the invention of an idea that produces new insight, knowledge, or up-to-date iterations of an idea, it is its translation and transformation. The transformational movement embedded in the film’s narrative corresponds to The DUFF ’s general strategy of translating generic markers and elements.15 In the abovementioned scene, metadiegetic translation becomes intradiegetic translation in a plot concerned with transformation. Focusing on the Latourian translation makes it all the more evident that Bianca’s mother turning her life around by turning her grief into (self-help) literature is less sublimation than it is the conversion of personal pain and something quite private into marketable commodity. Bianca is making deals to alleviate her hurt and dissatisfaction, her mother is selling books and seminars. Their respective agency does not 15 Genre

here is not seen as rigid classification, but as something that constitutes itself in the discourse from and about films and from the way other films and genres, as for instance addressed by Steve Neale (1988) or Claudia Liebrand’s proposition of anti-essentialist genre theory. She states: “Genres do not exist ‘by themselves.’ We are rather dealing with them in the guise of films: with films that can be attributed to genres, but ‘are’ not these genres. Every film refers to genre conventions, but rewrites them at the same time. … The genre is not the film, but we encounter it in the film, it (logically) precedes the film and yet (in practice) is its effect” (Liebrand 2003, 174; Bothmann 2018, 37). Rick Altman explicitly factors in the community that “uses” a generic text and the formation of a “constellated community” (1999, 162) that reacts to and interacts with the text as constitutive for any genre.

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take place on the plane of personal space or sexuality—both want to be dateable and offer themselves—but on the plane of self-optimization. The actual makeover Wesley has devised for Bianca’s improvement is also a multiple-step program, a learning experience echoing the undercurrent of discipline and self-control. It starts at the shopping mall, one of American teen films’ preeminent settings besides high school and the family home. Steps one and two are the acquisition of more feminine underwear. The ensuing fashion parade of various more or less hilarious outfits and the aptitude of actress Mae Whitman to endow her Bianca not with humiliation, but physical comedy turns the scene into a satire of the generic tradition of how a female undergoes the makeover by being dressed in new clothes, having makeup put on and getting a new hairdo, sometimes also by simply taking off her glasses (e.g., the makeovers in Breakfast Club, She’s All That, or their parody in Not Another Teen Movie [2001]). Whitman’s comedic acting paired with the over-the-top-ness of the costumes adds further layers of meaning to and masks, but not truly subverts the fetishization she has to undergo. She is at the same time playing along with the program and making fun of it by posing for Wesley like a porno model, doing silly push-ups or pretending to aggressively flirt with a mannequin that happens to look like her love interest Toby Tucker. Wesley films Bianca with his smartphone and upon realizing this, she is reluctant, concealing parts of her body clad in the unfamiliar outfit with her arms and hands, but Wesley reassures her that she can trust him, she loses her inhibitions and begins to play it up for the camera. They are still in an ongoing deal-making process, weighing each other’s positions, which only later will morph into a genuine friendship and even romance. An important factor in this transformation’s agencies is the agency of the camera(s): It is again used as a means of self-documentation, it adds a self-reflexive meta-level and serves to blur the boundaries of the medium (Bianca is supposed to be herself in front of the camera, but of course just acts out a fictitious version of herself ), and it constitutes Bianca’s tobe-looked-at-ness and externalizes Wesley’s male gaze and by extension that of everyone else, as he acts not as an individual but as a representative of an entire order whose gaze Bianca wants to subject herself to (this will change later when Wesley presents her with a beautiful black dress he saw Bianca adoring at the mall and thus actively and individually

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clothes her). As the scene plays in a mall, the epitome of a social center in the otherwise social-center-less suburban America, their rather intimate experience becomes a public performance when they are secretly watched and filmed by Caitlyn, sidekick and aide to the antagonist Madison. Her camera is not meant for documentation, but for surveillance: She also films the spectacle and thus really turns it into one, when she and Madison later use the material to shame Bianca and prevent her conversion into a higher class by putting it on YouTube (cyberbullying as a very real facet of contemporary teenage and high school life contributes to the film’s project of signaling its audience its topicality). The constellation is significant: Someone watches and films someone who watches and films, a mise-en-abyme of sorts. Like other famous moments of cinematic voyeurism including urtexts like Psycho (1960) or Peeping Tom (1960), the audience is forced to recognize and acknowledge its own spectatorship and complicity by having its position of the gazing-at doubled or even tripled by the on-screen gazers and their apparatuses.16 Highlighting the fetishization and subjectification of the made-over female in such fashion makes visible the power dynamics inherent in the highly sexualized (and often male) gazes of the makeover film’s generic history, dynamics which have rarely been put on self-reflexive display as clearly as they are in The DUFF. When for instance She’s All That female protagonist Laney Boggs is about to be made over, Zack, the boy who is making her over to win a bet, brings his sister Mac to Laney’s house (Mac also begins her makeover program with the request “You’d really have to trust me.”). After having been made over in her own upper floor room— since Victorian times the architectural sphere of privacy and intimacy where guests normally are not allowed—she is called downstairs by Mac several times, still too shy to go with the fashion parade she is asked to enact. When she finally does descend the staircase of her suburban family home, the mise-en-scène strongly suggests a specific perception, when the camera cuts back and forth between the expectant gazes of Zack and Laney’s little brother, who are either filmed up from the torso or with 16 For

an interrogation of gazes and gazes made visible by a visible camera, also see my discussion of Stanley Kubrick’s Nabokov adaptation Lolita (1962) in Sonnenberg-Schrank (2016).

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close-ups of their faces, unmistakably visualizing their positions in the dynamics of the gazing and the gazed-at. Laney is filmed while slowly walking down the stairs from her feet upwards, gradually exposing highheeled shoes, an evening dress, her pushed-up breasts and finally her face, she is wearing makeup, jewelry, a new haircut and no longer her signature horn-rimmed glasses. At the bottom of the stairs, she clumsily stumbles, still not used to the high heels, to fall right into the arms of Zack. The cinderella-esque staging of the damsel-knight constellation is seemingly caricatured by the little brother who mocks the resulting embrace as a goofy imitation of kissing, but actually he occupies the aforementioned Greek chorus function: By mocking, he reassures that we are witnessing the moment when Laney begins to enact her new role as the klutzy (read: weak and in need of a prince who saves her) girl in a script of heteronormative courtship, and Zack consequently falls in love with his creation, a love interest reorganized to cater to his desire. Their deal is consummated by, and in this moment: The cultural capital Laney acquires by her association with Zack is repaid by delivering herself into his arms— submission for status. However, the mise-en-scène does not provide a marker that comments on the scene’s arrangement on the textual level, nothing to unmask the gazes and the identification patterns they offer.17 The DUFF differs from its predecessors in this regard—and thus occupies a slightly different position in the makeover canon—by showing the transformative act as something that is not only actively and consciously performed, but also perceived, recorded, and multiplied as performance. The mere fact that the gendered gaze of the camera(s) is unmasked and visualized in The DUFF does not deconstruct it, as the film never calls into question that Bianca has to submit herself to a situation to begin with in which she must turn herself into a spectacle, or an object (-ofdesire). This updating of a well-rehearsed formula is another instance where reference circulates: In order to translate the trope for an audience whose awareness of the predecessors can be taken for granted just as well as their literacy, a meta-level of self-reflexivity needs to be added to keep the reference stable and capable of fulfilling the same narrative/structural function. 17 Also

see Gilligan (2011) and Smith (2017, 85–88).

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The shopping mall as a setting with very particular characteristics, connotations, and fixed place as a staple of teen film sites also factors in the next step of Bianca’s transformation. In order to overcome her lack of experience, shy- and awkwardness, she has to practice engaging with random boys and men outside of the school’s cosmos. The mall with its levels, escalators, and food court becomes a metaphorical and actual test laboratory in which to experiment on live humans. Bianca’s position remains ambivalent: On the one hand, agency is with her as she proactively approaches strange men instead of waiting for someone to approach her; on the other hand, she acts on Wesley’s instructions and practices how to offer herself in the best possible way to seem desirable or dateable enough (measured by the numbers of phone numbers she can acquire). Arguments can be made for her agency and her own desire, just as when she actively decides to transform herself, as well as against, because the transformation she seeks is one organized according to someone else’s desire. The shopping mall as a highly orchestrated space designed for predictability, safety, commerce, and consumerism’s escapist functions as a most appropriate backdrop. On the textual level, it is a realistic location through which actual (suburban) teens move; on the intertextual level, it is a location that has a deep-rooted generic tradition; and on the subtextual level, it is a location where the making-oneselfdateable—or in other words fit-for-the-market—can most appropriately be played out: a marketplace for looks, goods, food, and romance. After mastering the first steps of Wesley’s program and having had to suffer the defamation as “mall whore” in Madison’s and Caitlyn’s YouTube video and the degradation of being exposed in both her transformation ambitions and her feelings for Toby Tucker, Bianca musters her courage, owns the embarrassment, and asks Toby on a date as Wesley’s next step. Step seven is the preparation of the actual date, which Wesley lays out on the blackboard in a locker room that the football coach normally uses to explain game tactics—after all, he is an athletic jock who, at least for the time being, is kept spatially and intellectually stuck in his stereotype in order to establish and maintain the class system to which he and Bianca constitute two ends. These ends need to be in place and stable for both of them (when Wesley explains the subtleties of dating, Bianca says surprised: “I had no idea guys like you

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even thought about this kind of stuff;” and Wesley responds: “Well, that’s because you’re racist against jocks. You’re a jock-cist.”) before their borders can become porous. The actual date with Toby is disappointing, and the real Toby turns out to be far from Bianca’s idealization. She has built him up and used him as a projection screen, and thereby, she has done what everyone in the order of teens apparently does: She ascribes him a certain function, a function that is important to give cohesion to the social order and to her own comprehension thereof. In Bianca’s case, she has installed Toby as someone who is at the same time popular and a sensitive outsider (not a jock, but a guitar player and songwriter), and thus, she has posited Toby as the male ego-ideal and counterpart to what she strives to become and, ironically, ultimately does become—unlike the debunked Toby. The preparation for the crucial date is staged as Bianca regarding herself in a mirror, wearing the dress Wesley gave her and accompanied by voice-over narration, as second external incarnation of herself in addition to her own specular image. At the bottom of the staircase, she runs into her mother who is also getting ready for her first “internet date,” also wearing a black dress, also regarding herself in a mirror (see Fig. 2.2). The actual mirroring not only literalizes the metaphorical mirroring, of how the mother figure echoes Bianca’s situation and development, it is

Fig. 2.2 Both women achieve imaginary completeness by recognizing themselves in their specular reflection

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also a Lacanian mirror stage moment, where both women achieve imaginary completeness by recognizing themselves in their specular reflection and in an external image of themselves in a film that is so concerned with images and image. This is the moment where they have found their position in the Symbolic, after they have improved themselves to be dateable and dating, visualized by exchanging their common getup—Bianca as a slacker in t-shirts and dungarees, mom in Hillary Clinton-inspired pantsuits—for the elegant black evening dress as the archetypical fashion embodiment of femininity. Yet, narrator-Bianca undermines the fashionborne symbolic rebirth: “In my head, I think I was expecting some big reality-show reveal. But it was just me. Me in a dress.” She does recognize herself in the external image, but does not really feel that putting on a dress was a major shift in the process of her I-formation and that she has only now become a full subject—which means that she either still hasn’t and is still fragmented and oscillating between Ego and body, Imaginary and Real, child and mother (especially since these two are put next to each other as mirror images), or that she had already been a complete, yet decentered Bianca-subject and merely needs to realize this. Before Bianca’s date with Toby, she and Wesley have shared an intimate moment on Bianca’s “special place,” her “Think Rock,” a spot in the nearby woods where she used to come with her dog before her parents got divorced and when her mother wanted custody of her and her father of the dog. By associating it with these carefree memories, the rock becomes a space of regression, a reminder of the lost innocence of her pre-divorce childhood before the familial order had been uprooted by the falling apart of the parents’ marriage and the loss of the father figure, and thus been made visible as a structure at all, a parallel to her state of being before the social order of teens had not yet been made visible by assigning her the label of the DUFF. Wesley as her neighbor and childhood friend remembers the dog fondly and thus is able to regress with her into a shared space of pre-performative innocence. Caught in the moment, they start kissing, which they both immediately defuse, Wesley by declaring this as step eight of his program, Bianca by teasing him and licking his face when he is expecting another big kiss. For the audience, this is the moment in which it becomes clear that they are really rehearsing their own romance, even if they both maintain the

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protocol: Bianca goes on her date with Toby and Wesley reassumes his quasi-natural position at the side of the alpha female Madison. Their kissing on Think Rock was—again—witnessed by Caitlyn and her camera. The fact that she always shows up in private moments almost makes her an embodiment of the appropriate paranoia teens might feel in the age of social media, Bentham’s Panopticon Incarnate,18 always invisibly ready for surveillance and coercion, ready to document, judge, and punish, to enforce discipline and uphold the dominant ideology. When her meddling eventually leads to Madison displaying her position of power by stepping up her blackmailing game, it also leads to Bianca becoming able to withdraw from the competitive system and to truly reach autonomy through their final encounter at the homecoming dance, when she realizes and professes that she does not care about categories and classifications. The dance as another, if not the preeminent trope of the teen film, becomes the moment when Bianca’s makeover is actualized. The superficial makeover had already been completed when she went on her date with Toby, trained to be dateable and in a feminine dress after going through various scripted and unintended stages of transformation (underwear/clothing—interacting—dating—shame—dress). In addition, the process that initiated the outwards makeover—her incorporation into a category and thereby into the social order—has found its conclusion in her denial to subject herself. She finally stands up to Madison and delivers a short speech that is as much infused by traditional American values such as individualism, democracy, and laissez-faire, as it is by the positive-thinking and self-acceptance rhetoric that has become her mother’s strategy to cope with adversity: Look, Madison, it’s okay. Madison, you used to make me so upset, but now I just feel bad for you. Yeah, I’m somebody’s DUFF. Guess what, 18 For Foucault, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1798) as prison architecture serves as model for modern disciplinary societies, in which control by observation eventually is internalized and becomes self-control: “the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. … this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; … The Panopticon … automatizes and disindividualizes power” (Foucault 1995, 201–202).

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so are you. So is everybody. There’s always gonna be somebody prettier or more talented or richer than you, but it shouldn’t affect how you see yourself. You label everybody to try to keep them down, but you end up missing out on all this great stuff around you. You have Wesley, and you treat him like he’s stupid, but he isn’t. And people don’t like him because he’s with you. They like him because he’s, like, an amazing guy. Look, I like myself. I wouldn’t wanna be anybody else. And I realize now that none of this matters to me. But it does to you. It’s your dream. And I totally support that. Just don’t tear me down for not giving a shit about your labels, because in the end, they’re meaningless.

At the homecoming dance it becomes evident that the makeover was not only transformative for Bianca, Wesley, too, has been made over. When the principal as expected announces him the king to Madison’s queen, he does not even bother to enter the stage and take part in the coronation. His refusing to participate in the ritual is tantamount with a withdrawing of consent to the order he belonged to and represented to this point. He may not have changed his outer appearance, but his makeover is substantial: Not just academically (now a B student and eligible for his scholarship) and spiritually, he has also gained autonomy, proving that the deal he and Bianca struck was indeed a fair contract with an even exchange of services. Appropriately, the ending is simultaneously a kitschy romcom feel-good fulfillment of the promised romantic redemption of both Wesley and Bianca who have individually and as a couple transcended the rigid borders of the class system, and a pragmatic and indeed very adult conclusion: The big night with all its excitement was not just a dreamlike spike in the graph, but the contract-cum-romance is maintained in the form of a long-distance relationship that allows both to pursue their individual goals as well as to maintain a monogamous heteronormative relationship and still live at their parents’ houses.19 They 19 In her analysis of The Plastic Age and the flapper film in general as a precursor for teen films, Driscoll talks about the ways in which romance is enacted in teen-geared narratives, also applicable to the quasi-marriage ending for Bianca and Wesley in The DUFF : “One of the key differences between flapper films and girl-centered teen film in later decades is that they might feasibly end in marriage, which was gradually removed from the realm of films about adolescence while romance stayed central. For centuries across different media, plots where girls played central roles have closed with a romantic couple, but the teen film belongs to

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have made themselves and each other over to become the ideal version of the failed model of their suburban middle-class parents while remaining in their accustomed childhood roles, a mixture of progression and regression. They have found a niche within the system that posits individualism as generally possible within these systemic confinements and proposes autonomy and agency as something that is attainable through ambivalence. By blurring the edges of the class system, by diversifying categories and coming up with hybrid types and new labels, the borders become, or at least seem, porous. Both Bianca’s and Wesley’s makeovers were necessary to produce unclear positions, not to graduate to the more sharply defined types they aspired to become or to stay as they were at the beginning, but to become ambivalent and hybrid, something that for instance Madison can never be, as a one-dimensional character who believes that “the thing you have to understand is what happens in high school is gonna stay with us forever.” Ultimately, Madison may be right, as no true alternative to both the social order of high school and its depiction in teen films is given here.20 This leads to the following equation in which high school appears as an actant in its own right (not only as thematic backdrop), just as prominently as the individual teens: While adolescence is partly a biologic transition that just happens, cannot be delayed, stopped, or altered, the makeover as a produced transition driven by external forces (or internal forces caused by external forces, such as social pressure in its various forms) is something that decidedly does not just happen but is actively pursued and performed. The makeover as a sometimes chosen, sometimes forced-on (mostly both) entry into the Symbolic, performativity, and subjectification becomes a metaphor for the socialization process

the extension of adolescent development and thus delay of the full social maturity with which marriage is associated” (2011, 24). 20 Some Kind of Wonderful (which is mostly seen as a makeover film diptych from the John Hughes think tank along with Pretty in Pink) is a rare exception to offer a deviation: The one who has truly transformed and reached autonomy is Amanda, as she is now able to exist without defining herself by the male she is with. She says: “Remember how I said I’d rather be with someone for the wrong reasons than alone for the right ones? I’d rather be right. It’s gonna feel good to stand on my own.” Amanda is one of the few makeover characters whose outcome is not an indirect, rerouted affirmation of the status quo, but a genuine development towards individuation.

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of a high school education, of the recognition of an order, of an ideology, and of its laws. High school is not only the space in which the makeover is enacted, high school = the makeover. And high school, like the mall or the prom dance, is also a pars pro toto, which metonymically refers to the larger apparatus of which it is an institution. Therefore, the makeover narrative needs not only to be scrutinized in regard to its gender organization, the nature of its social landscapes, or many other appendant, implied or included discourses. Much more, these narratives are an expression of what Althusser calls ideology, what Foucault calls power, what for Lacan is the nom-du-père, and what Bourdieu alludes to in his theories of capital: a capitalist class system, its borders, and the way it symbolically and literally deforms, de-forms, and subjectifies.21 High school as an actant inserts itself into the film and its action in the form of high-school-as-institution, and as a locale, a material setting, and signifier. The high school in The DUFF (its architecture, aisles, lockers, gyms, and class rooms) visually does not deviate from the plethora of cinematic representations of suburban high schools, which are relatively stable with an almost unchanging spatial organization. Depending on the era in which a film is set and/or produced, details change, such as the clothes, hairstyles, the ethnic variety of the students and teachers passing through the aisles, or technological objects such as computer labs and cellphones as historical markers. But the school that is shown here must be seen as indebted to actual high schools, as a Hollywood invention, and as a translation of translations of 1950s cinematic high schools, and is in that sense as co-produced by reality and Hollywood, and along with all the other comparable cinematic schools stabilized by their many reiterations. Like the rain forest from the Boa Vista expedition Latour writes about is made visible and translated, but also simultaneously produced by the translations (“This expedition … discovers or constructs” [1999, 53]), school is simultaneously translated from reality into cinematic depiction as well as produced or invented by it. The cinematic schools constitute an apparatus that simply undergoes surface variations, but essentially 21 For

a mobilization of Bourdieu’s different forms of capital (1986) for an engagement with teen film’s preoccupation with class also see Driscoll (2011, 59) and Smith (2017, 64–104).

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remains unchanged, comparable to the cinematic representations of the suburbs themselves. In that sense, high school (or the suburbs) functions as a module with a fixed set of qualities and connotations that can be used as a stable building block into which stable knowledge is built and which in turn contributes to the stabilization of this knowledge.

Character Organization: Types and Updates The DUFF ’s success in attaching itself to a generic tradition by not simply reiterating a formula, but by carrying it further in the way it transforms known and established types and tropes in a timely manner without losing its place within a chain of reference, to some extent, is achieved by being very frank about its sources. In a featurette, Allison Janney who plays Ms. Piper calls the film “an updated version of Mean Girls including all social media” and director Ari Sandel aptly labels it “Social Media Breakfast Club.” There are numerous and clearly intended similarities, especially with She’s All That and Mean Girls from which The DUFF adopts certain visual and narrative devices (e.g., alternative outcomes for scenes, which visualize the presence of the voice-over narrator alongside the protagonist in both films, or the insertion of quickly-cut music video-like parenthetical scenes that visualize the narrator’s streamof-consciousness). Complementary to the content, the interactions of the characters, or the dialogues, the film’s ability to visually signify, to translate the form into actual matter, is what gives it coherence. The chain of transformations in this regard is not abstract at all, as reference can only circulate stably when the material dimension is adequate for the respective translation. In the same way, the settings and other elements of the mise-enscène have certain effects on spectatorship, the actors, their bodies, and acting styles do, and they are simultaneously individual as well as timespecific articulations of related concepts that then find varying expressions. Bianca is portrayed by Mae Whitman who was 26 years old when she played the high school senior. Whitman certainly not only brings with her the materiality of her body and her adulthood, but also the

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reality of her body-of-work as an actress. She played a significant supporting role as Mary Elizabeth in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), a quirky character with subcultural affiliation and mannerisms not unlike The DUFF ’s Bianca. In this regard, the human behind the role already is situated, or even lives in the teen film genre and embodies a teen film type. Besides all the information that unfurls on the connotative level, within the film’s diegetic reality she is presented as non-conventional by her body size, especially when juxtaposed with her antagonist Madison and her conventionally beautiful, “hot” friends. It is not only her interests (cult horror films), fashion sense (dungarees), or degree of feminine masquerade (e.g., no carefully curated hairstyle or makeup) that signify her status here, it is also her size. The casting choices adhere to the statistical median of the average height for females in the characters’ age group according to the CDC’s Vital and Health Statistics issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Bianca is evidently smaller than average, her best friends are slightly above average, Madison is evidently taller again than average. In the same way, Bianca is determined as not-conventionally-beautiful, Madison is constructed as fashion-model-like by writing, casting, camera perspectives, and acting. Whitman’s comedic acting style and the way she makes use of gestures, facial expressions, and her entire body is again juxtaposed with Bella Thorne’s deliberately flat interpretation of Madison. Whitman’s Bianca is not only more multilayered due to the construction of the characters and the acting styles of both actresses, she is also filmed from more perspectives and significantly more close-ups: The multitude of perspectives visualizes a higher ambivalence and complexity, especially played out against the cardboard character Madison who is staged to be glamorous, but under-complex, predictable, aloof, and dull. The mise-en-scène, and before it the casting, actively and visibly co-produce meanings. In comparable texts, the casting does not enforce the writing as obviously as in The DUFF. Mean Girls’ Cady Heron (played by Lindsay Lohan, a teen film staple in her own right) is mainly marked outsider by costume, name (sounding like Katie, but idiosyncratically spelled CA-D-Y—cause of some minor comic confusion), and by the backstory of her character: Due to her parents being research zoologists, Cady has spent most of her life in Africa and was homeschooled until the age

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of 16. Her peers are delighted by her almost child-like innocence and lack of tactical knowledge—or of social and cultural capital—because she has not been hardened/indoctrinated by a high school socialization. “I love her. She’s like a Martian,” says Regina, feared-and-adored leader of the Plastics, the alpha female girl gang. Cady’s outsider-dom pertains to socialization and geography (positing African wilderness as counterpart to American civilization), but not to physical otherness. When Molly Ringwald’s character in Pretty in Pink enters her makeover she is an individualist with a decidedly working-class background and a family constellation that deviates from middle-class conventions (motherless and taking care of her unemployed slacker father), who is somewhat ashamed of her origins but aspiring to become eligible for her upper-class love interest. The casting does not reinforce the text that much. In a time span of less than two years, this was the third film in which Ringwald starred after Sixteen Candles (1984) and The Breakfast Club. Regardless of what she brought with her as actress and person, and while not a typical Hollywood face, she was already established in the teen film cosmos and she brought with her specific connotations that induced a transfer of knowledge22 which arguably eradicated any outer-diegetic existence of the actress and allowed for her to become a projection screen on which contrary teen film types such as The Breakfast Club’s upper-class princess as well as Pretty in Pink’s working-class weirdo could be played out. The casting of Rachel Leigh Cook in She’s All That is even less of a weird choice for the seemingly weird character as which Laney Boggs is introduced. Cook’s outsider-dom is strictly claimed on the textual level— which is all the more highlighted by the direct parody in Not Another Teen Movie in which the made-over’s makeover simply and solely consists of the instantaneous letting down her hair and taking off her classes to stunned reactions. The respective antagonists’ casting is more consistent, but then, their function is also more consistent: They embody the high rank in their 22 For “transfer of knowledge,” see Seeßlen. He writes about the re-use of known, and thus already connoted, pieces of music in film soundtracks and thus about music as medium for the transfer of knowledge (2004, 75). But other actants can become such media, too. Christina Lee has dedicated an entire chapter of her teen film study to Molly Ringwald (2016, 43–58) and to her capacity to occupy such a function.

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social order, a status that is both desired and despised, as “upper class” is commonly equivalent with arrogance, snobbishness, classism, and a constant performance of the higher rank by behavior, clothing, and other demonstrations of status and power. Accordingly, the characters are constructed by drawing on several stereotypes, such as the alpha female/male behavior of the princess/the jock or the status-consciousness of the preppy. The different makeover films’ antagonists are more obviously incarnations of the same concept than are their counterparts, almost as if the embodiments of power in a capitalist order are less prone to change than the other end of that order. What becomes evident is a crucial political evaluation in the fluidity of the disenfranchised outsider character: Here, the translations are remarkably more profound in contrast to the consistency of the rather soft translations the popular in-power characters undergo. The outsiders’ variability reflects their individualism that is at stake and ultimately reached and re-gained via the dramaturgically necessary detours and their era’s time-specific idea and markers of individualism. However, the steadiness of the antagonists reflects an unideological ideology embedded in an unchanging order with seemingly porous borders that deflect from the fact that they might actually be not porous at all but stable as can be.

Media Use: Translating the Bully and the Extensions of Teens Timothy Shary dedicates a subchapter titled “Teen tech” to the appearance of new technologies and their cinematic representation in teen films. Looking at teens and technology from a historical perspective, he links the end of the teen film’s love affair with technology-centered themes to the high-tech-induced traumas of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion and Chernobyl: With the introduction of personal computers into American homes in the 1980s came a corresponding concern with how young people may use them. At the same time, the mounting fears of teens’ abilities to understand science better than adults was finding its way into the popular

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culture through a number of films that explored teens using technology. Such films were very rare before the 1980s … when suddenly studios took on a wide variety of plots in which adolescents threaten adult culture with their scientific knowledge … Yet as teen films were beginning to take teenagers seriously in the 1980s, they also began taking their intellectual capacities seriously as well, resulting in many poignant films of the time that celebrated teenage intelligence, at least until that intelligence became too problematic to even promote. (Shary 2005, 72–73)

It would be incorrect to equate science (which is mostly Shary’s concern23 ) and technology and also to lump different technologies, media, and eras together, since technology as a trope never had a stable function. The newer and more advanced technology gets, the more complex and multifaceted its roles in the narrative and in the making of tech-themed films become. Beyond the historical perspective, a cybernetic perspective on teen film needs to be developed which takes into account technology as an actant and not only as a prop or an atmospheric background theme. One pattern Shary identifies that applies to The DUFF in the same way it applies to WarGames (1983) and other examples he mentions, is the “mounting fears of teens’ abilities to understand science better than adults.” Adults play a significant, but small part in The DUFF —a most common characteristic of teen films: The presence of adults can be felt and they sometimes impact the teens’ lives, but they rarely are central figures, an effect reminiscent of Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comic strips, in which they may appear regularly, but only their legs are visible, never their faces (in the animated films, their voices are trombone sounds instead of intelligible speech). This “Charlie Brown Effect” to some extent defines The DUFF : Besides Bianca’s mother, the only two adults with more screen time than a few short moments are Mr. Arthur, 23 Also see Generation Multiplex, where Shary dedicates a chapter to the “teen science film” (2002, 180–209) as distinct, albeit small, subgenre. The DUFF besides the sub-sub-plot of Casey’s hacking activity to delete the defaming YouTube clip from the Internet isn’t concerned with science, the treatment of new media and technologies however is in line with a pattern Shary attests to science teen films: “The image of youth in science films is always one of awe and fascination, on the part of both the protagonists and the adult perspectives that inform the films’ production, always emphasizing the newness and surprising complexity—and hence mystery—of youth’s involvement with science and technology” (ibid., 181).

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the chief editor of the school paper, and Principal Buchanan. Yet, to establish the technology theme, the adults are necessary for contouring the teens and as embodiment of adult fears about teens and technology/media. The film narrates the generational gap via the gap in media literacy and goes to great lengths to contrast media-savvy teenagers and incompetent, struggling, and even fearfully hostile adults, not only separated by status and age, but technologically estranged. The obligatory hashtag when first introducing Bianca’s mother is “#WhatsAHashtag?,” at one point she is shown taking selfies for her e-dating platform profile, trying to adopt the young peoples’ techniques (the “duck face”) she seems to know only by hearsay. After the defaming YouTube video has gone viral, principal Buchanan’s handling of the situation shows him in the clichéd role of the struggling adult who is out of touch with new developments and views new media as harmful and corrupting agents, calling the students as “YOLO terrorists” that have compromised the school with “the stench of cyber bullying.” Technology and social media are something adults might well be aware of but do not truly understand, something that belongs decidedly within the realm of the teenagers. By emphasizing this contrast, social media as cultural technique and the technological apparatuses necessary to navigate it and to accumulate its inherent cultural capital is attributed to young people (accordingly, the principal’s strategy is confiscating all phones, both draconian and ineffective, but in line with how the school functions as mechanism of socialization by applying discipline). Comparably, when Bianca is introduced as a lover of cult horror films, she is shown on her bed watching a zombie movie on her laptop. When on the other hand her mother’s “divine inspiration” strikes while watching The Simpsons, she is watching the show on a traditional television set while sitting on the living room couch. Even though for both age groups media and ubiquitous screens occupy a dominant position, Bianca’s interactive and personalized media use with her own device in her own room as contemporary mode vs. her mother’s linear, non-interactive media use visualize how laptops and smartphones have become “extensions of teens,” to adopt Marshall McLuhan’s notion, or even machines that prescribe certain behaviors, in the sense of the technological determinism Friedrich

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Kittler proclaimed.24 The lives of the teens in The DUFF are inextricably interwoven with the media they use: Madison as “#FutureRealityStar” with two YouTube channels and a sidekick who constantly documents her every move with a phone camera is participating in the competitive culture of popularity and knows how to maneuver the attention economy in which she is enmeshed, openly turning herself into a marketable commodity. Even the less competitive girls around Bianca have fully incorporated media into their interpersonal interaction to more or less the same degree. Bianca temporarily breaks off her friendship with Casey and Jess, confronts them in person, but executes the break-off medially (“unfriending,” “unfollowing,” and “taking them off ” of the different social media platforms) in order to become “a free woman.” The world in The DUFF is completely pervaded with media and every action is seen as something that can be evaluated within the logic of an attention economy. When Bianca has to practice talking to strangers in the mall, one especially awkward interaction ends by Bianca’s test object assuming that this can only be a prank (“It’s a YouTube video, right? Oh, man, you’re so good. Totally believable. How many hits did this get? Where can I find it online? Man, so many unanswered questions. Really good.”). One of her peers after the principal’s confiscation of all phones angrily approaches her and says “I just thought of something funny, and now nobody’s gonna know. Hope you’re happy.” These situations all work as parody of the generational technology gap embodied by the teens and adults in the film, but from an adult perspective smuggled into a teen narrative, as the evaluation of media is rather negative: In the fashion of a cautionary tale, we can see what happens when the “YOLO terrorists” are on the loose and boost their Darwinistic competition with the help of media and technology. The reality of the characters is semantically charged by media and mediated interactions, yet there is a qualitative and semiotic difference between their respective media of choice: Bianca’s forum is the school newspaper (democracy), Madison has two YouTube channels (narcissism, coercion), as well as the panoptic Caitlyn and her camera phone

24 Referring

here to Kittler’s famous dictum with which he begins the preface to Gramophone Film Typewriter: “Media determine our situation” (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter 1999, xxxix). For McLuhan’s extensions of man, see Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).

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(surveillance), and Casey is a gifted “white hat” computer hacker (subversion). These media are not necessarily “extensions of man,” rather they are signifiers for different intentions and different relationships these teens have entered with their machines (or different machinic milieus they are embedded in). Madison as a cyberbully simply uses her media competence as an enhancement of regular bullying and visualizes the dark side of teen tech: not knowledge or education, or scientific curiosity which Shary ascribes to be connoted by technology, but narcissism and bullying are her project. Bianca’s allegiance to the traditional school newspaper is a semi-nostalgic proposition—there is even a print and an online edition—reassuring that there is good and bad media use, but either one is more prone to happen in specific media outlets. (Had the film been released two years later, there would be an argument in there to read its negotiation of technology and media as analogy to the current political landscape in which a twittering, narcissistic bully with access to the POTUS twitter account that grants him an even wider audience is, and stages himself as, the counter position to traditional media and their insistence on a free traditional media ecology as cornerstone of democracy.) Media and machines when they become machines of selfdocumentation like in The DUFF facilitate a quasi-anthropological perspective, as the self-documentation generates a self-mapping. These mediations and media literalize the notion of a peer group as social network: a social scientist’s dream come true, all the social media which are referred to in Bianca, Casey, and Jess’s breakup conversation, make relations visible and quantifiable. For a narcissist such as Madison, they are a tool to examine her status, for the nice teens who merely use these media to connect, to share funny comments and images, they still are a medial reification of intangible feelings: Friendship, as well as its termination, is realized via media. Beyond the look of social media and its agency in the narrative and a certain quickness in the editing, the film mostly does not stray far from Hollywood or teen film aesthetics. The one moment that stands out in The DUFF in which we are confronted with new images entering a filmic universe that came into existence through the presence of social media is when the YouTube video Madison and Caitlyn have

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uploaded to humiliate her goes viral and the picture gradually morphs into a mosaic of screens to illustrate the proliferation of the clip into a prismatic polyphony by the innumerable participants of the social networks, visualizing a hybrid human-media-machine and suggesting that the DUFF teens coexist in reality and virtual reality (see Fig. 2.3). The maps and networks the film produces by its visual networks (even though they are not visible in the film but mostly referred to in the dialogue or by graphic allusions) join the chain of films that employ mapping in the form of what Kaveney terms the “anthropology shot” (2006, 3, 56), a device to subdivide the totality of teens into separate groups and classes. Often visualized by these groups’ seating arrangements in the school cafeteria, the quasi-geographical maps, their parodies, and diversifications have led to highly and comically specific subcategories (examples include the manifesto of the Breakfast Club, Mean Girls, Clueless, or Me and Earl and the Dying Girl [2015]) (see Fig. 2.4). The DUFF in this sense can be seen as an anthropological teen film with its focus on classification, categories, the maps it explicitly suggests and the implicit mapping conducted by its protagonists. On the level of its technology discourse, this map is extended by an effective device: When the film ends and Bianca and Wesley drive from their parents’ houses toward the suburban (and rather close) horizon in a jeep while narrator-Bianca voices truisms about individualism (“In the end, it’s not about popularity or

Fig. 2.3 A mosaic of screens, becoming the visualization of a hybrid humanmedia-machine

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Fig. 2.4 The anthropology shot subdivides the totality of teens into separate groups and classes. This quasi-geographical map is from Mean Girls

even getting the guy. It’s about understanding that no matter what label is thrown your way, only you can define yourself. Take it from a DUFF.”), we segue into the final credits and on the margins, a novelty takes place. The design of the credits again refers to the look of various social media, their login screens, and other graphic conventions familiar to their users, they are collaged with the Hollywood comedy standard bloopers while the actual twitter names of the actresses and actors appear on the screen. The intradiegetic characters and the extradiegetic actors are put on the same medial level by taking place in the same media. The characters and actors not only share an archive with their audience, they share networks (in the social media and the Latourian sense), and realities as the reality of the actresses and actors becomes congruent with the reality of social media. The roles start to seep into the humans playing them and further anchor them in a genre (or a multitude of genres) and suggest that these actresses are part of a genre even when they are not acting. The mixing of roles, realities, ideology, and Hollywood ideologies pretends to blur the

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lines where the fiction ends and reality begins and therefore calls into question such a division in an age of simultaneity and surveillance. Just as narrator-Bianca as voice-over presence keeps the reference stable as an authorial instance, this is an attempt at producing congruence between signifier and signified, between form and matter. Coherence is ensured by making visible the presence of referents in the text. In the following quote, Latour speaks about “the scientific text,” but we have seen in The DUFF even though it is a different form of narrative, how “its own verification” is embedded: The scientific text is different from all other forms of narrative. It speaks of a referent, present in the text, in a form other than prose: a chart, diagram, equation, map, or sketch. Mobilizing its own internal referent, the scientific text carries within itself its own verification. (Latour 1999, 56)

This carried-within verification is decidedly and self-awarely constituted by the way in which The DUFF carves out its position in relation to other texts. Its renewal of established teen film types and tropes such as bullying, friendship, and the makeover partially functions exactly because it openly connects itself to other referents and makes visible the way in which it updates them. The makeover in this sense is not only what structures the narrative, but also the premise and principle by which The DUFF works. It is not only a film about a makeover; it is a film that makes over—and therefore a film that not only illustrates the notion of circulating reference, but that actually lets reference circulate. The text aligns itself with other texts and offers itself as a text with which other, future texts can be aligned—given that its strategies of transforming and renewing prove to be stable enough to keep reference circulating.

POSTSCRIPTUM As recent and important additions to the makeover subgenre, I briefly want to mention two coming-of-age dramas centering on the so-called Gay conversion therapy. Their take on the notion of a makeover differs dramatically from the traditional form—especially concerning the

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agency of the made-over. The makeover itself inverts the typical balance of choice and force; it is less allegorical, less fairy-tale-like, less colorful, and instead more violent, more intrusive, and more real. The Miseducation of Cameron Post (directed by Desiree Akhavan, released August 2018) and Boy Erased (Joel Edgerton, November 2018) were inserted into the teen film canon at the same cultural moment, and they are both remarkable adaptations of literary texts, personal in content and outspoken in their positionings. Even though the premise is very similar, they work differently, suggesting a different aesthetics and politics. Conversion therapy as a pseudoscientific treatment conducted by Christian fundamentalist hard-liners with the goal of changing individuals’ sexual orientations has already been at the center of Jamie Babbitt’s But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), possibly somewhat ahead of its time due to working through its subject matter in a comedy format. In these two 2018 films, conversion therapy is situated in (cultural, historical, and diegetic) environments that assert a claim to realism as opposed to other “brainwashing” teen narratives, most famously Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of A Clockwork Orange with Alex undergoing the fictional “Ludovico” conditioning technique. The sci-fi/dystopia aspects and the allegorical capacities of such texts are displaced here by the real-life absurdity and abusiveness of the depicted content matter, as both films use the temporal displacement of a nostalgic mode (The Miseducation of Cameron Post plays in 1994, Boy Erased in 2004) to generate a this-really-happened effect. When watching The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Boy Erased back-to-back and choosing which actants to follow (the ones that suggest themselves most ostensibly are religion/faith, sexuality/lust/desire, cinematography, casting, setting, language, (self-)writing), the ways in which the two films mobilize the same devices produces significant differences. Besides one being a more starstudded, major studio-produced film and the other an independent produced on a significantly smaller budget, the more obvious variant seems to be The Miseducation of Cameron Post’ s female protagonist, who is sent to “God’s Promise” to overcome her lesbian tendencies, as opposed to Boy Erased ’s Jared, who is forced to battle his gayness at the “Love In

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Action Camp.”25 It is not only the foregrounding of male experience that makes Boy Erased a more traditional Hollywood narrative (even though admittedly its subject matter isn’t a very Hollywood topic): The central conflict is not the teenager’s experience or individuation, but the family’s dilemma and especially the relationship between a boy and his father. Neither the characters, their inner lives, nor Jared’s sexuality are granted much in the way of complexity, almost framing it as a parable with a moral lesson (befitting its diegetic religious environments), an after-school special, as opposed to a narrative of individuation. Jared is presented as the misunderstood and hurt voice of reason who in the end both stands up to the aggressive and incompetent therapist and to his conservative yet decent father. His standing up though is not an act of rebellion: In his pain and resolve, he remains friendly, respectful, and a level-headed and eloquent young man whose good manners mark the contrast with the dangerous violence and bigotry of dogmatic fundamentalism. Jared is constructed as an American hero, a lone wolf type determined to go his own way, a person whose individualism cannot be broken, whose Christian faith will remain intact, and who ultimately will be able to achieve reconciliation with the father. The ending is followed by actual photos of Garrard Conley (the author of the nonfiction memoir Boy Erased is based on) with his parents, accompanying text centers on his marriage to another man, his writings as empowerment for the LGBTIQ community as well as on the fact that conversion therapy still hasn’t been outlawed in 36 states—reminders of the film’s authenticity claim and its didactics.

25The

camp as a specifically American and teen-centered locus and as a rite/site-of-initiation in a different form is a teen film staple worked through for instance in numerous slasher films after Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), as it offers the isolation and a mostly adult-free space for teenagers to explore transgression and confront horror. The gay conversion camps here are less burlesque, but just as horrible sites, whose power and coercion climax in the self-mutilation and the suicide, respectively, of an inmate.

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Love, lust, and bodies are problematized in the film, thereby tragically keeping in line with the pathologization and shaming of homosexuality that takes place at the horrid camp: There is not a single physical experience in the film that is not terrible. Jared’s attempt at a sexual moment with his high school girlfriend fails due to his homosexuality, he is raped by another boy in college, and a boy at camp will later take his own life after a degrading ritual “burial” in which he is beaten with a bible by everyone present including his family. Despite the film’s well-meaning intentions, homosexuality is depicted as devoid of sexuality. Gayness is “normal”; however, there is nothing sexy, or at least nice, about being a gay teenager here, the gay body is not a site for any pleasurable experience whatsoever, except for the outlook before the end credits roll that marriage/happiness might await. The fatalism that befalls the (rural) homosexual as a destructive trope of LGBTIQ narratives that Boy Erased doesn’t question, or offer an alternative to, but visualizes, might ultimately be resolved between father and son, but only after Jared has moved to New York, which is depicted ostentatiously as a multiracial, tolerant counter-space to his native Arkansas. The assessment isn’t new, as many rural teen films (e.g., The Wizard of Oz [1939], What’s Eating Gilbert Grape [1993], or Boys Don’t Cry [1999]) equate “getting out’ as the only feasible solution for non-normative teen identities to prosper and mature. Even though that might often be close to the truth, it sends a bleak signal to LGBTIQ teens in rural America by reiterating the impossibility of deviation in the heartland, a coding addressed by Mary L. Gray. In Out in the Country (2009), her study on queer visibility in rural areas, she assigns the media a significant function in circulating the social grammar, appearance, and sites of LGBTIQ-ness and how “rurality itself is depicted as antithetical to LGBT identities. Mass media consistently narrate rural LGBT identities as out of place, necessarily estranged from authentic (urban) queerness” (2009, 12). In terms of inclusion or acceptance, Boy Erased is not as progressive as its subject matter suggests, as it doesn’t utilize the Hollywood dream machine to code Otherness or gayness in non-fatalistic terms. The Miseducation of Cameron Post on the other hand manages to propose sexualities as something singular and fluid by its portrayal of multilayered characters, both among the teens and among the camp

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counselors. The depiction of lust and sexuality is more in line with the film’s larger project and shows adolescent confusion with, but also an enjoyment of the body. The sex scenes are awkward, intense, and realistic, but not in and of themselves painful and/or shameful. They are neither shot along the lines of horny male fantasies about “chicks making out,” nor with a problematizing or othering gaze. Director Desiree Akhavan consciously and confidently stages this aspect of the coming-of-age experience to offer a more adequate depiction of female sexuality, stating that “nothing disgusts and angers me more than the disparity between the portrayals on screen of men receiving pleasure and women receiving pleasure” (Northrop 2018, 23).26 Both the film’s aesthetics and conclusion indicate that it is possible to use the premise as a means for a different outcome other than that Boy Erased proposes. Aesthetically what is most apparent is how The Miseducation of Cameron Post ’s color palette remains in a warm spectrum and the slightly unstable handheld camera allows for a different movement toward and with the characters. Boy Erased ’s camera perspectives are generally further removed from the characters, have more steadiness, and its color palette leans to a darker, more blue-gray spectrum, the only exception in terms of color being the New York scenes in the end. The images of The Miseducation of Cameron Post contain more movement, fluidity and indeed color, an aesthetics echoing its attempt to derive a livable future from past experiences. Accordingly, The Miseducation of Cameron Post ’s relationality works toward a different goal and not only to contour Cameron further as protagonist, but instead to introduce other fully formed and complex characters along with their desires and difficulties in their public and private lives, too. Cameron’s allies in the camp are her fellow “disciples” Jane, a girl with a prosthetic leg, and Adam, a Lakotan wíŋkte or “two-spirit.” The film’s politics of inclusion are thus further echoed by inserting a disabled and an indigenous presence. Adam’s backstory (his father became a politician and reinvented himself as Christian, so “me being like this 26 “It’s important to look at the American ratings system; if somebody films a scene of a woman giving head to a man, it’s rated R, but if a woman gets pleasure in a scene, it’s an X rating. If a man goes down on a woman, you will lose your R rating and go to porn territory” (Akhavan interviewed by Northrop 2018, 24).

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fucks his image”) introduces the Lakotan mindset and language, in which a concept of a “third gender” exists on the same level as others and even has a term that linguistically allots it an equal position. Thereby, Christian fundamentalism is established as a crude und ultimately harmful binary system of good|bad, God|Satan, heterosexual|homosexual, normal|perverted. American Christian fundamentalism overriding indigenous beliefs, languages, sexual, and identity politics contains a critique of American colonialism that ranges from the historical colonization of indigenous peoples to the ongoing colonization of the sexual identities of non-normative teens. The film ends ambiguously when the three friends will use the pretext of a hike to sneak away and hitchhike into an unclear future with the film’s last minutes showing them on the loading area of a pickup truck, providing no clear answers, a classic American road film motif. In Boy Erased, adolescent individuation is a lonely act, in The Miseducation of Cameron Post it is a collective becoming. Where Boy Erased opts for the clarity of a prevailing American individualism embodied by a heroic man with an unwavering belief in the institution of the family that can overcome divergent gender identities, The Miseducation of Cameron Post suggests a productive queerness and sexual identity as a spectrum. Multiplicity, companionship that doesn’t have to be situated within the nuclear family, and ultimately processuality/movement: They haven’t arrived at a safe place and fully resolved who they want to become; their freedom is not the freedom to enter gay marriage, but the freedom to journey and to stay in-between. Instead of positing adolescence as an intermediate stage that must lead to a more clearly delineated, seemingly stable state, “the teenager” is taken seriously and acknowledged: Being teen is not just a step toward being the improved and actualized adult version of yourself, it’s one of a thousand tiny self-actualizations. My superimposition of The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Boy Erased isn’t meant as a comparison to rate them in relation to one another. In the way they resonate with each other though, each film’s singular approach to the topic gains more contour and demonstrates the potentialities of teen narratives. Director Desiree Akhavan deliberately set out to make a teen film that incorporates the “rawness, weirdness, messiness, and ugliness” (Northrop 2018, 22) of the John Hughes

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films she grew up with, while acknowledging that his “films were about straight white people … and didn’t challenge the status quo” (2018, 23). Akhavan expands the range and explicitness of the ways in which teen identities and especially teen sexualities are represented here. Boy Erased gives us on the other hand an indication of what can be done with particular teen-centered themes within a mainstream Hollywood drama, we see how comparably simplistic and didactic these themes are when approached in a way that makes them more palatable, where in contrast The Miseducation of Cameron Post gives an indication what of can (and should) be achieved within the teen film genre in order to keep it from becoming stagnant and repetitive.

Filmography 10 Things I Hate About You, Gil Junger, Buena Vista Pictures, USA, 1999. A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, Warner Brothers, UK/USA, 1971. American Karate Tiger, Robert Radler, Imperial Entertainment, USA, 1993. Boy Erased, Joel Edgerton, Focus Features, USA, 2018. Boys Don’t Cry, Kimberly Peirce, Fox Searchlight Pictures, USA, 1999. The Breakfast Club, John Hughes, Universal Pictures, USA, 1985. Broken Blossoms, D. W. Griffith, United Artists, USA, 1919. But I’m a Cheerleader, Jamie Babbit, Lions Gate Films, USA, 1999. Can’t Buy Me Love, Troy Byer, Warner Brothers, USA, 2003. Christine, John Carpenter, Columbia Pictures, USA, 1983. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, RKO Radio Pictures, USA, 1941. Class Act, Randall Miller, Warner Brothers, USA, 1992. Clueless, Amy Heckerling, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1995. Deal of a Lifetime, Paul Levine, Tomorrow Film Corporation, USA, 1999. The DUFF, Ari Sandel, CBS Films, USA, 2015. Friday the 13th, Sean S. Cunningham, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1980. Grease, Randal Kleiser, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1978. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, Francis Lawrence, Lionsgate Films, USA, 2015. Jawbreaker, Darren Stein, TriStar Pictures, USA, 1999. Karate Kid, John G. Avildsen, Columbia Pictures, USA, 1984. Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig, A24, USA, 2017.

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Lolita, Stanley Kubrick, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, UK/USA, 1962. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, Wes Ball, 20th Century Fox, USA, 2015. Mean Girls, Mark Water, Paramount Pictures, USA, 2004. The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Desiree Akhavan, FilmRise, UK/USA, 2018. Never Back Down, Jeff Wadlow, Summit Entertainment, USA, 2008. Not Another Teen Movie, Joel Gallen, Columbia Pictures, USA, 2001. Once Bitten, Howard Storm, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, USA, 1985. Peeping Tom, Michael Powell, Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors, UK/USA, 1960. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky, Summit Entertainment, USA, 2012. The Plastic Age, Wesley Ruggles, Preferred Pictures, USA, 1925. Pretty in Pink, Howard Deutch, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1986. The Princess Diaries, Garry Marshall, Buena Vista Pictures, USA, 2001. Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1960. She’s All That, Robert Iscove, Miramax Films, USA, 1999. She’s the Man, Andy Fickman, DreamWorks Distribution, USA, 2006. Sidekicks, Aaron Norris, Triumph Films, USA, 1992. Simpsons, Matt Groening, 20th Century Fox Television, USA, 1989–. Sixteen Candles, John Hughes, Universal Pictures, USA, 1984. Some Kind of Wonderful, Howard Deutch, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1987. Spider-Man, Sam Raimi, Columbia Pictures, USA, 2002. Twilight Saga, Summit Entertainment, USA, 2008–2012. WarGames, John Badham, MGM/UA Entertainment Company, USA, 1983. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Lasse Hallström, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1993. The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming, Loew’s Inc, USA, 1939.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis. (1970) 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. London and New York: Verso. Altman, Rick. 1999. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute. Aslinger, Ben. 2014. “Clueless about Listening Formations?” Cinema Journal: The Journal of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies 53 (3): 126–131.

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Austin, John Langshaw. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd Edition. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. Barthes, Roland. 1964. Elements of Semiology. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1974. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1977. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill & Wang. Bentham, Jeremy. 1798. Proposal for a New and Less Expensive Mode of Employing and Reforming Convicts. London. Best, Amy L. 2000. Prom Night: Youth, Schools, and Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Bothmann, Nils. 2018. Action, Detection and Shane Black. Berlin: Springer. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, 241–258. Westport: Greenwood. ———. (1972) 2013. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Box Office Mojo. 2015. “2015 Domestic Gross.” Accessed 28 July 2017. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2015. Bulman, Robert C. 2004. Hollywood Goes to High School: Cinema, Schools and American Culture. New York: Worth Publishers. Callon, Michel. 1991. “Techno-Economic Networks and Irreversibility.” In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, edited by John Law, 132–161. London and New York: Routledge. CDC. 2014. “Vital and Health Statistics. Anthropometric Reference Data for Children and Adults: United States, 2011–2014.” Accessed 9 September 2017. www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_03/sr03_039.pdf. Considine, David. 1985. The Cinema of Adolescence. Jefferson: McFarlane. Driscoll, Catherine. 2011. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Oxford and New York: Berg. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) 16: 22–27. ———. (1975) 1995. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Book. Gilligan, Sarah. 2011. “Performing Post-Feminist Identities: Gender, Costume and Transformation in Teen Cinema.” In Women on Screen: Feminism and

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Femininity in Visual Culture, edited by Melanie Waters, 165–182. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gordon, C. Wayne. 1957. The Social System of the High School: A Study in the Sociology of Adolescence. Glencoe: Free Press. Gray, Mary L. 2009. Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York: New York University Press. Hölter, Eva. 2002. Der Dichter der Höller und des Exils: Historische und Systematische Profile der deutschsprachigen Dante-Rezeption. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Kaveney, Roz. 2006. Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Films and Television from ‘Heathers’ to ‘Veronica Mars’. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Keplinger, Kody. 2010. The DUFF: Designated Ugly Fat Friend: A Novel. New York: Poppy. Kittler, Friedrich A. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. 1969. On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families. London and New York: Routledge. Lacan, Jacques. 1981. The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan—Book III 1955–56. Edited by Jacques-Alain Milled. Translated by Russell Grigg. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 1991. Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by John Forrester. London and New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 2004. “The Function and Field of Speech in Language in Psychoanalysis.” In Écrits: A Selection, edited by Bruce Fink, 31–107. London and New York: W. W. Norton. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Lee, Christina. 2016. Screening Generation X: The Politics and Popular Memory of Youth in Contemporary Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. Leppert, Alice. 2014. “‘Can I Please Give You Some Advice?’ Clueless and the Teen Makeover.” Cinema Journal: The Journal of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies 53 (3): 131–137. Liebrand, Claudia. 2003. “Melodrama Goes Gay: Jonathan Demmes PHILADELPHIA.” In Hollywood Hybrid: Genre und Gender im Zeitgenössischen Mainstream-Film, edited by Claudia Liebrand and Ines Stiener, 171– 191. Marburg: Schüren.

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McLuhan, Marshall. (1964) 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press. McRobbie, Angela. 1991. Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mulvey, Laura. (1975) 2009. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other Pleasures: Language, Discourse, Society, 14–27. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Neale, Steve. 2005. Genre and Hollywood. London and New York: Routledge. Northrop, Andrew. 2018. “Revitalizing the Teen Movie: An Interview with Desiree Akvhavan.” Cineaste 43 (4): 22–36. Seeßlen, Georg. 2004. “Zärtliche Zerstörung.” In Quentin Tarantino: Film 1, edited by Georg Seeßlen et al., 65–87. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Shary, Timothy. 2002. Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2005. Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen. London and New York: Wallflower. Smith, Frances. 2017. Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press. Sonnenberg-Schrank, Björn. 2016. “Forbidden Bodies: Teens, Taboos and Porn.” In Pornorama: American Pornographies: Visual Culture, Literature, History, edited by Claudia Deckers et al., 115–134. Münster: LIT. von Polenz, Peter. 1999. Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert. Band III. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Waters, John. 2019. Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom for a Filth Elder. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

3 Actants | Objects | Participation: Teen Film Ecologies

The Teenager as Adult and Winter’s Bone as a Teen Film for Adults Winter’s Bone (2010) is a slow-paced drama set in the Missouri Ozarks, a decidedly rural and isolated setting, in the temporal and economic context of a “New Great Depression” due to the 2007/2008 recession. The adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s eponymous novel (2006) features Jennifer Lawrence, at the time 19 years old, in a breakout role that earned her an Oscar nomination as the 17-year-old Ree Dolly who lives with her mentally ill mother and her two younger siblings Sonny and Ashlee. The family leads a destitute life, existing on the fringes of the geographic and social spectrum of US civilization, and their decidedly unurban life is not depicted and romanticized as serene communion with nature, but is characterized by hardship. Over the course of the film, which gradually unfurls into a 100-minute-tour-de-force, Ree sets out to find her disappeared father—or at least a confirmation of his death. As seemingly almost everyone in the area, Ree’s father Jessup Dolly was deeply mired in the manufacture and trading of drugs, more specifically “crank”/methamphetamine. Jessup had been arrested and agreed to turn © The Author(s) 2020 B. Sonnenberg-Schrank, Actor-Network Theory at the Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31287-9_3

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police informant, most likely leading to him getting killed. However, Jessup put up the family home in the woods as collateral for his bail which leaves Ree with the task of locating her father or his body, or otherwise the family faces eviction—which would equal the destruction of the family unit that is hanging by a bare thread as it is, with the teenage daughter serving as caretaker for her incapacitated mother and surrogate mother for her siblings. For a number of obvious reasons, Winter’s Bone is not what is typically considered a teen film, yet for a number of less obvious, but equally significant reasons, it is. In terms of genre, the film is a hybrid, oscillating between thriller, detective film, gothic elements, neo-realist, neonoir, classical western, or mumblecore (a strand of mainly American independent film characterized by its low-budget aesthetics, naturalistic and often at least partly improvised acting and dialogue, and on-location shooting). Woodrell, a Missouri Ozarks resident, coined the term “country noir” (see Merrigan 2014) for his style of writing, another embodiment of hybridity in merging of two genuinely American generic ascriptions—Western and Film Noir—and sites, as the Western plays itself out in non-urban settings whereas the film noir is mostly urban. Woodrell’s label has been used oftentimes to classify his novels, a label whose implications also apply to the film adaptation—as does the hybridity of the film, which creates a generic and stylistic oscillation that echoes the film’s negotiation of liminality on many levels. Woodrell’s focus is on the South and the economic decline of certain regions, which since the Civil War has generated an inner conflict for the USA, in which legacy and history are on the one hand idealized and romanticized, but at the same time revealed as the dark underbelly of a forgotten America (a theme that has become very topical in the Trump era USA with a president inciting these same tensions by siding with right-wing extremists “defending” confederate symbols, as in the Charlottesville incidents in August 2017). In American literature and cinema, the tension concerning the glory and the depravity of the (mythical) South is addressed in a wide range of texts, and both in Woodrell’s novels as well as in the movie adaptation of Winter’s Bone, these elements can be identified, but simultaneously the

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archaic diegetic world is largely devoid of a cohesive history and presented as littered scenery of economic (infra-)structural, and personal tragedy. Despite these ambiguities, Winter’s Bone is also undeniably a comingof-age narrative in the tradition of the bildungsroman retracing the process by which the protagonist becomes mature. The center of the film is Ree’s maturation, even though it may not be narrated via any clichéd high school film tropes such as getting together with an adorable boy, landing a date for the big dance, reaching autonomy from social pressure, or the loss of virginity. Her journey bears as much similarity with film noir or detective films as it does with Greek mythology, an Odyssey to find a vanished father, passing through the Hades of degradation, corruption, immorality, and extreme violence, but the narrative also yields the cathartic conclusion of her ending up as a determined and symbolically cleansed heroine who fully assumes responsibility for her family. This element, the “teenager as adult” trope, can be connected to numerous canonic texts, such as Pretty in Pink (1986) or What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) which both feature adolescent protagonists living with a single parent who is incapacitated in one way or another: Andie’s father in Pretty in Pink is an alcoholic idler, unwilling and/or unable to lead a conventional middle-class life and in addition traumatized by having been left by his wife. Andie occupies a triple function as adolescent daughter, ersatz wife, and parent in a reversal of roles when it is she who wakes up her father in the morning, prepares him breakfast, and reminds him of appointments (he, in turn, occupies a hybrid function as father, partner, mother, and child). Similarly, Gilbert’s mother in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape has become morbidly obese and is now literally stuck in her own body after the father’s ominous suicide, which leaves it up to Gilbert and his sisters to manage the household and take care of his developmentally challenged little brother. There are more examples here of different-yet-similar constellations,1 but they all play out the experience of adolescence’s liminal transition in a very literal way: the legal, 1 In

his article about the 1990s teen films, Robin Wood comments the role of parents in the sample he analyzes: “Most of the films seem reluctant to suggest that all these high school students actually come from somewhere, that they have a specific background. The mother’s presence is particularly negligible, by far the most important mother being the dead one of

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physical, developmental, psychological, juridical, and symbolic transformation processes from child to adult is negotiated by assigning (sometimes contradictory) aspects associated with either stage to one character.2 Most examples however, just like the two mentioned, deliver their protagonists from being stuck in their transitional in-between states with conclusions that present a successfully completed transition: in Pretty in Pink, it is the class-divide-defying romantic ending for Andie and her upper-class love interest—and the simultaneous transition of her father who finally starts to cope with the loss of his wife and starts to regain control over his life; in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape it is the death of the mother, the ritual burning of the family’s house and the advancement of the sisters who move to bigger cities and of Gilbert who is reunited with his love interest and can now embark on a yet-uncharted journey with her while still taking care of his little brother. Winter’s Bone is not unambiguously a teen film, mainly because it may adhere to generic and formulaic patterns, themes, types, settings, or aesthetics—just not the ones one would expect. If read as a teen film however (not as a high school film for high schoolers, but still as a film with, about and organized around a teenager), the ways in which the coming-of-age trope is narrated here, the similarities and differences to the strategies of more traditional teen films, become productive registers to engage with both Winter’s Bone as well as with the teen film canon. In relation to the canon, the move away from a generic (sub)urban locale is one of the apparent deviations necessitating the question what impact space will have, and also, which other actants contribute to Winter’s Bone to make it a rural teen film. I will test the applicability of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and particularly its focus on objects and the dynamic relations of human and non-human actors/actants in my reading of Winter’s Bone. In order to address the status of especially non-human actants, select elements and She’s All That (1999), continuing to exert her influence on the heroine, and on the whole beneficially. Fathers are generally obstructive and a nuisance” (2002, 7). 2 Driscoll discusses the “Teen Film for Grown-Ups” (2011, 108 ff.) as texts that negotiate adolescence in modes accessible for adults and teenagers (such as films from what she identifies as the adolescent/adult body-swap subgenre), and she also assigns What’s Eating Gilbert Grape to this category with its “doubled adolescent/adult protagonist” (ibid., 111).

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vocabulary from the ANT context will be mobilized. The film is presented as a rural drama whose protagonist happens to be a teenage girl; however, its center is the negotiation of transitional experiences and liminal spaces—of a teenage character and of her distinct environment, or we could say: a teen ecology. A keyword Latour uses is participation, which emphasizes that in “a collective of humans and non-humans” there is no default position prescribing who determines whom, as all participants are free to the same degree as they are determined by others due to their entanglement in the network. “This is why specific tricks have to be invented to make them talk, that is, to offer descriptions of themselves, to produce scripts of what they are making others—humans or non-humans—do” (Latour 2005, 79). The “tricks” we have to invent to make the actants talk are the slowed-down mode of thorough observation, the identification of actants, and the documentation of their agencies.

“A Method and Not a Theory”—A Short Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory Bruno Latour’s contributions to Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) are arguably what he is most associated with and the concept that has been applied, tried, and tested the most as an approach in different fields. ANT has both been hailed as an intervention bridging the gap between “hard” natural science and “soft” humanities, as well as famously criticized as “fashionable nonsense” (Bricmont and Sokal 1997) bordering on charlatanry, and watered-down version of other theories, ideas, and philosophies, for instance those of Michel Serres or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. While the sheer amount of reactions, positionings, polemics, accolades, and foremost the amount of ANT-based or -inspired scholarship certainly proves neither stance to be appropriate, it does prove that we are faced, both in terms of discourse and operation, with a productive (in the sense of generating ) concept. ANT as one incarnation of Latour’s ideas and overarching themes is the one that is laid out most explicitly for “being made use of ”—in the introduction to Reassembling the Social,

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Latour states that “this book resembles a travel guide … It is directed at practitioners as a how-to book” (2005, 17). My focus is on ANT and its applicability for “practitioners” in an anti-essentialist movement, regarding it not as “a theory” or “a philosophy,” but as a pre-theoretical method. This important distinction is repeatedly stressed by the various ANT protagonists in order to remind us that ANT is explicitly meant as a way to follow the actors instead of imposing an interpretation. Actor-Network-Theory operates on a fundamental premise: Objects of inquiry are to be treated as networks consisting of relations and interactions between human and non-human actors (or actants). However, almost every word in that sentence opens up further layers of complexity: object, relation, interaction, human, non-human, actor—all of these words assume quite specific (and productively unspecific) meanings that differ from, or go beyond, their everyday usage, which is already a big part of doing ANT: slowing things down, zooming in on details and meticulously describing the complex makeup of assemblages. The genealogical starting point for what would later be called ActorNetwork Theory was Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, which Latour co-authored with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar in 1979.3 Therein, they devised strategies to apply tools and methods from linguistic and semiotic analysis to a text from the hard sciences with the goal to let the results “speak for themselves.” The project is in its core strongly related to the ideas laid out in the last chapter and the concept of circulating reference, as it is a negotiation of translation, transmission, and transformation—and the machines, devices, apparatuses that connect events and inscriptions. Latour’s irreductionism, and most of all the consideration of how things, objects, or other non-human actants become participants that impact actions and interactions and actively do something, are central to Latourian thought in general: After all, there is hardly any doubt that kettles ‘boil’ water, knifes ‘cut’ meat, baskets ‘hold’ provisions, hammers ‘hit’ nails on the head, rails ‘keep’ kids from falling, locks ‘close’ rooms against uninvited visitors, soap 3 Also

see Matthias Wieser’s comprehensive study of Latourian networks (2012), where he organizes the development of ANT in a diagram (125) beginning with Laboratory Life that chronologically charts the most important contributions and their degree of differentiation.

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‘takes’ the dirt away, schedules ‘list’ class sessions, prize tags ‘help’ people calculating, and so on. Are those verbs not designating actions? … And yet they do. The main reason why objects had no chance to play any role before was not only due to the definition of the social used by sociologists, but also to the very definition of actors and agencies most often chosen. If action is limited a priori to what ‘intentional’, ‘meaningful’ humans do, it is hard to see how a hammer, a basket, a door closer, a cat, a rug, a mug, a list, or a tag could act. They might exist in the domain of ‘material’ ‘causal’ relations, but not in the ‘reflexive’ ‘symbolic’ domain of social relations. By contrast, if we stick to our decision to start from the controversies about actors and agencies, then any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor—or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant. Thus, the questions to ask about any agent are simply the following: Does it make a difference in the course of some other agent’s action or not? Is there some trial that allows someone to detect this difference? (Latour 2005, 71)

ANT’s particular novelty is “that objects are suddenly highlighted not only as being full-blown actors, but also as what explains the contrasted landscape we started with, the overarching powers of society, the huge asymmetries, the crushing exercise of power” (Latour 2005, 72).

(White) Trash Ecology: Abject Objects, Abject Father, and Spaces of Obsolescence In Winter’s Bone, color, landscape, and settings are shown to be in transition just as much as Ree, they leave their passive status as backdrop and assume a position where place is one of the most important factors—and indeed actors—further emphasizing the apparent realism of the film by the staging of Ree’s environment: in-between seasons, in-between the nature-culture divide, in-between (economic and ideological) self-sufficiency and dependency. Therefore, one major plane on which Ree’s transition is negotiated is space and the orchestration of particular spaces. Winter’s Bone’s mise-en-scène, and thus by extension the world through its inhabitants move, is characterized by old, broken, used non-human and human actants: haggard stray dogs, toys, caved-in

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Fig. 3.1 Trash ecology: the burnt-out meth lab and discarded cars in Winter’s Bone

buildings, broken-down vehicles decomposing into rusty organic matter, a burnt-out meth lab overgrown by weeds, a corpse, and hand-medown clothing (see Fig. 3.1). The yards of all the houses give a double meaning to the term junkyard, and naturally the omnipresence of junk as slang term for drugs and the junkies who use them also inform the film’s ecology. Not only as a theme and a metaphor, but also in material form, junk and trash are significant participants of an ecological materialism. American culture is rich with representations of the decaying South, providing depictions of a forgotten America with entire regions left behind and excluded from American progress and prosperity. Figuratively speaking, these regions, to which Appalachia and the Ozarks count, are landscapes of obsolescence4 and of abjection (in the way Kristeva uses the term to refer to an in-between-ness disrupting identity and order),5 which in Winter’s Bone also is negotiated quite literally on the level of 4 For

reflections on obsolescence, see also Toffler (1970), Strasser (2001), Rogers (2005), Slade (2006), and Tischleder and Wasserman (2015). 5 “ … what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses…. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 1982, 2, 4).

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materiality. Different than in The DUFF (2015) or in Dope (2015), it is not technology that becomes the marker for the present here, the twentyfirst century is not represented by its technological advancements, but by all that it has left behind and made disposable, be that its people, and the moral garbage of a drug-ridden community or the material garbage that clutters the landscape as another index for a culture of obsolescence. Concerning obsolescence, Susan Strasser retraces the historical transition to an American consumer culture in which mass-produced objects are ubiquitous and become obsolete quickly by ever-changing styles, technologies, tastes, or slight damage, being replaced rather than repaired as a “trend … toward a fundamentally new relationship with the material world. People now took their definitions of self as much from what they owned as from what they produced … a new kind of relationship with the material world, to production, and to disposal” (Strasser 2015, 49–50). If the ability to participate in consumer culture—by buying, disposing of, and replacing objects—is tantamount to being able to participate in progress, a chasm opens up between consuming participants and those left behind by their economic inability to participate who are automatically excluded from progress. Thrown-away objects become the markers for being at the receiving end of the “throwaway culture:” (ibid., 57) The new consumer culture changed ideas about throwing things away, creating a way of life that incorporated technological advances, fashion and design, organizational changes, and new perspectives, a lifestyle that linked products made for one-time use, municipal trash collection, and the association of reuse and recycling with poverty and backwardness. (ibid.)

In that sense, discarded and reused objects like those so prominently visible in Winter’s Bone carry within them a political dynamic and allocate their position in a larger social order, here garbage and obsolescence become vital categories in understanding Winter’s Bone’s trash ecology. This material dimension of trash and the political dimension it contains are embedded in the notion of “white trash” as a slur for poor white people such as the characters in Winter’s Bone. Matt Wray begins

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his study about white trash, which is built on Kristeva’s argument and her conceptualization of the abject and its disturbing in-between-ness, by looking at the term itself and how charged with meaning, or meanings, it is: But why white trash? Split the phrase in two and read the meanings against each other: white and trash. Slowly, the term reveals itself as an expression of fundamental tensions and deep structural antinomies: between the sacred and the profane, purity and impurity, morality and immorality, cleanliness and dirt. In conjoining such primal opposites into a single category, white trash names a kind of disturbing liminality: a monstrous, transgressive identity of mutually violating boundary terms, a dangerous threshold state of being neither one nor the other. It brings together into a single ontological category that which must be kept apart in order to establish a meaningful and stable symbolic order. Symbolic orders are those shared representations of reality and collective systems of classification that are key elements in bringing about social solidarity. White trash names a people whose very existence seems to threaten the symbolic and social order. As such, the term can evoke strong emotions of contempt, anger, and disgust. This is no ordinary slur. (Wray 2006, 2)

The very notion of white trash already contains so much tension that it opens up a “disturbing liminality,” reflected also in Winter’s Bone and the liminal spaces and transformative experiences it addresses. White trash as a term is both racist and classist, but I am especially interested here in “trash, a signifier of abject class status … Which word is the modifier and which the modified? Does white modify trash or is it the other way around?” (Wray 2006, 3) Re-imported into the world of Winter’s Bone, which contains many markers for white trash in all its meanings and contradictions, Wray’s fundamental etymological question becomes an—unsolvable—ecological question, namely that of modification, or determination: Are these people and their environment the product of their ecology or did they produce it (in actor-network terms)? While John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939, film adaptation by John Ford in 1940), a useful point of comparison here, is, for example, much more resolved and much more didactic in its identification of unchecked cut-throat capitalism as the destructive force eroding the American soil,

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the American family unit, and ultimately the American Dream, Winter’s Bone does not present itself as a social drama that explicitly points fingers, even as it would be negligent not to read the text and subtext as a critique of an unbridled neoliberal economy where “the market” should regulate itself—co-producing the dark underbelly of shadow economies seen here. Yet, the entanglement of cause and effect, victim and victimizer in Winter’s Bone is more complex and while it certainly can’t be fully untangled, it can be better understood in its complexity by identifying its agencies and agents, as “power, like society, is the final result of a process and not a reservoir, a stock, or a capital that will automatically provide an explanation. Power and domination have to be produced, made up, composed” (Latour 2005, 63–64). In order to reassemble the final result of the process that has produced Winter’s Bone’s milieu, I want to begin then by looking more closely at the (discarded) objects that are so central in its mise-en-scène, at the functions they have and the different notions of trash and junk played out in the film—as both objects and as signs. In a Boston Globe article based on an interview with director Debra Granik, the author Erin Trahan comments: “Some might call the mise-en-scène junky, but Granik prefers ‘layered with objects’” (2010, 2). This is significant insofar as the entire film carefully avoids catering to the well-rehearsed hillbilly exploitation that so often ensues from Hollywood’s urban gaze. In many examples, rural America is presented as a ghost-town like pre- or postapocalyptic wasteland, a genuine dystopia insinuating that the USA is a third world country about to happen—or that has already happened in entire regions that are no longer needed in the post-Recession-USA, and are in that sense geographies of obsolescence, from the Ozarks to the Rust Belt. Granik’s choice of words reaffirms the importance (and semantics) of objects, and also that of layering, implying more depth, longer duration, and higher entanglement than a mere decorative “wallpapering” for local color and mood. With that non-evaluative approach to the rather evaluative terms “junk” and “trash” in mind, its depiction is another visual theme akin to

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the anthropology shot, practically turning the settings into a museum6 — or even a “mausoleum of ancient machines covered in blood-red rust, windowless school buses, and John Deere tractors tangled in weed, [that] represents the past, present, and future of the American hinterland” (Wellum 2013, 10). The early parts of the film all focus on Ree, her siblings, their daily routines and ways of living together, and their immediate surroundings, the leafless forest and the wooden hut they live in, which is shown in the background from different sides while in the foreground Ree’s siblings are jumping on a huge trampoline, playing with a skateboard, cuddling with tiny kittens, or Ree and her little sister hanging the laundry on a clothesline. Also in the background, a cluttered world is visible: plastic toys, old tires, vehicles, and machinery are strewn over the premises, making it clear that this is not a site of “eco tourism,” no romantic chalet in the primordial forests somewhere in pastoral rural American, but an environment in which the flotsam of American civilization seems to end up and nothing is ever thrown away. The image of two children gaily jumping on a trampoline signifies a playful easiness but also a repetitive movement that ultimately leads nowhere and not out of the being stuck: Sonny and Ashlee jump up and down, in circles, and later even with the huge cuddly toy horses Brownie and Cupcake, but the intense movement facilitated by the trampoline is only movement for movement’s sake, but it’s not transitional and has no destination. However, it allows us to see them interacting in a kind way, pulling and stabilizing each other. The kindness and good behavior with which Ree and her siblings interact

6 Not

only in this presentation a resemblance to the famous pictures taken for the FSA photography program from 1935–1944 by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others can be identified, but also in the difficult task not to cater to certain viewing expectations and gazes by showcasing rural poverty and turning it into what would now be called “ruin porn.” Also see James Agee and Walker Evans‘ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), and Abigail SolomonGodeau (1991) who discusses documentary photography, and especially the FSA images in this friction between victimization, subjectification, colonization, and exploitation vs. making-visible: “The photographer’s desire to build pathos or sympathy into the image, to invest the subject with either an emblematic or an archetypal importance, to visually dignify labor or poverty, is a problem to the extent that such strategies eclipse or obscure the political sphere whose determinations, actions, and instrumentalities are not in themselves visual” (Solomon-Godeau 1991, 179)—in this regard, Winter’s Bone is very careful not to exploit its characters and turn them into the obvious and well-known rural stereotypes.

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are a subtle, yet significant trait, as in a world characterized mostly by emotional distance, curtness, and even violence, their greeting each other with “Good morning,” saying “thank you” when receiving a gift, “bless you” when someone sneezes, and “nice meeting you” after an encounter really stands out as rare display of human decency and ethical standards even. Even before, trash is visibly established in the film’s very first image, a landscape shot with broken-down cars of all sorts. Looking closer at them throughout the film and at the different houses—all the yards are cluttered with discarded vehicles—they become a part of the landscape on the one hand, and on the other hand reminders of a function that they no longer fulfill and thus semiotic matter.7 The discarded school bus is a reminder of the simple fact that it no longer runs, either due to a lack of children at school age in a dying region, or due to a lack of funding. The discarded agricultural vehicles such as the impressive array of rusting small tractors in the Miltons’ yard refer to agriculture as an outmoded way of living and of earning a living. The foundational American ideal of the agrarian who lives in accordance with his ecology and whose influence can be felt from the first settlers’ mythology to the Transcendentalists to The Grapes of Wrath and Easy Rider (1969) is a thing of the past. Agriculture has taken a turn for a streamlined and brutal Monsanto economy and the individual farmer is no longer needed or able to compete—an obsolete ideal and way of living embodied by obsolete tools. The discarded, broken, or abandoned vehicles visualize yet another absence, namely and simply that of their former owners. Not only when abstractly read as Luhanian “extensions of man” or Barthesian “projections of the ego” (1963) that are closely enmeshed with their owners (accordingly, Gail says about the parking bondsman who awaits her and Ree: “Judging by that car, he ain’t from our neck of the woods.”), but also more literally: No car goes anywhere without someone driving it. The fact that there is an abundance of junk cars and not that many people further works toward painting a picture of rural exodus from a dying world that is constantly being reminded of its own indelible past, whether in song, such as in the title song “Missouri Waltz,” or in object. 7 See

also Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (2001).

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More than being indexes of a culture of poverty in which the flotsam of consumer culture strands, and thus a dumping ground for consumerist (sub)urban America, the plethora of garish plastic objects that is visible from the first image on can be understood following the logic of Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory (1979): When (discarded) objects keep circulating, their value might change eventually due to social and historic contexts changing and garbage may perhaps not turn into gold, but certainly assume a different value. In the way the images are staged and acted, they don’t suggest in themselves that there is a lack, different than there is in terms of food, which is shown and mentioned multiple times as scarce and properly lacking. The lack these commodities might make visible is actually borne from a middle-class viewpoint and much more attests to how deeply ingrained in the public imagination the constructed image of rural America as (sub)urban middle-class America’s waste dump is. The evaluation of rural America as a place where the things end up the more affluent no longer want to have around, perhaps situates it as the middle class’s unconscious, the place where their fears and repressed (violence, crime, inbreeding, drugs, conservative gender roles and morality, backwardness, lack of education) are buried and bubbling underneath the surface awaiting violent return, piercing the thin veil of civilization— a notion well-rehearsed in dozens of so-called backwoods horror films, rural dramas, and thrillers.8 Similarly, the clothes Ree and her siblings are wearing are, like the cluttered locations, also found objects and not markers for “trash” put there by set decorators.9 In teen films mainly concerned with negotiating individuality versus conformity, fashion naturally becomes one of the most important canvases on which a character’s status (sub)cultural affiliation, and development are projected, as for instance in the discussed shopping mall scene in The DUFF. However, in a teen film where the teen protagonist does not even have visible peers and has to deal with truly existential “adult” problems, the project of orchestrating one’s individuality is first of all less important and secondly, individuality is less 8 See

also Bell (1997). in her Boston Globe article: “In a similar effort toward authenticity, locals gave their worn clothes to the costume department in exchange for new Carhartts” (2010, 2). 9Trahan

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a question of style than of self-reliance. Still, fashion and costume is an important part of the mise-en-scène: the fact that Ree is neither coded conventionally feminine (except for a pendant necklace she wears no jewelry at all and no makeup, other than most other females she meets), nor coded conventionally masculine or tomboyish, factors in her construction as a character able to defy such ascriptions. There are a few pieces of clothing that resonate strongly with the images and/or the plot such as Ree’s sweatshirt with a printed-on deer motif (directly after the scene in which a deer had become food) or Ashlee’s T-shirt on which “DANGER ZONE!” is written in all caps, which she is wearing in the scene when the brutally beaten Ree returns home. In the same sequence, Sonny walks past the father’s wardrobe, carefully puts Ree’s knocked-out tooth—yet another powerful and emblematic image of abjection—in a lemonade jug filled with water and both he and Ashlee cuddle up with the semiconscious Ree, ending on a close-up of the two sisters. Like a subtitle Ashlee’s DANGER ZONE! shirt dominates the right half of the image, a most fitting header for where they are at right now, a dangerous zone of abjection and liminality. Compared to the outfits seen elsewhere, Jessup’s wardrobe however is comparatively neat and seems to contain all of his (former) belongings and when Ree is standing in front of it in the middle and at the end of the film, it’s almost like she is conversing with these stand-ins for an absent father. Besides shirts and jackets, especially his collection of at least six pairs of rather expensive-looking and wellkept leather cowboy boots centralizes the role Ree will assume, having to “walk in her father’s shoes.” It is only after his death has been confirmed that she is able to finally take up one of her father’s objects, his banjo, which she hands to her father’s brother Teardrop, he reluctantly plays a tune on it but ultimately hands it back to Ree. The closing image of the film shows Ashlee grabbing the banjo and strumming on its strings, Teardrop and the mother are now literally out of the picture, the house has been saved and the family has been, if not restored, then at least reorganized (or: Ree-organized). The guilt of the father, his criminal life, has been overcome. His “virtue” that has been passed on to the next generation, all that is good about his legacy, sensitivity, and humanness, is embodied by the banjo as representative of music (music being arguably the only carrier of tradition, mythology, and history in Winter’s Bone’s

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Ozarks). Like Jessup’s corpse is decomposing in a pond, dissolving into matter and particles that re-enter the ecology on the material level, the preservation of his legacy is a contribution to the composition of life. In this environment now deprived of a cohesive common history and institutions, the family as institution assumes a bigger function as producer of meaning, social, personal, and symbolical cohesion. This can be seen in the mafia-like clan laws (and even the mafia isn’t called family for no reason) and the fact that everyone is related to some degree, but even more prominent is Ree’s loyalty to her father. She does not doubt his “professionalism” and competence as a meth cook (“He’s known for never fucking up labs or cooking bad batches. He’s known for knowing what he’s doing.”), and Ree justifies his actions despite the predicament he has put the family in (Megan: “Your dad left you to do all that? That’s fucked up.”/Ree: “Well, he had to, the way things go, you know.”). Consequently, she has more understanding for his abandoning the family in his flight from the law (as official written codex), but feels shame for his eventual snitching, the betrayal of the unwritten clan laws. Preparing for the imminent eviction, Ree is going through old objects, deciding together with her siblings and mother which ones to hold on to and which ones to burn, thus partly cleansing by fire, but also keeping the father-substitutes in order not to give them up to whoever will take over the estate. Among these significant objects are a wooden toy he once carved for Ashlee, a love note the mother wrote him on the back of an old portrait (and which explains their relationship and what it eventually did to Connie, again, by love and loyalty: “I don’t know how I ever latched on to someone like you, but I sure hope I can keep you interested in me forever. I love you and will always be true.”), and a photo album. The photos for instance depict him and Teardrop as little boys and dressed in cowboy costumes, an image impregnated with meaning, evoking associations from the innocence of childhood to signifiers of the American frontier experience, and simply hinting at the fact that these men, like their entire environment, as a matter of fact do have a history, a history in which corruption has not been a part as a priori condition, but into which it seeped at a certain point. One photograph shows Jessup as a teenager, together with teenage Connie at her high school graduation, complete with robe and tasseled mortarboard hat, another reminder

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that their life at one point was a regular teen and high school life with institutions and romance. “How old was he in that picture?” Sonny asks, to which Ree replies: “Probably around my age.” While this emphasizes the difference of her coming-of-age experience and the things she has to go through from the regular activities and rites of initiation of youths around her age such as dating and graduating, it also shows that Ree is now symbolically reconnecting with her absent and redeemed father. An entire album page is filled with images from the grandmother’s funeral, a close-up and a midshot of her in a coffin and a close-up of a bouquet of flowers. The photo album and the choice of what are memorable, family-defining moments, literalizes the side-by-side existence of life and death of the Dolly family, and of the succession of generations. Ree’s reconciliation with the father and the commitment to her family whose present leader she has now become will be confirmed when in the end she tells the bondsman who is surprised that Ree was really able to find the father’s corpse and save the house: “Bred’n buttered. I told you,” referring back to their first conversation where she told him: “I’m a Dolly, bred’n buttered, and that’s how I know Dad’s dead.” The bracket of family allegiance has been closed by her reaffirmation of her identity as part of the collective family identity. The fact that her father is first substituted in the form of objects by his belongings and in the end becomes “trash” himself not only illustrates the participation of non-human actants as decisive contribution to the film, it will be the crystallization point of objects as actants and signs. Merab and her sisters take Ree to a swamp at night, where the father’s body has been dumped in a shallow watery grave. The film’s generic logic here switches to thriller bordering on horror during these painfully slow minutes and to which the blue-gray palette contributes, in which it is unclear whether they really want to help Ree or abduct and get rid of her. The group actually finds Jessup’s body, they cut his hands off with a chainsaw (“You’re gonna need both hands, or sure as shit they’ll say he cut one off to keep from going to prison. They know that trick.”). The gory image as a symbolic castration, reminiscent for instance of Che Guevara’s hands that have famously been cut off after he has been executed in Bolivia and used both for identification purposes but also to visualize the submission of an inimical war hero, becomes even more vivid when

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Ree delivers the hands in a crumpled generic plastic shopping bag on which “Thank You Thank You Thank You Have A Nice Day” is written in bold letters. Her white trash father, a junk peddler, has now become trash, stuffed into a white trash bag while simultaneously decomposing, turning into biomass, dissolving into the ecology like the “piles of shit in a hogpen” Ree speculated before her father’s body is turning into. However, the content of Ree’s bag is not just piles of shit or random trash, but parts of her father, and the image of her sitting in the police station’s waiting area, surrounded by posters and brochures informing and warning about drug abuse, in a crouched position, embracing the plastic bag with both hands, expresses protectiveness rather than disgust. After all, Merab Milton has confirmed by urging her to pull up the father’s body and sawing off the hands (which Ree cannot bring herself to do) with the words: “Oh, come on, child. Your daddy would want you to do this” that this action does not undermine the father-instance. The corpse, for Kristeva, is “the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything” (1982, 3). As the epitome of abjection, she states that “[e]xcrement and its equivalents” (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death (ibid., 71). Delivering her father’s hands while leaving his body at rest in the swamp, thus will not only constitute a ritual by which Ree crosses the border of her liminal adolescent space, but also a cathartic cleansing ritual in which the corpse as “waste, transitional matter” (ibid., 109) is buried and thus purified to render it no longer dangerous and threatening.10 The purification, played out on the corpse and the passed-on banjo, will complete Ree’s transition. More like a reward than an inheritance, the bondsman returns the money Jessup’s murderers had posted in order 10 “But it is the corpse—like, more abstractly, money or the golden calf—that takes on the abjection of waste in the biblical text. A decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whose life is undistinguishable from the symbolic—the corpse represents fundamental pollution. A body without soul, a non-body, disquieting matter, it is to be excluded from God’s territory as it is from his speech … The human corpse is a fount of impurity and must not be touched (Numbers 19:13ft). Burial is a means of purification” (Kristeva 1982, 109).

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to get him out of jail and kill him before he can tell on them, and which they most certainly will not collect themselves. The final conversation before the film ends with an image of the three siblings is a discussion of Ree’s transition: Sonny: Does that money mean you’re leavin’? Ree: I ain’t leavin’ you guys. Why do you think that? S: We heard you talking about the Army. Are you wanting to leave us? R: I’d be lost without the weight of you two on my back. (Ree kisses her sister’s head.) I ain’t going anywhere.

Ree “ain’t going anywhere” because her transition is already complete and in that sense, she has already gone somewhere and come full circle, a development that is echoed by revisiting the images from the film’s beginning in the exact same order: Ashlee feeds Nickdog the dog, Sonny is playing with his skateboard, the sisters are taking laundry from the clothesline, the mother helps them fold it. In this sense, the editing closes the bracket opened at the beginning, confirming the closure of the circular transitional movement.

Real Estate Ree’s Odyssey is narrated as a multiple-stage search for her father, following a linear logic of escalation toward the pinnacle when his demise, which no one ever really doubted, is finally proven by producing the actual, material corpse. The object of the search may be the father, or the father’s body, but the ultimate objective is quite simply the family house whose ownership must be retained. In this sense, Winter’s Bone also becomes a negotiation of real estate—and real estate becomes the screen onto which a larger discourse is projected. Etymologically, the term real estate is modified by the prefix real, rooted in the Latin res, thing, and thus refers to the thing-ness of an entity, to its materiality, its real, actual object dimension. However, the United States housing bubble beginning in 2006 eroded the relationship of Americans and their houses as material, immovable property in a man-made crisis that like the stock market crash 2007–2008 and the

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Dot-com Bubble of the 1990s was caused by the market itself, in this case by the abstraction of material objects into immaterial, virtual, movable objects of speculation. The housing bubble in that sense is not only the metaphor for the greed and inhumanness of a deregulated neoliberalist economy, it is also the proof, literalization, and bodyless embodiment thereof. The notion of invisible forces repossessing one’s house, not to live in it, but to speculate with it, becomes a punishment for Ree that she labors to avert for the narrative’s sake; but against the contemporaneous US American socio-historical background it is a topical concern for millions of affected Americans, especially in poorer regions. The sanctity of the home and the demise of this notion are both depicted in Winter’s Bone. The lighting inside the Dolly family home has a different color palette than any other location in the film and even though the close quarters with the children sleeping on couches and objects strewn everywhere clearly signify destitution (the only other home that is shown from the inside is Gail’s, where especially a collection of DVDs in the background underlines a different economic status by different objects), the difference in lighting elevates their quarters into something that at least in comparison with the barren outside is quite cozy. When the sheriff comes to interrogate Ree’s mother, he requests: “Ask me inside. I need to talk some with your mama,” an etiquette repeated by Ree when visiting Gail and asking her young patriarch husband: “Hey, Floyd. You gonna invite me in? Or I could just stay out here and talk to you.” The social protocol of requiring an explicitly enunciated invitation in order to trespass the border into the privacy of the home (known also from vampire lore) affirms the importance of this symbolical-material border and the space it demarcates. The house is a material extension of those who live in it and violating its borders is an intrusion, consequently an even more severe intrusion is its repossession as (and brought about by) the encroachment of an economy. The entire landscape and the lifestyle of its inhabitants are characterized by such an encroachment, in the shape of decay or in the shape of the meth industry as an actual economy. The sheriff ’s question—“Jessup signed over everything. If he doesn’t show at trial, see, the way the deal works is, you all gonna lose this place. You got some place to go?”—reflects his knowledge that the house is not

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just a random, exchangeable container, but the material object necessary by all means to keep the family unit intact. “If Dad has done wrong, Dad has paid. And whoever killed him, I don’t need to know all that. But I can’t forever carry them kids, and my mom—not without that house.” says Ree in her plea to Thump Milton. Milton’s estate in turn is not only characterized by the vast amount of broken-down vehicles cluttering the yard, but also by the automatic white rolling shutter gate of his otherwise brown, wooden, and dilapidated shed that becomes the claustrophobic torture chamber in which Ree is chained and beaten under the bright and unnatural glare of neon lights. The rolling gate appears as an architectural disruption, a foreign object that does not really fit in, hinting at the contamination that is the hidden presence of the underworld whose main representative the meth kingpin Thump Milton is. Real estate not only characterizes its inhabitants, they are in a sense conjoined, a reminder of the “notion, that human identity is somehow inseparably bound up with human location” (Malpas 1999, 4). Ree has to deal with her real estate constantly, consciously and not. Just how deep-seated and traumatic this conflict is for Ree is illustrated by her quasi-psychedelic fever dream. Compromised by the physical trauma of having been severely beaten and the toxicological trauma of having been fed painkillers, Ree nods off and the floodgates of her unconscious are opened, visualized by switching to black-and-white Super 8 film stock as a different and more primal layer of cinematography. To a collage of chainsaw noise, the sound of trees being cut down, and tense violin soundscapes, images of chainsaws, trees, burning timber acres, startled squirrels and birds taking off, the theme of the Dolly family’s eviction is translated into the expulsion of innocent animals and images of a violated wilderness. American history repeats itself.

Act Local: Cinematography and Music The expositional opening sequence of Winter’s Bone is a 81-second succession of nine images, each between six and twelve seconds long, accompanied by Marideth Sisco’s a capella version of the “Missouri Waltz.” Besides contributing decisively to the soundtrack with six songs, Sisco as

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a genuine and still active Missouri Ozarks figure dedicated to preserving Appalachian folk music and culture also makes two cameo appearances in the film and thus constitutes one of the many factors that not only produce a Barthesian reality effect (the seemingly insignificant details that produce vraisemblance, the feeling of a text being realistic and coherent), but that add genuine local color to the film.11 Not to just have Hollywood actors mumble through their roles with a Southern drawl, but placing the film directly in the milieu in which it is set is an exception in the cinematic representation of rural America, which in most cases is reimagined from the distance of Hollywood and its urban gaze. The film’s engagement with its environment also applies to the film’s locations, the entire film having been shot on-site in the Missouri Ozarks and a large portion of the cast are non-professional actors from the area. The composition in that sense emerges from the milieu it depicts, it is not only about but also from that ecology. The images reciprocate this on the level of content and technically, as the opening sequence, like most of Winter’s Bone, is filmed with a hand-held camera: the “RED One” produced by the American company RED Digital Media and introduced to the market in 2007 as their first digital production camera is known for bridging the gap between the look of analog 35 mm film and digital cinematography.12 The RED One can, depending on the lenses used, produce either quite polished hi-res Hollywood images, or slightly grainy images whose look is perceived as less produced and more realistic, or even mimicking a TV news or documentary style. These effects are especially strongly felt when complemented with the unsteady motion of hand-held shooting and an absence of more mediated movement (through, for example, the use of a camera 11 For the history of Appalachian folk music that goes back to the eighteenth century and wideranging influences from African American and European music traditions, see Becker (1998) and Williams (2002). 12The company’s product description underscores the “democratizing” function of endowing filmmakers with the possibility to shoot images that look expensive without being expensive, and also emphasizes the duality of formerly mutually exclusive paradigms by mentioning both 35 mm standards and most recent technological advancements: “The RED ONE redefined digital cinema upon its arrival … Introduced as the purest digital alternative to 35 mm film, the RED ONE has shot some of the most influential films of our time - from Che to The Social Network.”

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Fig. 3.2 Winter’s Bone’s first picture: the sublime Ozarks trashscape

dolly), techniques that are staples of documentary film, particularly in a so-called direct cinema and cinema verité mode. In a sense, not only local light informs the picture, but also localized movement and the choice of a camera whose aesthetics are not as determined and which therefore doesn’t already contain or prescribe a specific gaze on the landscape that is photographed with it (Fig. 3.2).13 The aesthetic and technological emphasis on the naturalism of the images translates both the setting and the important theme of an Ozarks ecology with its own looks and laws, more in the tradition filmmaking

13The lenses used to film Winter’s Bone are the Zeiss Master Prime and Angenieux Optimo. The Zeiss Master Primes have an especially high light sensitivity when shooting in fixed focal length, i.e., they enable to open the aperture wide for a lower depth definition to create a more “cinematic” look. The Angenieux lenses are said to produce a softer, “creamier” look (comparable to the widespread Cookes) often used in digital filmmaking or commercials to shoot images that are very crisp, yet look more like “warm” analog than “cold” digital photography. Both lenses contribute to the cinematic “high end grittiness” of Winter’s Bone and enable the photography of the film that relies so strongly on different kinds of light and lighting situations as a means of conveying an entire ecology rather than just create an atmosphere. In comparison, The DUFF was shot on Arri Alexa XT cameras, a bigger and heavier camera, simply due to its size and weight more likely to be used with Steadicam systems or on stands (which both automatically lead to a more stable image) and by design rather tailored to high-budget film or TV productions, providing a “slicker” look.

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modes that set out to devise a style that is less characterized by more traditional Hollywood conventions, but rather by an attempt to allow settings and (light) situations their own look instead of obscuring them with technology and special effects—a way to “let the actants speak for themselves” by granting them their own aesthetics and especially their own light. In his essay about “Light in Faulkner,” Hanjo Berressem connects American literary regionalism as a literary mode (also known as local color writing ) with light “as the true medium of painting” (Berressem 2015, 80) to propose “local light” (ibid.) as a conceptual upgrade, something that also defines Winter’s Bone’s specific palette. While Faulkner’s preoccupation with and use of light is mediated through language, in Winter’s Bone the milieu’s local light becomes a full-fledged actant that co-produces the film. The de-saturated color palette that defines the look of Winter’s Bone does not celebrate the pastoral and nature as the lush epitome of unadulterated life itself, they create a foggy blue-grayish look, reminiscent of representations of specific light situations by the impressionist painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: The agency of light, color, and atmosphere in well-known motifs such as a hazy port or a haystack in gray weather are expressed through muted colors and restrained valeurs, underscoring that light is the medium of painting. The impressionists’ goal was the recreation of pure light and pure sensations by leaving the studio, painting en plein air and a specific use of color to achieve a depiction of the world not constrained by artificial light, contour lines, and imposed construction. To illustrate the point, a painting by Frank Nuderscher as embodiment of the Ozarks’ light is useful: (Fig. 3.3) Nuderscher is an American impressionist who after 1910 left his native St. Louis and relocated to the Missouri Ozarks to concentrate on the landscape paintings of the area he is mostly associated with. The similarity between Winter’s Bone’s first picture and Nuderscher’s paintings is striking, both in subject matter, perspective, and color—as if the area itself dictates the way in which it is to be depicted by the light it exudes. In comparison, though, Nuderscher’s use of purplish and yellow tones makes the equally barren landscapes slightly more “delightful” than the photographed image from 100 years later. The quasi-impressionistic, yet real, local light in Winter’s Bone, which was also taken en plein air/on

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Fig. 3.3 Frank B. Nuderscher, The View from the Studio, oil on canvas, ca. 1920

location, and despite of its luminous purity, on the other hand seems almost devoid of purity and of life, just as the first picture is devoid of living beings. The purity of Winter’s Bone’s naturalistic local light, photographed with the light-sensitive Zeiss lens and unaugmented by artificial light or heavy application of postproduction techniques such as color grading, and even the purity of its light when thought of in relation to impressionist light becomes the medium that, as the narrative unfurls, will reveal the moral impurity of Winter’s Bone’s ecology, reinforcing the agency of light in and for the film with the capacity to materially and symbolically make visible. The image that opens the film certainly contains signs of (human and non-human) life, but they all appear as empty shells, indicating something that is actually absent: the leafless trees and hedges against the cloudy gray skies in the fore- and background are complemented by the

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mid-picture section full of junk cars of all sorts, the iconic American yellow school bus, a caravan, and several pickup trucks. The depiction of nature in this opening is a quite literal visualization of the Latourian metaphors of the actor-network or the collective of humans and nonhumans: The borders of nature and culture are not discernible, the junk cars and the barren trees are not in opposition, but they are participants in the very same ecology. Other than in Thoreau’s Walden (1854), where the whistle of the locomotive in the distance is a disruption of pastoral beauty and serenity and a harsh encroachment of modern industrialization and urbanization on the natural landscape of Walden Pond,14 the landscape in Winter’s Bone however has already been digested by these cultural forces and discharged as a clump of amalgamated human–nonhuman-matter. Trees, plants, dwellings, cars, sky—everything has been drained of color, and of life. Accordingly, the nature we see is maybe not undefined by color and shape, but certainly defined otherwise than by an impressive mountain range, memorable trees, bodies of water, animals, or landmarks whatsoever, present neither in the foreground nor in the background. For spectators who are not familiar with the Missouri Ozarks (or for instance Nuderscher’s depictions of them), the markerfree vista is an emptied-out landscape as unspecific as it gets, almost a natural non-place (as opposed to the man-made non-places Marc Augé [1995] writes about). The aesthetic orchestration of the picture aligns itself with, and not only implicitly suggests a comparison to American landscape painting, and later photography, with their emphasis on the sublime of nature—either its beauty or indomitability.15 The ambivalence and tension already generated on the sonic level by the title song and its lyrics are echoed on the visual level: The sublime has left this American landscape, Hollywood’s Technicolor excess has been replaced by broken colors for the luminous recreation of a purity of impurity, and the pastoral beauty of America’s hinterland has been compromised. It is a landscape in transition, a proper liminal space, preparing the ground

14 Also

see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (1964). an overview of prominent protagonists especially from the Hudson River School of painting, also see the catalogue of the Tate Britain exhibition American Sublime. Landscape Painting in the United States 1820–1880 from 2002. 15 For

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for Ree’s liminal experience and the way it is contrasted with the unsuccessful navigations of liminal spaces by her parents. This liminality can be extended to the entire region, whose out-of-balance order is only to some extent restored in the end by Ree’s personal successful transition, but a precarious “underclass” life will probably simply go on, still unaffected by human, in this case Ree’s, activity.

Absence One of the key terms to describe the sound, look, and plot of Winter’s Bone is absence. Many things the audience hears or sees denote the presence of one thing, while connoting the absence of many more things. The intro music is reduced solely to the voice, the color palette is characterized by an absence of color and light (at least in the sense of Technicolor and Hollywood light), the environment is characterized by its absence of structure, architecture, organization, or official institutions and the Dolly family is characterized by its absence of (sentient) adults. While removing the parental instance is a common trope for teen films that also defines Ree’s quest, its function and evaluation here differ from the vast number of parent-free teen film house parties gone awry, Joel Goodson conducting his Risky Business (1983), Ferris Bueller tricking his parents while actually having his famous Day Off (1986) or the depraved youths in Kids (1995). The absence of Ree’s “breadwinner” father Jessup Dolly is the premise for the plot and the quasi-absence of her mother is what forces Ree into the role of the one who takes care of things, forces her to become a detective, to be active, or in other words: to assume agency. She does not act because of her sheer will and determination, she acts because of the absence of those whose duty and responsibility it would be to do so. She is asked twice “how old are you?” by a bondsman and by an army recruiter, simply answering: “Seventeen.” Otherwise neither the characters nor the spectators would know for sure that this girl is actually too young to experience what Ree has to go through. Ree is an adult de facto, but a minor de jure, placing her into a strongly oscillating liminal space.

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Absence is the premise for the agency around which Ree’s coming-ofage is organized, and the very absence of parental figures is then what makes Winter’s Bone a teen film: without relying on any adults whatsoever—the parents are gone or mentally ill, her uncle Teardrop is an erratic drug addict with family loyalty and wild mood swings, her neighbors Sonya and Blond Milton show solidarity, but have their own self-serving agenda—she has to solve the “case” by herself and thereby simultaneously reach autonomy. Ree’s double status as child and adult is not only touched upon explicitly in the mentioned “how old are you?” situations, but also on the level of hard drugs. The drug theme is informative for the entire film—and the main reason why it becomes necessary for Ree to assume agency: “I bet your dad would still be here if he was just growing his marijuana” says the Sheriff, when Ree finally brings her father’s sawed-off hands in order to prove that he is dead. Drugs are traditionally an important theme for teen film, and especially in the urban and suburban films in which the drug motif is used for different purposes, for instance as a rite of initiation, to characterize “bad” kids and youth’s depravity, or to create burlesque comedy situations. In Winter’s Bone, drugs fulfill a different function, partly due to the specific setting in the rural Ozarks. Besides merely updating the clichéd trope of moonshining stereotypically associated with hillbillies, the drug theme turns Winter’s Bone into a mediation of the still-current opioid crisis that in its current form began in the 1990s and has been increasing ever since.16 Comparable to the sand storms responsible for the Dust Bowl during the depression era that were caused by the application of wrong agricultural methods and thus at least co-produced by human activity, the opioid crisis is solely a fabricated, man-made problem. While the use of farming machinery that contributed to the Dust Bowl is easily traceable to industrialization and capitalism, as famously depicted The Grapes of Wrath, the opioid crisis is a similar encroachment of disruptive capitalist forces on rural America, as the insurgence of hard 16 See the entry on the opioid crisis on The National Institute on Drug Abuse’s website, where the extent of the crisis is addressed and its reasons clearly connected to the pharma industry. Also see Lloyd Sederer’s Huffington Post article (2017) about the historic development of opioid addictions and the current crisis in the USA, which even includes a reference to Winter’s Bone, and Sheelah Kolhatkar’s New Yorker article (2017) on the economic implications of the crisis.

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drug use does not mainly affect the expectable urban centers, but the rural regions, where the use of prescription drugs such as OxyContin evidentially facilitated a new market for opioids with those who get addicted to painkillers that they then can no longer afford. We see evidence of the nature of this epidemic in Winter’s Bone, when Ree’s neighbor Sonya Milton pays her a visit—earlier, she gave the almost starving family some deer meat but after Ree has been assaulted Sonya hands some pills in a pharmacy vial to Ree’s best and only friend Gail who is taking care of her, a progression from the nourishing meat she brought them before. What these pills are, is fairly evident due to Connie’s prediction that “she’s gonna want more.” Again, comparable to the Grapes of Wrath movie adaptation where the wind as a powerful, yet invisible force, and the dust it blows around to become a destructive agent that is present in its absence (mentioned in dialogues, as well as on the sonic and visual level), the production of meth or a meth industry even is never explicitly shown, yet it is present as an epidemic in rural America closely connected to white identity, and also as an economic means. There are references to the drug industry on many occasions in the dialogue, and there are telltale images of steam rising from a vent at Thump Milton’s place, a burnt meth lab Blond Milton takes Ree to in order to convince her that the search for Jessup is in vain (see Fig. 2.1 on page 42), as well as posters visible in the police precinct that illustrate how to recognize so-called meth mouth. But the presence of meth, just like that of the dust storms in Grapes of Wrath and of Ree’s father, is narrated through an indirect visibility, as an absence in presence that simultaneously turns into a ghost-like haunting. This haunting takes different forms, most prominently through violence and power, with the violence in the film all more or less directly rooted in the meth industry. (There are also more general observations here, in the sense of Horkheimer and Adorno, whereby the violence of a brutal capitalist system has become the violence of its subjects, mirroring “the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society” [2002, 110]. They write this in reference to Donald Duck cartoons, which they read as a medium to “accustom the senses to the new tempo … and learn to take their own punishment” [1944, 110] by turning violence into something

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hilarious and enjoyable. Winter’s Bone in that regard works differently: The tempo and the de-aestheticization of the violence when Ree receives her thrashing are painfully slow and visceral by staging it as decidedly not spectacular [other than, e.g., the cartoonish over-excessive violence from Peckinpah to Tarantino]. In that regard, Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument works in reverse: By deviating from conventional Hollywood tempo, editing, and style, the violence is shown as tedious and painful and without any redeeming value whatsoever—and thus unmasks the violence of capitalism. While violence in teen films mostly is relegated to the “youth problem films” [see also Considine, Shary, and others], where it is either used in an exploitation film manner or didactically, Winter’s Bone is more analytical and more bleak in its matter-of-factly depiction of violence.) The production of meth is at the same time a normal way to earn a living in the Ozarks, and a clandestine operation. Megan, niece of the local crime lord Thump Milton, and one of Ree’s first stations in the search for her father, replies to Ree’s comment that her missing father cooks crank: “They all do now. You don’t even need to say it out loud.” Megan’s answer is the request to keep quiet and the confirmation of common knowledge, and thus contains the ambivalence of the simultaneous normalcy and clandestineness of an ecology that has been polluted by the intrusion of the drug industry as the last resort to earn a living in a dilapidated and structurally underdeveloped region. In Winter’s Bone, being adult is practically equivalent to being involved in a world of illegal drugs.17 Ree shields the children from a knowledge about their father’s involvement in criminal activities that would erode their innocence and their perception of the father and the institution of the family, however, nobody makes an effort to hide this from the adolescent Ree, on the contrary: Teardrop’s companion Victoria sends Ree away after giving her a bundle of cash and “a doobie for your walk,” which Ree accepts with a 17 In a way, the presence of hard drugs is a literalization of Karl Marx’s evaluation of religion as “opium of the people” (Marx 1977, 1) and Vladimir Lenin’s variation that “Religion is opium for the people” (Lenin 1905, 83). The essential difference between Marx’s and Lenin’s allegory is simply put agency: Marx’s opium of the people implies that it is self-administered by the people, whereas Lenin’s opium for the people is administered by an external force. In Winter’s Bone drugs occupy both positions and invert the allegory: Drugs indeed are the opium of and for the people and in regard to how they affect the economic side, the bodies, and minds of the Ozark residents, opium becomes the religion of the people.

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quiet “thank you” (however, she is not shown consuming it). Ree’s uncle Teardrop who openly snorts meth in front of Ree without inhibitions, showcasing both the degree of his addiction and of the normalcy of the drug in the present (diegetic) Ozarks ecology, offers Ree some: “You get the taste for it yet?” Ree’s reply “Not so far” is highly ambivalent and a key moment of the film. It could be understood as an ironic comment on the depravity of practically every adult around her for which drug use, regardless whether of prescription or so-called recreational drugs, is almost a given. It could also be her acknowledging that the use of drugs is practically inevitable in the ecology of which Ree is a part. All these examples work toward painting a picture deeply pervaded by a bleak fatalism—this however is exactly what Ree is stoically battling against, not letting the fate of her family and herself be determined by external forces. The pairing of fatalism and maturation, played out in the equation of adulthood with ethical and moral bankruptcy from cinematic teenagers’ perspective, is a recurring teen film trope, most famously put in what is perhaps the darkest moment in the otherwise pastel-colored The Breakfast Club (1985): Andrew: My God, are we gonna be like our parents? Claire: Not me…ever… Allison: It’s unavoidable, it just happens. CL: What happens? A: When you grow up, your heart dies.

The idealization of the child as the epitome of uncorrupted innocence before culture, language, and all the other components of the adults’ world is a motif that has a long history in its own right and in pretty much every culture. In Western culture alone, it manifests itself in artifacts as diverse as the Bible’s baby Jesus, the so-called kindchenschema 18 underlying the construction of most Disney figures and other cartoon characters, or Nietzsche’s “three metamorphoses of the spirit” from the

18The

psychologists’ term “Kindchenschema,” literally “scheme of childlike characteristics,” refers to the over-determined “baby face” consisting of markers associated with children and thus connoted especially cute, characteristically a high, domed forehead, a small pug nose, a small doll’s mouth and chin, and unproportionally big eyes.

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first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891).19 Nietzsche structures the development of the human spirit into three stages, from the submissive and obedient camel to the free, egotist, and forceful (“preying”) lion and finally to the highest stage, the child, whose innocence and “first movement” much less signify a lack of knowledge but a human ideal state of being uninscribed and uncorrupted by culture, productively “forgetful” and open (“sacred yes to life”)—only thus able to become a truly free sentient being with agency, not merely ruled by external forces like the camel, or instinctual drives and desires like the lion. The idealization of the child must also be seen against the backdrop of a specific notion of American innocence. American culture is enamored by innocence as counter-position to the loss of innocence that comes with the corrupting effect of civilization and the inscriptions of socialization, an innocence that plays itself out in romanticizations of the child as good and pure, but also of wilderness along these lines. This is specifically American insofar as the European ideal put forth in the structure of the bildungsroman—literally formation novel—is a process in which the young hero (or child) becomes good by maturing and the eponymous formation, by growing into culture and symbolically out of the pre-formed, pre-culture original state. In his study of American culture’s relationship with wilderness, Roderick Nash states: “From the feeling that uncivilized regions bespoke God’s influence rather than Satan’s, it was just a step to perceiving a beauty and grandeur in wild scenery comparable to that of God” (2014, 45). The idealization of American wilderness works as dichotomy, whether as God|Satan, nature|civilization, or city|country, as it posits the purity of wilderness in opposition to civilization and culture, which are deemed bad exactly because culture is formed and thus made impure by human intervention. The child’s innocence and the adult’s depravity as the two poles mapping the adolescent’s liminal space is negotiated in Winter’s Bone with a harshness and consequence rarely encountered in teen films. That 19 “Three metamorphoses of the spirit do I designate to you: how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child … But tell me, my brothers, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why must the predatory lion still become a child? Innocence is the child, and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes” (Nietzsche 1995, 26).

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a development into adulthood that at the same time means depravity (embodied by drug use) is not only a possible option, it is almost expected—as inevitable as the fulfilling of specific social and gendered roles as acceptable behavior is in the majority of teen films.20 This is what becomes clear in Ree’s conversation with Teardrop, and also in her answer “Not so far.” In this regard, the drug theme not only makes Winter’s Bone a crime film set in rural America’s criminal underworld, or a social drama reflecting on the USA’s opioid crisis, but also a comingof-age narrative in which age or adulthood simply assumes a radically different shape than that seen in most other teen films. In constituting the defining feature of being adult, drugs represent a socialization that leads to the reproduction of adult behaviors. Only in this context, the reproduction of the forced-on social scripts of adulthood leads not only to a metaphorical and spiritual corruption as in the aphoristic “When you grow up, your heart dies,” it is literally toxic: When you grow up like this, you die. The drug-related absence and death of Ree’s father is complemented by her mother Connie. While the father-ghost is present in absence, her mother is absent in presence. Her state of being cannot be easily reduced to terms such as “catatonia” or “autism” that are used by many reviewers to summarize her character (or by Blond Milton’s condescending reference to her as “that nut job mama of yours”): She is sentient enough to react, greet, smile, and participate; however, she never speaks. Her child-like pre-language state emphasizes the reversal of roles of the adolescent Ree and her adult parents. The mother’s condition serves to illustrate another option in the spectrum of possible transitions: The father’s model is the descent into the fatal world of drug criminality, the uncle’s model is drug-induced escapism as coping strategy, the mother’s model is an inner exile as her withdrawal from the world and

20The

Breakfast Club also contains an allusion to certain expected behaviors on the sidelines. Bender, the “juvenile delinquent” and “white trash” character of the group explains his familial situation: “You know what I got for Christmas this year? It was a banner fuckin’ year at the old Bender family! I got a carton of cigarettes. The old man grabbed me and said ‘Hey! Smoke up Johnny!’” The equation of consumption as rite of initiation with a scripted performance of adulthood is taken to an extreme in Winter’s Bone.

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the utmost possible reduction of participation and agency—a regression into the more easily endurable baby state glorified in the “Missouri Waltz”‘s lyrics.21 As another possibility Ree’s plan to join the army could be a gettingaway different from the failed models of her parents—which of course and ironically is not possible as she can neither obtain their signatures she would need as a minor, nor ignore her responsibility for her mother and siblings. Again, both the absence (as legal guardians and authority to sign for her) and the presence (as nursing case) of the parents force her to stay and choose or devise a survival strategy.

Education Ree’s conduct as ersatz parent for Sonny and Ashlee suggests education not only as passing-on of knowledge and traditions, but also as a rare opportunity for a survival strategy preferable to the available models personified by the adults around her. By educating her siblings, Ree is both initiator and initiated: She is being initiated into parenthood and initiating the children into adulthood and she does this by assuming the mother/father role both at the same time, or rather by becoming a nonbinary parent figure. Lessons learned here include for instance cooking deer stew and gun use, but also, how not to use guns: “Don’t ever—both of you look at me—never point this at each other, not ever. Alright?” Ree also instructs them in the rules of social convention, not as openly a

21 As a side note to Winter’s Bone ’s incorporation of mental illness: When the teen film differentiated into different strands in the 1980s (mainly sex comedies, horror movies, and the “sensitive” films), the foundation was laid for a subgenre centering on “serious” topics such as illness, depression, anorexia, suicide, or death already touched on in some of the John Hughes’ films. Such “existential teen films” more decidedly organized around various ailments have also proliferated in the last decade, for instance It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2010), The Fault in Our Stars (2014), Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015). In these films, agency is distributed differently due to the characters’ default positions and their way of relating to their afflictions becomes their plane of individuation. Even though ailing adults have always been present, they have rarely been addressed as well-rounded, albeit ill, characters. Father Leviatch in Lady Bird (2017) is another example for an empathetic depiction of a troubled adult in a teen-centered narrative.

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“survival” strategy as the handling of firearms and hunting, but certainly no less important in a world ruled by archaic and often invisible laws. The most apparent teacher-pupil moments occur while Ree walks her siblings to school. As a significant site in its own right here, and unlike the schools in (sub)urban teen films it clearly belongs to another milieu, one in which people move and behave according to a different set of rules and practices. This is one of the few institutions not ruled by the clan system and its drug industry. A Montage of Ree strolling through the aisles, looking through a window and tenderly smiling at her sister Ashlee in an arts and crafts class, engaged in a fun and somewhat meaningful activity underscores that school, and even childhood generally are much further away than they should be. Her walk through the institution’s corridors is akin to the anthropology shot seen in other high school movies. While it doesn’t introduce the different “tribes” of teenagers in a high school, it does allow deeper insight into the whole school ecology. In one classroom, young people are instructed how to properly handle babies using training dolls (an indicator for the statistically much higher teen pregnancy numbers in poor areas), while the members of the local JROTC chapter, wearing their gloves, hats, and rifles, are practicing parading in the gymnasium where we later see Ree sign up for army recruiting. All of these moments are staged similarly, with Ree shown in close-up, photographed from inside the room into which she is looking through a glass window. Here Ree can dreamily or eagerly look in on the activities, but she cannot participate, she is both framed and constrained by the doorframe, kept at bay by this invisible barrier (see Fig. 3.4). As important as what happens in the school is the way there, which the three siblings take together, walking on a dirt road through the woods, accompanied by their dogs. The short scene is photographed with a hand-held camera, hence as spectators, we not only see them moving, we move with them. We are participating in the movement in a way that avoids either the characters or their world being “on display,” fetishized and exhibited to a potentially more exploitative gaze. The mise-en-scène in this regard emphasizes a participation that not only determines this image, but the entire film: the woods, the dirt road, the humans, the

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Fig. 3.4 On the outside looking in through the glass barrier

dogs, and the camera that captures them all operate as actants, as “fullblown mediators” with significant contributions to the ecology, dispositif, or actor-network. As they walk, Ree makes up playful educational games, giving Ashlee exercises in adding and spelling. The word Ashlee spells her is “House”—the central object of Ree’s journey. Ashlee is unsure here whether to spell it like “Horse” or “House,” underscoring her relative innocence: while elsewhere real estate will dominate Ree’s world Ashlee has not yet (or at least, not linguistically) any fully formed concept of the precarity of home. Were it not for the slight disruption by the ill-fitting dirty clothes and ripped pants, this would be a serene moment and a positive, if unconventional family dynamic. Later in the film after having been seriously beaten and with strong drugs racing through her system Ree continues to prioritize the children and their education, making sure they will do their homework while she is sedated with painkillers. Ree recognizes education as a viable strategy for coping with, or escaping the hardships of their life and the culture of poverty. In this regard, Winter’s Bone resonates with many other teen films, but does something rather unusual: It shows a protagonist taking education and academic effort very seriously, thus elevating it to the status of a non-human actor. Education is not only a wallpaper in front of

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which the characters experience personal crises and growth, it has a function. Certainly, this is no total exception, however according to Bulman’s division of teen films into urban and suburban films—a categorization that reaches its limits with this rural teen film—the teen film’s evaluation of academic efforts follows two resultant main patterns: While the suburban films use school very prominently, albeit rather as a backdrop or “as a social space within which the drama of teen angst is played out” (Bulman 2004, 85), the urban films devise a different didactics, more akin but not identical to the function of education in Winter’s Bone: Hollywood films about urban public schools suggest that low-income inner city students need to believe in themselves, believe in the American dream, believe in the power of education, work hard and make better choices in their lives in order to escape their culture of poverty … Unlike the students in urban school films, the middle-class students in the suburban school films tend to take their education for granted…. These characters know they will likely graduate from high school, attend college, and at least reproduce their parents’ middle-class status. The rough social trajectory of their lives has essentially been predetermined, independent of their effort in school. They merely need to go through the motions. Therefore, the education of the suburban school students is not a central feature of the plot of these films. What matters most in these films is not academic achievement, but the achievement of one’s independent identity. (Bulman 2004, 47, 86)

In Winter’s Bone, education is not suggested as a redemptive solution, only as an option: There will be no closure when a scholarship is won or the entrance to college is granted as in many of the films Bulman writes about and which he aptly reads as projections of middle-class values: “What middle-class American culture wants most for poor urban adolescents is a rejection of the culture of poverty and attainment of a middleclass lifestyle and financial independence through hard work” (Bulman 2004, 86). Education as a means of social mobility simply doesn’t present a feasible way out in an ecology (and economy) in which there hardly is any social or otherwise mobility possible, at least not from the middleclass perspective put forth by most teen films organized around education and/or school. Winter’s Bone shows a specific culture of poverty whose

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lack of structure also applies for its class organization devoid of an easily classifiable, coherent low, middle, or upper class. It’s an economic microclimate that cannot be overcome by applying oneself to academics with an inspired American work ethic—however the film’s conclusion isn’t as bleak and fatalist to suggest that there is no possibility whatsoever to ever “graduate” and eventually leave its cyclical trappings.

Responsibility as Rebirth: TeenAgency as Teenage Heroism The most common ways in which teen films narrate the successfully passed-through transformation are easily decipherable indicators of autonomy, independence, or romance—not seldom, a mixture of all of them. In Winter’s Bone, Ree accepting the responsibility to take care of her family will fulfill a similar function. Although she does not attain individual or spatial freedom in the sense of (or by) going away, joining the army, escaping into drugs or autism, dying, or “doing her own thing” in any other way, she does so by escaping and defeating fatalism. She neither becomes her mother nor her father, nor does she become a mother or father figure in the traditional conservative sense, as she defies conventional binary notions of the nurturing feminine and the resourceful strong (or absent) male. The models for men, women, and families around her are as limited and without prospects as the models for adulthood in her own family. Wellum writes that “Winter’s Bone is a feminist film about an antifeminist world. In the movie, men represent power, and authority, with Thump serving as the tribe’s patriarch. Most of the dialogue between the women characters is about men and their power” (2013). This goes for the older and the young generation, as even Ree’s same-age friend Gail, already the mother of baby Ned, has been absorbed into repressive gender roles by marrying. Overcoming the binarisms of her world, of mainstream cinema in general, and of the teen film in particular becomes the premise for Ree’s successful coming-of-age transition, but moreover, it is what constitutes

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her heroism. Oversimplified, the men are bullies, the women are submissive, or bullies as well. Ree calibrates her role by becoming neither: Her strength is not violence, but non-violence, with which she endures whatever she has to face, unwavering and unrelenting. She walks on and on, most of the times on foot and through the woods, she does not leave the Milton’s yard despite intimidations, pursues Thump Milton and tries to confront him at a cattle auction (an impressive setting visualizing the public world as purely male sphere), and continuously presses ahead with her search. Ree’s path bears resemblance to Greek mythology, the urtext for the hero’s journey and its narrative structure that turns the protagonist into a heroic figure. The traces of mythical heroism are hidden in plain—allegorical—sight, from the obvious Odyssey comparison to details such as Merab Milton and her sisters who beat Ree up as counterpart to the Graeae (three witch-like old sisters), to the Labors of Heracles. Among Heracles famous twelve tasks are not only the slaying or capturing of several fierce animals or food gathering of sorts (obtaining the cattle of the monster Geryon and stealing the apples of the Hesperides), which in Ree’s journey is the obtaining of deer meat and the gutting of squirrels. Even the intense scenes in the factory-like structure where the cattle auction takes place conjure up the Augean stables Heracles has to clean. But Heracles’ ultimate required task, after whose completion he finally becomes purified and thus heroic, is to capture and bring back Cerberus, the gatekeeper dog of the Hades. Heracles’ archenemy Eurystheus assigned him this specific task deeming it impossible—and it implies the suspension of the fundamental border between the here and the netherworld. Heracles must redeem himself from the sin of having killed his wife and children and in a bout of madness induced by external influence (in his case, not drugs or crime, but the vengeful Hera) whereas here the guilt from which Ree must wash herself clean is her father’s inherited sin. The negotiation of moving between life and death, world and netherworld, not only takes place here in the form of liminal geographical spaces, it is literal and visceral in Ree’s experience of violence and in the ultimate retrieval of her father’s dead body, which she has to pull up from the swamp, from the dead (the swamp in a sense becomes the Hades of the clan cosmos, the place where they hide their corpses). Ree achieves and confirms purity then by traveling through Hades and

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thus becomes heroic—not an ancient Greek heroine, but a heroine of the American frontier in its contemporary form, a heroism borne from actively “choosing” to deal with her family’s fate instead of escaping into drugs, the army, or other choices Ree is given. Consequently, her heroic deeds lead to the rescue of her American family and a shared ethos of responsibility that needs to be distinguished from other forms of responsibility people take for each other in Winter’s Bone. Ree is not only obstructed in her journey, she also receives help. Her neighbor Sonya Milton feeds her starving horse and brings meat and painkillers, Sonya’s husband Blond offers to take in Sonny and raise him, Merab takes Ree to her father’s corpse which makes it possible to save to the family home. All these generosities are counterbalanced by actions that make it clear that they are borne from a clan codex than any genuine responsibility or even selflessness: Blond adds to his and Sonya’s proposal to take in Sonny that they have no interest in doing the same for little Ashlee, which reaffirms the archaic patriarchal order they abide by, and unmasks the offer as purely self-serving, looking for a male heir. Merab’s life-saving help comes only after debating whether to kill Ree or not. Ree and her siblings however are characterized differently here, particularly in their relationships with further non-human actors: animals. In the exposition, they take care of baby kittens, at the end, when the full-circle-bracket around the film closes, Teardrop comes by and hands each child a duckling he has wrapped in a piece of flannel. In unison, Sonny and Ashlee say thank you and until the end credits roll, they will hold them, both hands tenderly clutched around them. In a way, a succession and the future of the family are suggested by this doubling: Just as Ree was given two helpless creatures to raise up through her parents’ absence, these two are now given two helpless creatures to raise by the soon-to-be-absent uncle. A film scene that was deleted from the final cut but is included on the DVD edition enforces this doubling, a montage of the two children looking everywhere and for a long time for the stray dog they brought in earlier and named Peanut Butter (which is not only a cute name for a dog, but also a reminder of what they desire: nourishing food), calling his name in vain over and over again, a search that both echoes Ree’s search for someone untraceable—their calls fading

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Fig. 3.5 Responsibility and response-ability. Animals as non-human actants

away into a space where people and things just get lost—and the children’s sense of responsibility. Ree has set an exemplary new model for adulthood, unlike her parents’ absence, unlike the authoritarian families around her, or the part solidary, part violent clannish blood ties—and her siblings embrace that model. The interactions with animals function as a visualization of responsibility—or “response-ability” in Donna Haraway’s sense22 —participation, and taking care of smaller, or perhaps helpless beings. The presence of animals runs through the entire film: horses, pet and stray dogs, a ferret, squirrels, a donkey, birds, and cats not only add to the local color, in most cases they are treated with more care and respect by humans than they treat each other (see Figs. 3.5 and 3.6). Even the gory scenes in which deer and squirrels are gutted and later eaten are less shocking than they are an illustration of an ecology 22 In

When Species Meet (2008), one of her reflections on the modes of coexistence of different species, Haraway directly replies to Latour’s famous dictum We Have Never Been Modern (1991) to take his concept into a different discursive and ontological realm as she speaks about the entanglement of species under the header “We have never been human” to call into question certain binarisms: “The Great Divides of animal/human, nature/culture, organic/technical, and wild/domestic flatten into mundane differences—the kinds that have consequences and demand respect and response—rather than rising to sublime and final ends” (Haraway 2008, 15). Her plea for respect and response is the basis of “sharing suffering” (ibid., 69 f.) as an ethical practice that involves the ability to recognize other (human and non-human) living beings and

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Fig. 3.6 Sonny and Peanutbutter, doubled and completed by their reflection in the mirror

in which both humans and non-humans (in this case, animals) are participants who coexist, feed each other, and if necessary eat each other. When Ree bluntly tells the bail bondsman that her father “Jessup Dolly is dead. He’s lying in a crappy grave somewhere or become piles of shit in a hog pen,” her comment certainly is disdainful and fueled by anger, but to some extent, she graphically describes a materialist ecology, where a dead body is not so much glorified as a holy vessel that needs to be ritualistically buried, but rather becomes decomposing matter, compost, food for other participants of the ecology. Ree’s model of responsibility and selflessness gains contour through the interplay with her plan to join the army as another sphere of selfsacrifice, responsibility, and dedication to the extended family unit of the body politic, of “the American people” as family. The army recruiter says to Ree: “Well, it sounds like it might be a bigger challenge just to stay home, you know, and actually take care of your brother and sister … So it sounds like right now, you need to buckle up and stay home. It’s going to take a lot of backbone and a lot of courage to stay home, but respond to suffering by “learning to live and think in practical opening to shared pain and mortality and learning what that living and thinking teach” (ibid., 83).

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that I think is what you need to do right at this point. OK?” Sgt. Schalk’s consoling words upon seeing Ree’s bruised face and learning about her bleak home situation also ennoble what she is doing, as it is accurate that the task at hand takes more courage than joining the army, or even possibly going to war, which might be an altruistic self-sacrifice, but also an escape into a state-administered socially esteemed altruism, easier to manage due to a rigidly structured system of hierarchy and orders, and at the same time more prestigious and better paid than taking care of a family all alone. There is no one telling Ree what to do at home and she has to assume full responsibility as an individual, which is the opposite of what would happen in the army as a de-individualizing agent. Only by assuming responsibility, she can establish a model for herself and her siblings in which agency defies fatalism and the deterioration of the family. On their first encounter, Merab asked: “Ain’t you got no men could do this?”, surprised that a teenage girl leaves the protocol of patriarchal clan laws. Ree in that scene replied: “No, Ma’am, I don’t.”—because there really is no one else, no man, no parent, no adult to assume agency. The agency Ree has to assume is what ultimately leads to her attaining autonomy and her individuation—not by emancipating herself from certain ascribed labels, but from certain prescribed life paths allotted to her economic class. Overcoming fatalism is Ree’s liminal transformation and constitutes her teenage heroism.

POSTSCRIPTUM Winter’s Bone has arguably advanced the spectrum of teen-centered films and, with that and by extension, the critical registers that might be developed for our engagement with the genre. The entanglement of characters and their environment has always informed cinematic teens and figured as part of what motivates their respective quests. However, most commonly what we encounter is not just the intersection between place and circumstance, but a deterministic hypothesis arising from a normative middle-class perspective: If a main character is situated in a lower-class milieu or otherwise undesirable spaces, her desire to escape is depicted as a way to mature or even survive; an upper-class milieu is commonly

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coded as morally corrupt and characters are stifled by their overachieving or self-absorbed parents’ expectations or their lack of interest respectively; and a middle-class milieu is simultaneously boring and ideal (embodied perfectly by Ferris Bueller ’s non-quest). There are texts that challenge and rewrite the frequent spatial and social determinism of the teen film (for instance Napoleon Dynamite [2004]), but Winter’s Bone might be the first “ecological teen film”— ecology here both in the everyday language sense as well as in the sense of an extended notion of environment, or a complex network of coexisting life forms, as proposed in this chapter. This entails a mutual influence of characters and their environment as an entangled ecology, inseparable, but not necessarily deterministic or a priori problematic. In this regard, the engagement with Winter’s Bone generates a different perspective that can be fed back into the discourse and be used for texts before and after it. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014) as a longtime-filmmaking endeavor never before seen in the teen film genre explores an ecology along its temporal axis. In it, not only a teen protagonist on the representational level, but his entire environment (or apparatus) are, both materially and symbolically, in transition, with cast, crew, and their machines actually coming-of-age together in front of and behind the camera (for a detailed account of Linklater and Boyhood, see Shary [2017]). Further differing ecologies within teen cinema and similar ecological themes in this extended sense of entanglement—particularly after Winter’s Bone— are explored in other teen films as diverse as Hick (2012), Chronicle (2012), The Hunger Games (2012), Moonrise Kingdom (2012), The Kings of Summer (2013), Standing Up (2013), The Maze Runner (2014), Paper Towns (2015), American Honey (2016), Beach Rats (2017), Super Dark Times (2017), Mid90s (2018), or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019). As a filmmaker with a social consciousness and a pronounced ethics Debra Granik has in all of her feature films thus far explored fictional and real characters on the margins of American life by trying to participate in their reality without exposing them to a sensationalizing or othering gaze and not using the camera as a mechanism of an anthropological or even colonial investigation (and instead upholding the ideal of documentary postulated by Walker Evans: “the camera seems to me, next to the unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time”

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[Agee and Evans 2001, 9]). Leave No Trace (2018) is another unusual variant on the coming-of-age narrative and a useful companion piece to Winter’s Bone (as well as to Granik’s 2014 documentary Stray Dog about an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD). The 13-year-old girl Tom at the center of the film lives “off the grid” with her war-traumatized father Ben in the forests of a public park in Oregon, they are eventually discovered, well-meaning social workers try to reintegrate them, and they take off again in pursuit of an environment, or at least niches that might accommodate their needs as a team as well as their increasingly diverging individual demands, Ben needing to retreat further and Tom needing to grow and branch out. “The same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me,” Tom says when for the first time she decides to stake a claim on her own development, the culmination of both the tenderness and tensions between them, as well as a shift her father accepts, even though it will mean a disruption to the family unit. Many of the actants that defined Winter’s Bone can also be observed in Leave No Trace. There is once more a pronounced presence of animals that also help to trace human behavior and characterize people by their relations; however, the human–animal associations are used in a more allegorical and more anthropocentric manner here. Among the various seahorse pendants, plastic toy horses, and taxidermied deer heads, there is Boris the guard dog with the ability to wake veterans up from their nightmarish hauntings, and a beehive that will serve as a moving allegory on the social organism into which Ben is no longer able to be incorporated by showing that whether the bees are a lethal force or a body politic that produces warmth is a matter of trust on our part and how we choose to coexist with them and understand their agency. When Tom comes across a rabbit named Chainsaw while walking on a deserted road, Leave No Trace incorporates a subtle Alice In Wonderland moment that will lead her to a Future Farmers of America meeting, as one of her first interactions with her peers, and an encounter that provides one of the many occasions for the film to establish its own aesthetic corridor between a cinema verité mode and a phantasmatic hi-res composition, boldly stylized and understatedly intimate. The detail with which ferns,

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Fig. 3.7 Entangled ecology: objects, human and non-human life in Leave No Trace

spider webs, moss, or other elements of their ecology are portrayed visualizes the forest’s local light and optical unconscious 23 and grants depth and agency (and agency via depth) not only to the humans in an environment, but to the complex and ramified makeup of the ecology. Consequently, the film’s color palette unfolds an enormous number of shades of green, the perspectives relying often on mid-shots or even aerial perspectives dissolving humans and other singular actants in beautifully layered rhizomatic landscapes, Granik thus visualizing “the consuming vastness of the forest, the idea that you are immersed in this forest” (Garcia 2018, 38) (see Fig. 3.7). An actant that is worth following in Leave No Trace is communication. Tom and Ben have developed nonverbal communication both as a survival mechanism based on Ben’s army training, but also as expressions of their particular modes of coexistence with each other and within their milieu, like their humming together in the film’s beginning or making clacking sounds. Their language exceeds words—an ecological language, a way of one’s body relating to its environment. 23 Referring to Walter Benjamin’s term with which he refers to visual information the human eye cannot perceive at first glance, but whose presence can be made visible by specific properties of film and photography, as for instance enlargement or slow motion (2008, 30).

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Leave No Trace addresses, like Winter’s Bone, central issues besides its adolescent protagonist’s individuation outside of conventional family structures or other institutions. It can be read as ecocriticism in its negotiation of the human–animal divide and the more general confrontation of nature and culture, or wilderness and civilization as inimical entities instead of their union in an ecology (as a reintegration measure, Ben has to work in a tree nursery, trim, cut down, and package Christmas trees to be shipped to Florida). Other recurring themes are the opioid crisis (war vets having become addicted to medication they can then no longer afford), parental figures and their absence, maturing beyond one’s years and outside of traditional mechanisms of socialization, and real estate in its relation to identity (the house Ben and Tom have to move into, the tiny house, the RV park as counterparts to the Walden-esque retreat to the forest). Ben’s path as a traumatized loner and loving father becomes the vehicle for a state of the union address on how the USA treat their veterans: Granik lets her work as a documentarian from Stray Dog bleed into the tragic-yet-tender depiction of American war heroes and their trauma (about her process with co-writer Anne Rossellini, Granik says: “We write and imagine, but reality reshapes the movie” [Garcia 2018, 38]). Ben’s self-reliance, but also his loss of any ability to become his pre-war self again, is surprisingly akin to the first Rambo movie (1982), yet Granik’s way to shape his interactions with other vets and non-vets are all characterized by kindness and solidarity. Americans are genuinely nice and compassionate in Leave No Trace. Against the social realism of her subject matter and the aesthetic realism of her style, Granik’s graceful negotiation of intimacy and companionship postulates an idealism— while never offering simple answers by reducing the textures of American life or blaming clear villains—whose didactics and politics-free of cynicism in the Trump era USA almost seem like a gently radical proposition of kindness (as a truly ecological mode). Even more than in Winter’s Bone, all the metaphors and symbolism carry within themselves a reminder how they relate to the lived world. The scope of what can be done with coming-of-age narratives besides genre staples—getting the guy/girl, getting high, getting laid, getting out, or getting into college—has clearly been extended by Leave No Trace: The quest for autonomy doesn’t have

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to be a solipsistic endeavor, but can become a quest for an ethical, ecological individuation, in which being adequate to the world and to one’s own desires aren’t mutually exclusive, both for the film characters and filmmakers.

Flimography American Honey, Andrea Arnold, A24, USA/UK, 2016. Beach Rats, Eliza Hittman, Cinereach, USA, 2017. Boyhood, Richard Linklater, IFC Films, USA, 2014. The Breakfast Club, John Hughes, Universal Pictures, USA, 1985. Chronicle, Josh Trank, 20th Century Fox, USA, 2012. DOPE, Rick Famuyiwa, Open Road Films, USA, 2015. The DUFF, Ari Sandel, CBS Films, USA, 2015. Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper, Columbia Pictures, USA, 1969. The Fault in Our Stars, Josh Boone, 20th Century Fox, USA, 2014. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, John Hughes, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1986. The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford, 20th Century Fox, USA, 1940. Hick, Derick Martini, Stone River Productions, USA, 2012. The Hunger Games, Gary Ross, Lionsgate Films, USA, 2012. It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, Alliance Films, USA, 2010. Kids, Larry Clark, Killer Films, USA, 1995. The Kings of Summer, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, Big Reach Films, USA, 2013. Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig, IAC Films, USA, 2017. Leave No Trace, Debra Granik, Bleecker Street, USA, 2018. Maze Runner, Wes Ball, 20th Century Fox USA/UK, 2014. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Fox Searchlight, USA, 2015. Mid90s, Jonah Hill, A24, USA, 2018. Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson, Indian Paintbrush, USA, 2012. Napoleon Dynamite, Fox Searchlight Pictures, USA, 2004. Paper Towns, Jake Schreier, Fox 2000 Pictures, USA, 2015. Pretty in Pink, Howard Deutch, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1986. Rambo: First Blood, Ted Kotcheff, Orion Pictures, USA, 1982. Risky Business, Paul Brickman, Warner Bros., USA, 1983. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, André Øvredal, Lionsgate Films, USA, 2019.

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She’s All That, Robert Iscove, Miramax Films, USA, 1999. Standing Up, D.J. Caruso, AR Films, USA, 2013. Stray Dog, Debra Granik, Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, USA, 2014. Super Dark Times, Kevin Phillips, Netflix, USA, 2017. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Lasse Hallström, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1993. Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik, Roadside Attractions, USA, 2010.

Bibliography Agee, James, and Walker Evans. (1941) 2001. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London and New York: Verso Books. Barthes, Roland. (1963) 1993. “La Voiture, Projection de l’Ego.” Oeuvres Complètes 1: 1136–1142. Becker, Jane S. 1998. Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk. London: University of North Carolina Press. Bell, David. 1997. “Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror.” In Contested Countryside Culture: Otherness, Marginalization and Rurality, edited by Paul Cloke and Jo Little, 94–108. London: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. (1936) 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J. A. Underwood. London: Penguin Classics. Berressem, Hanjo. 2015. “Local Color: Light in Faulkner.” In Media|Matter: The Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, 69–95. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Brady, Emily. 2013. The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Bricmont, Jean, and Alan Sokal. 1997. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. London: Picador. Bulman, Robert C. 2004. Hollywood Goes to High School: Cinema, Schools and American Culture. New York: Worth Publishers. Burke, Edmund. 1767. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Idea of the Sublime and the Beautiful. London: Harper. Considine, David. 1985. The Cinema of Adolescence. Jefferson: McFarlane. Driscoll, Catherine. 2011. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Oxford and New York: Berg.

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Garcia, Maria. 2018. “Thinking Her Own Thoughts: An Interview with Debra Granik.” Cineaste XLIII (4): 36–41. Haraway, Donna Jean. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. (1944) 2002. “The Culture Industry. Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, translated by Edmund Jephcott, 94–137. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. (1790) 2007. Critique of Judgment. Translated by John. H. Bernard. New York: Cosimo Classics. Kolhatkar, Sheelah. 2017. “The Cost of the Opioid Crisis.” The New Yorker, September 11, https://newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/thecost-of-the-opioid-crisis. Kristeva, Julia. (1980) 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1991. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: And Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 2013. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lenin, V. I. 1905. “Socialism and Religion.” Lenin Collected Works 10 (208): 83–87, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm. Malpas, Jeff E. 1999. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl. (1844) 1977. Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLuhan, Marshall. (1964) 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press. Merrigan, Court. 2014. “New Genres: Country Noir.” Electric Literature, May 27, https://electricliterature.com/new-genres-country-noir/. Nash, Roderick Frazier. 2014. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1883) 1995. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House Inc.

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Rogers, Heather. 2005. Gone Tomorrow: Hidden Life of Garbage. London and New York: The New Press. Sederer, Lloyd I. 2017. “What the Washington Post Gets Wrong About Opioids.” Huffington Post, August 6, https://huffpost.com/ entry/opioids-the-washington-post-and-the-trump-commission_b_ 5984d86ae4b0f2c7d93f55a6. The Shaggs [Dorothy Wiggin] writer. 1969. “Who Are Parents?” Track 3 on the Shaggs. Philosophy of the World. Red Rooster/Rounder. Shary, Timothy. 2005. Teen Movies. American Youth on Screen. London and New York: Wallflower. ———. 2017. Boyhood: A Young Life on Screen. London: Routledge Focus. Slade, Giles. 2006. Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. 1991. “Who Is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography.” In Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institution, and Practices, 169–183. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Strasser, Susan. 2001. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Pantheon. ———. 2015. “Rags, Bones, and Plastic Bags: Obsolescence, Trash, and American Consumer Culture.” In Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age, edited by Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman, 41– 61. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, Michael. 1979. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Thoreau, Henry David. 1854. Walden; or Life in the Wilderness. Beverly Hills: Concord. Tischleder, Babette B., and Sarah Wasserman. 2015. “Thinking Out of Sync: A Theory of Obsolescence.” In Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age, edited by Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman, 1–17. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Toffler, Alvin. 1970. Future Shock. London and New York: Bantam Books. Trahan, Erin. 2010. “Winter’s Bone’ Director Strived for Authenticity in Cast, Script, Set.” Boston Globe, June 13, archive.boston.com/ae/movies/ articles/2010/06/13/winters_bone_director_strived_for_authenticity_in_ cast_script_set/?page=2. Wellum, Caleb. 2013. “On the Margins: Winter’s Bone, Independent Cinema, and Rural America.” Art of Ekphrasis, March 23, https://artofekphrasis.

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wordpress.com/2013/03/26/on-the-margins-winters-boneindependentcinema-and-rural-america/. Wieser, Matthias. 2012. Das Netzwerk von Bruno Latour: Die Akteur-NetzwerkTheorie zwischen Science & Technology Studies und Poststrukturalistischer Soziologie. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Williams, John Alexander. 2002. Appalachia: A History. London: University of North Carolina Press. Wilton, Andrew, and T. J. Barringer. 2002. American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wood, Robin. 2002. “Party Time or Can’t Hardly Wait for That American Pie: Hollywood High School movies of the 90s.” CineAction 58: 2–10. Wray, Matt. 2006. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. London: Duke University Press.

4 Quasi-Object | Quasi-Subject: Technology, Drugs, Language, Ethnicity

A Black Tech Teen Hood Film: Technology and Drugs as Quasi-Objects in Dope Technology played an important role in the discussion of The DUFF (2015) as an important element, factoring in the interactions of its characters with each other and with their diegetic world, as did drugs as a traditional and manifold teen film trope in my reading of Winter’s Bone (2010). Both themes and their respective articulations and functions reoccur in Dope (2015). Like The DUFF, Dope is characterized by the incorporation of time-specific technologies and their characteristics; however, Dope is formally more experimental and more consequently proposes a dramaturgy and aesthetics that corresponds to the technologies it refers to. The use and literacy of technology on the level of plot become a decisive catalyst on which other themes, conflicts, and contradictions are played out. Dope is first and foremost a black teen film, a text concerned with African-American identities and experiences and secondarily a teen film concerned with technology. It can be considered here as a renewal of the technocentric teen film, but especially as a renewal of the black teen film, which traditionally has been mostly in the form of hood films. The term is derived both from the setting of these © The Author(s) 2020 B. Sonnenberg-Schrank, Actor-Network Theory at the Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31287-9_4

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films and from the title of John Singleton’s seminal Boyz N The Hood (1991). Shary refers to the hood films as “The African-American crime cycle.” He points out that not only the ethnicity, but also the age of the authors is significant, as “[t]his marked another departure for youth cinema, since for the first time young adult filmmakers began controlling their own images” (2002, 81). Besides “exposing audiences to (male) African-American youth culture and questioning the current state of race relations in the nation” (ibid., 82), they also revived the teen film creatively and economically after a decline in the late 1980s. Mulholland argues that the cycle has been outmoded by recent narratives such as The Wire (2002–2008): “African-American teen cinema is notable only by its absence. John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood felt like a major movie in 1991, again, because no one had seen the lives of ordinary black American kids in a mainstream movie before. But two decades later the sentimentality and one-dimensional preachiness is dated and cloying” (2011, 497). The hood film produces a progeny until the present with a persisting popular mythology and iconography, but African-American comingof-age narratives have by now expanded into a multitude of more diverse articulations (see postscriptum at the end of this chapter). Dope is an important contemporary contribution to the teen film canon, as the majority of texts purport a white middle-class perspective with limited and oftentimes overtly stereotypical deviations in regard to gender, sexuality, class, or ethnicity (instances of poorly handled representations of non-white or non-American characters ranging from Sixteen Candles’ [1984] Long Duk Dong to gratuitous African-American sidekicks reduced to shouting catchphrases). One of the central elements through which Dope renews the black teen films from the 1990s is through the trope of technology. The legacy of the drug theme is insinuated by an ambiguous title that evokes a history of cinematic meetings between adolescents and drugs. In most teen films, drugs function as a powerful rite of initiation, similar to sexuality. Depending on the type of film, its according depiction of drugs, the kinds of drugs used as well as the kinds of teens who use drugs, these can be typically grouped into two dominant modes—the first being the cautionary tale, in which drug use is scandalized and sensationalized (a staple of American teen and exploitation films, from Reefer Madness [1936] to a slew of 1950s youth

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problem films to Kids [1995] and numerous recent films and TV shows), and the second the stoner comedy subgenre, in which getting high and the altered states that accompany it provides a platform for comedy.1 Both modes (as well as less prevalent ones) tend to rely on clichés and easily decipherable signifiers, be it the inevitable physical and moral decay of the bad drug user, or the predictably erratic behavior, and occasionally heightened perception and insight, of the good or “fun” drug user. The history of the modes in which drug use is represented is closely connected to the history of censorship and specifically the Hays Code—and the danger of facing legal troubles, accusations of “advertising” substance abuse, or a backlash from parental figures and institutional authorities that automatically occurs if a film does not dismantle the drug topic by either comedy, shock, or fearmongering. The function of drugs in Dope however is different, as they occupy a more neutral position: In themselves, the drugs are just a substance, neither a lethal poison nor a funor wisdom-inducing potion. Only by their associations do they change their status and become something else and something not neutral. Building on the position allotted to objects and other non-human actants in the last chapter, both drugs and technology and their various functions in Dope shall be investigated here by approaching them as what Bruno Latour, referring to Michel Serres, calls the quasi-object— and its complementary, the quasi-subject.

1 Driscoll

traces drug use as a rite of initiation back to the flapper film in which “[s]ex and drug use are often implied … In The Plastic Age (1925), smoking and drinking are represented as commonplace parts of college life, despite (or because of ) the reigning US Prohibition laws (from 1920 to 1933) and other illegal drug use is also apparently common … It’s important to the flapper film that such risky behavior is entwined with the dominant expectations of adolescence—school or college, career choice, and developing independence and romantic attachments—and in this way the flapper film was a contributing factor in the debates that led to the Code” (2011, 23–24). She also discusses the “stoner” film, which “generally employs drug use as a comic eye on disenfranchised youth and on the hierarchized ‘straight world’ that frames and judges them … They belong with teen party films because of their shared emphasis on margins and excess and their discourse on immaturity, but they often stray beyond US teen film’s common association with suburban white adolescence” (2011, 80).

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Quasi-Object and Quasi-Subject Bruno Latour’s laboratory studies and especially the interest in inscription devices would pave the way for his later studies of technological objects and their influence on human (inter)actions and behaviors. It is the devices themselves that define the translations (as processes of mediations and actants continuously redefining each other) and in how far the inscriptions have “a direct relationship to ‘the original substance’” (Latour and Woolgar 2013, 51–52). Latour’s technology studies of different exemplary cases (such as the failed railway transportation system Aramis, guns, VCR recorders, cameras, seatbelts, key chains, “sleeping policemen,” or the particular lock system he writes about in The Berlin Key) on the one hand are a methodological demonstration of what he means by following the actors. On the other hand, they serve to illustrate how the translations, associations, and mediations between humans and technological objects take place: Humans enter hybrid networks in which objects influence their behavior. The different human and nonhuman actors “do something” with and to each other and thereby define and redefine each other. Assigning agency to non-human actants is not tantamount to assigning them a life of their own, free will or intentionality: “We should not animate, we should stop de-animating!”2 —Latour’s non-human actants are not made human, they simply are not denied their capacities to do something and their capacities to alter human actions by “offering their services.” Following Madeleine Akrich, Latour postulates that every device carries within it specific associations that it proposes, and from which specific scripts emerge (“If we call the ‘script’ of a device its ‘program of action’ [Akrich 1992], what is the programme of such a key?” [Latour 2000, 17]). For Latour, the question, prompted by Gilbert Simondon, is decisive as to how machines are part of the milieu in which humans live, which also allows us to understand the hidden human aspects in the machine and the realization that milieus are machinic. Machinic, hybrid networks in which mixed beings coexist, oscillating between nature and culture, are part and parcel of a concept; 2 Bruno

Latour, personal communication, June 18, 2015.

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Latour introduces in We Have Never Been Modern from 1991: Building on Michel Serres’ concept of the quasi-object that he laid out in The Parasite (1982, 224–234), Latour picks up on the idea of the quasiobject (see also 1993, 51) as the defining entity of a hybrid, collective reality—or network. For Serres, a key aspect of the quasi-object is circulation and participation which then leads to the formation of the collective, as for instance with quasi-objects as different as the furet in a hunt, language, money, bread, love, or the ball in a soccer game. The position of the quasi-object therefore is connective—it is defined by the relations in which it is entangled. The quasi-object is the (non-human) actant around which a network forms, which circulates and is translated by the interactions and other actants with which it is entangled. Quasiobjects are not abstract figures of thought. They do exist as non-human actants and have a very real, oftentimes (not always!) material dimension and (always!) material consequences. As soon as we are on the trail of some quasi-object, it appears to us sometimes as a thing, sometimes as a narrative, sometimes as a social bond, without ever being reduced to a mere being … Of quasi-objects, quasisubjects, we shall simply say that they trace networks. They are real, quite real, and we humans have not made them. But they are collective because they attach us to one another, because they circulate in our hands and define our social bond by their very circulation. They are discursive, however; they are narrated, historical, passionate, and peopled with actants of autonomous forms. They are unstable and hazardous, existential, and never forget Being. (Latour 1993, 89)

The quasi-subject then is complementary to the quasi-object and they presuppose each other; they emerge from relations and in that sense are relational, or relative—and these relations can, of course, also be relations into which non-human actants can enter just as much as human actants. The ontological status of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects is determined by the interactions they are part of, by the translations, which they enable and out of which they emerge. They are part of networks and constitute (new) networks as they form collectives of humans and non-humans, as they weave the social.

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Case Study: Dope Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope follows high school senior Malcolm Adekanbi, who lives with his single mother, and his two best friends James “Jib” Caldones and the tomboyish lesbian Cassandra “Diggy” Andrews, all of whom are introduced as “black geeks” by an invisible and anonymous voice-over narrator (voiced by famed African-American actor Forest Whitaker) in the opening scenes. Despite living in a part of the Los Angeles suburb Inglewood, California that is aptly named “The Bottoms” and characterized by poverty and crime, the three friends have carved out a niche in their ecology in which they can pursue their geeky interests, such as 1990s hip-hop culture or playing in their three-piece band Awreeoh (a play on the Oreo cookie that inspired the slur for someone who is “black on the outside but white on the inside”). All of them have aspirations of going to college, Malcolm has his mindset on studying at Harvard and is in the process of writing an application essay and meeting with a local businessman and Harvard alumnus for an interview. More or less by coincidence, Malcolm acts as a go-between passing on flirtatious messages to a girl named Nakia for Dom (played by rapper A$AP Rocky), a slightly older boy who—like him—is highly intelligent and eloquent, but has chosen the path of crime and is now involved in trading drugs as a leader of his own crew. Invited to Dom’s birthday party at a club, Malcolm and his friends witness a violent altercation when a backroom drug deal goes wrong and rival gang members assail Dom’s crew. The drugs, a big stash of a synthetic psychoactive similar to the party drug MDMA called “Molly” (when presented to its potential buyers, it is framed with the vocabulary of the teen film lexicon: “What you got there?”/“Breakfast Club, nigga. Molly Ringwald.”), end up in Malcolm’s backpack along with a gun. He finds himself in a bind as the competing crews try to get hold of the drugs and he learns that AJ Jacoby, the Harvard alumnus he is supposed to meet with, is secretly the head of the drug ring for which Dom works. Jacoby denies any cognizance, yet implicitly blackmails Malcolm into solving the problem himself by tacitly threatening his life and bribing him with the promise of endorsing his Harvard application. Together with Jib and Diggy and a hacker friend of theirs, he devises a way to sell the drugs on the darknet, pay

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the druglord-cum-legitimate-businessman in bitcoin after hacking into Jacoby’s account to implicate and thereby blackmail him in endorsing Malcolm’s Harvard application. In order to escape poverty and crime, he has to engage in criminal activity on a highly sophisticated level. And while all this crime-related action takes place, Malcolm, who is still a virgin, is almost seduced by the drugged-out daughter of AJ Jacoby, before becoming romantically involved with Nikia, and inviting her to prom— the central tropes of both the urban and the suburban high school film, hardly ever mixed, are then all in place. Dope was released practically at the same time as The DUFF and both films’ similarities and differences help define a mid-2010s spectrum. Their prominent use of social media and modern technology posits them as social-media-infused updates of certain strands of teen films and in some aspects as antipodal texts: The DUFF is a major-backed mainstream film with a predominantly white cast set in a middle-class suburban world in which technology is used for cyberbullying and narcissism, a use motivated by pettiness and pathological vanity. Dope in contrast is an independent production (backed by several prominent African-American entertainers such as actors like Forest Whitaker as well as musicians Sean Combs and Pharrell Williams), written and directed by a Nigerian-American and with a predominantly black cast and crew set in an inner-city urban world in which technology is used for an intricate drug-peddling scheme on the darknet, motivated by the desire to escape a culture of poverty. Both films treat a related topic matter and use it for diverging narrative and formal/aesthetic goals and with diverging connotations, but it would be counterproductive to limit them to a racial-, class- or sitespecific determination of zeitgeist phenomena, as if there were a “black” and a “white,” an “urban” and a “suburban” way in which cinematic teenagers make use of technological objects. While The DUFF clearly, but also only to a certain extent, is a 2015 version of the makeover film as a well-rehearsed type of teen film, Dope also only in parts is the 2015 version of the hood film, building on that specific tradition implicitly and explicitly. The most obvious commonalities of Dope with the wellknown hood films from the early 1990s such as Juice (1992) or Boyz N The Hood is among others the depiction of the urban environment of

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black inner-city teenagers as fatalistic and potentially fatal crime-infested ghetto world ruled by gangs, in which the sole trajectories seem to be either becoming criminal or education as a literal and figurative way out. However, Dope depicts a milieu that has become more stratified: The borders of the ghetto world have become more porous, but so have those of the other strata, the formerly clear black-and-white divisions starting to bleed into each other. On the one hand, the ghetto is not solely grim and a harsh danger zone marred by a ruling culture of poverty—in comparison, in Boyz N The Hood a current sonic presence of gunshots, disinterested, sadistic and racist police, and the sound and searchlights of patrolling helicopters is an integral part of the mise-en-scène and the lives of the protagonists, foreshadowing the 1992 L.A. Riots (which in turn also form the thematic background for another important hood film, A. & A. Hughes’ Menace II Society from 1993). On the other hand, life “on the other side” is also not free from corruption and violence, on the contrary, it is built on these, as affluence seems not only to accept, but to necessitate the exploitation of the lower classes for the advancement of individual and personal gain. Most films from the cycle’s heyday in the early 1990s presented American capitalism and its (legal) economies as a predominantly white enterprise with almost impenetrable borders—a clarity of racially coded class distinctions reminiscent of Marxian economics: a white ruling class resting on the exploitation of a precarious black Lumpenproletariat .3 Dope in direct comparison somewhat uncouples the critique of neoliberalism’s obedience to “the free market” and its capital flows from ethnicity: Participation in contemporary high-speed capitalism is

3The Lumpenproletariat refers to those on the fringes of the industrialized world, such as beggars, petty criminals, unemployed or unemployable people, prostitutes or other precarious outcasts (Marx lists more specific terms in the Eighteenth Brumaire: “Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds … in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème” (Marx 1852, 75). Those affiliated with the Lumpenproletariat lack coherence as a class, and accordingly also lack class consciousness, which in times of crises and social breakdown makes them prey for demagogues (here, this would be Napoleon) as a “bribed tool of reactionary intrigue,” as Marx and Engels (1992, 44) analyze in the Communist Manifesto— and as historical and very recent political developments have continuously confirmed.

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no longer a matter of black vs. white but of mastering certain technologies. While this implies a discourse à la Paul Virilio (1986) that puts power and technology in a direct and mutual relation, it does not automatically imply that contemporary virtual turbo-capitalism is an equalizing agent that finally dissolves societal asymmetries and democratizes access to formerly white economies. In any way, a different perspective on and evaluation of the black experience in the form of a coming-of-age experience is suggested here, and if one of Winter’s Bone’s main merits is the deconstruction of stereotypical teen film females and males, one of Dope’s projects is the deconstruction of stereotypical teen film ascriptions to whiteness and blackness.

Repurposing Language, Reclaiming Meaning The first image before the film title is superimposed on the black background which then makes way for the establishing shot (an extreme long shot of the Inglewood skyline) while the film title remains in the same position—is a simple black screen on which three lines successively appear to form a simulated dictionary entry that specifies the meanings of “dope:” 1. noun: a drug taken illegally for recreational purposes 2. noun: a stupid person 3. slang: excellent. Used as a generalized term of approval. Similarly to The DUFF, the quasi-object language is put to the foreground in the form of vocabulary, or rather, a specific word as a symbolic container that can be filled with meaning. Whereas “DUFF” as a neologism is about reinventing, diversifying, and specializing and thereby carries with itself the film’s engagement with other generic texts, the word “dope” already exists but is made fluid by its ambiguity: The different and even contradicting meanings it can assume and has assumed depending on temporal and (sub)cultural contexts correspond to the film’s theme of re-attributing, appropriating, and expanding meanings and denotations. Later in the film, this is done very explicitly, for instance

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in a lengthy debate about the use of the word “nigga,” and implicitly, for instance by constructing characters as black geeks. Whereas both the geek (or nerd) and “the token black” character are staples of teen films, positioning black characters as geeks can be seen as a reclaiming of a niche conventionally allotted to whites. This is already one of the moments in which Dope becomes the missing link between the (white) suburban high school film and the (black) hood film, in which typically black protagonists are either partaking in, or victimized by a culture of poverty and crime that largely determines their milieu, with seldom anything between these two hardly dynamic positions. By emphasizing the multitude of meanings of dope, a theme—illegal drugs—is established, and also a subcultural affiliation, as the slang use of dope has its roots in African-American street vernacular and hip-hop culture. A word that belongs to different word classes, that can be a noun or an adjective, and has completely opposite connotations as it can be used as negative or positive, alludes to the arbitrariness of language. Language as a culturally constructed entity can simultaneously be a language of power as well as a counter-language undermining that power4 —and in that capacity, it echoes the constructed character of teen film types and tropes. In the same way, dope can be and has been repurposed and shifted from a derogatory term to a laudatory term, the hood film, the geek type, or even the prom can be repurposed. These terms and tropes can be assigned more, new, and different ascriptions and meanings thereby highlighting, questioning, and perhaps reshuffling in turn the modes of action and ideological underpinnings of these conventions.

Mapping by Movement: Repurposed Spaces Inglewood as location is a programmatic and meaningful choice that corresponds with the film’s many in-between positions. Winter’s Bone was already discussed as being set in a transitioning landscape in which the 4 In

his essay “On not Teaching English Usage” from 1965, James Sledd writes about the function of slang, its potential to be a counter-language against the social/linguistic hegemony: “To use slang is to deny allegiance to the existing order, either jokingly or in earnest, by refusing even the words which represent convention and signal status” (Sledd 1965, 699).

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setting’s liminality echoes the heroine’s own transformational experience. In Dope, too, the setting is a multilayered liminal space, not in the sense of an ecology in transition, but in the sense of a transitional geographical place. As a city in between more clearly ascribed geographical and cinematic locations—Los Angeles on the one hand, nondescript suburbs on the other—Inglewood is simultaneously urban and suburban and consequently, neither of both. This way, specific connotations associated with these spaces inform the diegetic world, but will not entirely define it. Aspects of both the urban Los Angeles and the suburbs implement a specific spatial organization. Jean Baudrillard sees “the parody of cities and urbanism in the sprawl of Los Angeles” (1988, 103), but this very sprawl necessitates and allows for a movement that is different from other places in its directionality; one could almost say it is two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional. Baudrillard goes on: Thus the only tissue of the city is that of the freeways, a vehicular, or rather an incessant transurbanistic, tissue, … No elevator or subway in Los Angeles. No verticality or underground, no intimacy or collectivity, no streets or facades, no center or monuments: a fantastic space, a spectral and discontinuous succession of all the various functions, of all signs with no hierarchical ordering—an extravaganza of indifference, extravaganza of undifferentiated surfaces. (1988, 125)

The lack of verticality, of contradictions, and other markers of a real city make Los Angeles a hollowed out, hyperreal city: “you are delivered from all depth there—a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference-points” (ibid., 124). This superficial neutrality and the absence of reference points are what creates a surface on which a repurposing can take place, especially when the setting doubles as a suburban backdrop characterized by the dominance of residential buildings and lack of social centers, a spatial arrangement that results in an absence of plurality and produces superficial neutrality in the first place. What at first glance seems to be a transitional nonplace, for the film’s project becomes the embodiment of an ambivalent liminal corridor charged with friction.

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The linear and horizontal movement by which the protagonists traverse Inglewood turns it into a flat landscape with no verticality or underground, which not only sets the pace of the film, moving back and forth on bicycles, feet, and sometimes cars or buses, but at any rate modes of transportation that always make visible the spaces they move through, other than for instance a subway, elevator, or a plane would. The modes of transportation simultaneously denote class or at least the level of affluence: Malcolm and his friends walk, ride their bikes or the bus (Malcolm’s mother also works as a bus driver), whereas AJ Jacoby’s spoiled children have their own cars and the upper-level gangster De’Andre rides a collectible red 1970 Chevrolet El Camino. Another classic teen film motif Dope appropriates for its own purposes this way is the “losers on bikes” trope, a genre staple occurring in texts as different as Stand By Me (1986), Gummo (1997), It (1990/2017), E.T. (1982), Stranger Things (2016), Super Dark Times (2017), The Summer of 84 (2018), and Spike Jonze’s short film Scenes from the Suburbs (2011) (as accompaniment to Arcade Fire’s 2010 album). Much has been written about cars as cinematographic objects, and even in teen films where they can become “mobile teen spaces moving between partial or temporary teen spaces (like the drive-in, parks, the dance, or homes)” (Driscoll 2011, 67). The bicycle as a quasi-object—and cinematographic object—opens further possibilities of inquiry, mapping teen geographies, constellating the riders, spatially organizing their quests, and generating different movement, speed, associations and relation to their respective diegetic ecologies than a quest on feet, in cars, buses, on motorcycles or skateboards. Site-specificity in that sense goes hand in hand with, or is generated by, the specificity of the respective mode of transportation (see Fig. 4.1). By moving through an ever-visible verticality-less world, their movement maps the territory and this mapping-by-traversing has a comparable function as the anthropology shot, the device that introduces the different tribes of which a teen film’s respective teen demographic consists. In Dope, not a social, but a spatial network is charted though, as place assumes such a central role here and serves as a reminder how identity and location are intertwined, something that is neglected in the suburban teen films that are almost solely focused on the development of the

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Fig. 4.1 “No verticality or underground.” Traversing the Bottoms on BMX bikes

adolescent individual without much regard to the specifics of their suburban milieu. The exploration of the film’s spaces as an explicit mapping of a milieu is highlighted in the first ten minutes when Malcolm, Jib, and Diggy are on their way home after their school day, complete with Malcolm being robbed of one of his stylish collectible sneakers. While the coexistence of the disembodied voice-over narrator’s monologue and the characters’ dialogue contributes to the mapping of the narrative’s architecture and its layers, the images of the three friends riding their 1980s BMX bikes and having to make choices at literal and metaphorical crossroads which path to pursue enable the spectator to comprehend the milieu through which they physically and figuratively move: Narrator (voice-over): On this day, their usual route home is blocked by a Blood [gang] gathering. They were shooting a video for their YouTube channel. Diggy: Well, where do you want to go? Jib: Some nigga really needs to invent an app like Waze to avoid all these hood traps. Narrator: The only way to get home is down 104th Street. But that’s where the dope dealers are who, for sport, routinely try to steal their bikes. Such is the life of a geek in The Bottoms. A daily navigation between bad and worse choices.

This “anthropological geography shot” that retraces the daily navigation between bad and worse choices, and the exact allocation of hood traps

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such as thieving dope dealers is the time- and site-specific equivalent of the “here be dragons” from medieval maps. The mapping of Malcolm’s territory continues throughout the film where the traversing of the city becomes a journey through different social strata with fluent transitions and different traps. Besides establishing the mapping, the scene foreshadows both the technology and the drug theme: Jib not only alludes to the video gamelike quality of their “mission” to get home safely and dodge all potential perils, he also wishes for “an app like Waze to avoid all these hood traps.” Waze is a popular app for smartphones and tablets that provides routing by combining a GPS-supported engine with community-generated content, which is significant insofar as it refers to a certain mode of interacting with media and technology in a true and Latourian network-sense: It is not merely a map, it is a dynamic map (as opposed to a static map that cannot be shaped by user input) that changes as the users’ perception of and interactions with the territory change, a map that is in a current translation process. It’s a comic detail that a gang has its own YouTube channel for which it produces gang-themed content as this defies the clandestine nature of gangs, but it contributes to constructing a world that might be at the bottom of the social, economical, and moral spectrum of the USA while working with the same technology as all the other—and highersituated—participants. Latour reminds that “[w]hen people say of technologies that they are neither good nor bad, they forget to add: nor neutral” (2013, 219). Dope repurposes language, types, tropes, settings, and technology underlines how all these quasi-objects are neither determined, nor determine, but function as connective tissue around which networks evolve. When Malcolm is shown moving through Inglewood, one of the first places he rides past is the “Academy Cathedral,” a former movie theater that has been turned into a church in 1975. The marquee gives worship

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times and the name of “Pastor Doyle Hart,” who preached in the repurposed cinema until his death in 2016. To see former large movie theaters transformed into churches is a common development in the USA5 and illustrates a particular shared history of media and technology: The demand for rooms that seat large crowds wanes as a symptom of the 1970s decline of the movie industry and the studio system. That a cinema as a dream machine built on selling myth, iconography, and illusions is displaced by a church as yet another dream machine trading on myth, iconographies, illusions, meaning, and purpose assumes symbolical significance. Not only are these specifically designed architectures hollowed out and repurposed, but especially here a black church reclaiming the cinema, a space that for the most part of history has been a realm of white domination, is a footnote echoing the film’s M.O. in doing the same for the black and white teen film: hollowing out and repurposing. The Academy Theatre thus doubles as an authentic visual backdrop, a carrier of media history, and as a metacommentary on both the status of Hollywood, teen films, and the strategy of Dope. The moving image still plays a prominent role in the lives of adolescents: Besides the gang’s YouTube channel, Awreeoh film their band practice with a smartphone, Malcolm is shown masturbating while looking at the small screen of his phone (instead of a porno magazine or a movie), and later on, the success of their drug sales is based on memes and viral videos—but the traditional screens have become obsolete here. Cinema as a social space and the film and TV industry as the sole provider of powerful and widely disseminated moving images have been displaced by media that have inseparably grown together with their users. More than being mere Luhanian extensions of man, these human–non-human collectives are Latourian hybrids (or cyborgs in Haraway’s [1985] sense) 5A

famous cinema-turned-church similar to as the Inglewood Academy with over thousand seats is the Loew’s Valencia on Jamaica Ave in Queens, NY. The Valencia was built in 1929 as one of the world-renowned “Loew’s Wonder Theaters” with 3500 seats and eventually donated to the “Tabernacle of Prayer” in 1977, coinciding with the demise of the huge pre-television-era movie theaters. On select weekends, members of the congregation give guided tours, making the Valencia a hybrid space, both film history museum and place of worship, an apt and genuinely American amalgamation. Other North American cinemas have been turned into mega chain “bookstores” that sell books, other media, and objects as another variant of repurposed movie theaters reflecting changing media use and spaces.

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comprising quasi-objects and quasi-subjects, and around their devices and the platforms they access with them, networks are forming.

Appropriated Objects and Media In his Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Latour in his rhetorical question suggests recalibrating how we approach technological objects: “How have the Moderns managed to miss the strangeness, the ubiquity, and yes, the spirituality of technology? How could they have missed its sumptuous opacity?” (2013, 10). Objects possess symbolic capacities embedded in their environment such as potential for prestige; they are never boundless and always identified within the cultural and historical frame through which they originated. Dope as a tech-centered teen film strongly makes use of these symbolical capacities (as well as of their technological capacities) and attaches different strategies and issues to the incorporated objects. Whether technological objects and media function as an updating agent to locate a narrative in the now or as a time machine that locates a narrative in the past strongly depend on whether they are still-current at the time of production and consumption, as every medium turns into a time capsule at the moment, it is outmoded and replaced by a newer medium. Then, it will assume the properties of a medial DNA swab that contains the entire media history out of which it once emerged and from whose further progression it has been severed, frozen at a certain point in the media evolution whose indexical marker it has become. Like fashion, hairstyles, or design, technological objects, too, are meaningful visual markers of certain epochs and of course are often used as timespecific props that create nostalgia or decorate a mise-en-scène set in a bygone era. It is not solely contemporary technological objects that are entangled with the narrative, the characters, and the mise-en-scène in Dope, particularly visible in the establishing shot in Malcolm’s bedroom, the traditional site where a teen’s character is embodied spatially and through

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Fig. 4.2 Geeky bricoleurs: Super Nintendo still life

objects.6 While Naughty by Nature’s song “Hip Hop Hooray” (a hit in 1993) is playing, some of Malcolm’s belongings are introduced. The arranged objects themselves as well as the way in which they are edited together in a montage sequence of draped still lifes foreshadow how Malcolm and his friends, and Dope as a film, are bricoleurs who collect, combine, and recombine7 (see Fig. 4.2). Among Malcolm’s objects is a stack of VHS tapes labeled “YO MTV RAPS” (a show which ran from 1988 to 1995), a 7" vinyl single of EPMD’s 1988 hit “You Gots to Chill,” posters of a young Dr. Dre and Eazy-E on the wall, and a cassette tape of Dr. Dre’s compilation album released as N.W.A. and the Posse in 1987. Prominently on display is a Nintendo SNES video game console, the American SMS-001 model that was introduced to the US market in 1991. Next to it, there is a light-gun peripheral, which doubles as a dual index for Dope’s youths-and-media as well as its youths-with-guns theme.

6The

bedroom is according to Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (1991), and as evidenced by countless teen films, one of the single most important sites and one of the very few not adult-defined spaces for adolescents—both for cinematic teens and for real teens. McRobbie and Garber’s are concerned specifically with girls’ bedrooms as spaces of teen culture, but their findings can be extended to the ways in which teen films make use of adolescent bedrooms as settings that function as extension and embodiment of their adolescent inhabitants (which, however, are indeed more often girls’ than boys bedrooms). 7 Referring to bricolage in the way Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the term (1966, 16–18, 33), as assembled, improvised and constructed from the materials and actants at hand that are sometimes “misappropriated” for their use in contexts they weren’t originally intended for.

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The single memory Malcolm has of his father, who went back to Nigeria before he was born, is also object-bound and notably unsentimental: In flashback, we see how Malcolm receives a VHS tape in the mail as a birthday present from his father, his favorite movie, the 1972 Blaxploitation classic Super Fly by Gordon Parks, Jr. The Super Fly VHS tape functions as a dual index for the absent father as well as for the ghetto and drugs theme Super Fly is famous for, in which the cocaine dealer Youngblood Priest wants to get out of the drug business by pulling off one last huge deal that will supposedly make him enough money and buy him the freedom to escape a culture of poverty and crime. The paradoxical “committing one massive crime in order to no longer commit crimes” foreshadows the bind Malcolm, Jib, and Diggy will soon find themselves in. On his way to school riding his BMX bike, Malcolm listens to music with a classic Sony cassette Walkman, a WM-F10 model from 1984. All these objects are neither random clutterings of class-specific discarded old things and thrift shop items that signify poverty, or a “being backwards” in regard to technology’s progress and consumption; neither are they time-specific decorations of the scenery signifying that the narrative is set in the time with which they are associated. They don’t stand in contrast to the present-day smartphones and computers that are also in use; instead, they are carefully curated aesthetic objects that produce a distinctive style and a stylistic distinction. Malcolm and his friends are committed to late 1980s/early 1990s pop culture, they go hunting for rare hip-hop vinyl in a record store, but not in a strictly retro way, and instead in the form of postmodern appropriation, incorporating many, sometimes contradictory, signs, codes, and objects in their identity pastiche. When introducing the three friends walking across the school halls, the voice-over narrator gives a list of “white shit” they are into—skateboards, manga comics, Donald Glover, Trash Talk, TV on the Radio, getting good grades, applying to college—adding further (pop)cultural and racial in-between positions to their already established adolescent

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in-between-ness. While it is consensus that (mainstream) culture is asymmetrical and hierarchic, the remark that they are ridiculed for not fulfilling their assigned racial role is a reminder that sub- and countercultures tend to follow the same logic and politics: They are just as much gendered or racially divided as the dominant culture; it is only the content that is different.8 Even more so than declaring activities such as skateboarding or comics subgenre such as manga as “white shit,” this negotiation of the ways subculture is absorbed and appropriated is repeated in listing the exemplary musicians Donald Glover, an African-American performer and actor, the ethnically mixed hardcore punk rock band Trash Talk, and TV on the Radio, a progressive rock band from Brooklyn whose members are predominantly African-American. All three acts have found success especially with white audiences, thereby, and from the perspective of the street-cred-minded peers of Malcolm and his friends, have become appropriated by white culture. Even though Malcolm, Jib, and Diggy are very active and adept appropriators of both black and white pop culture themselves, they apparently draw the line when the appropriator is white, as for instance with the use of the n-word or their refusal to play the “Harlem Shake.”9 Their eclectic collage of popcultural particles is no more random than their selection of objects and media and becomes the surface on which their hybrid cultural identities oscillate between eras, styles, ethnic ascriptions, and gender roles. Their band Awreeoh is yet another expression of their postmodern identity practices: It has the drums—bass guitar—guitar lineup of a traditional three-piece rock band, but plays a mixture of punk rock and hip-hop, two distinct music genres rooted in the early 1980s as articulations of youth culture

8 For

a detailed study of how skateboarding as an alleged subculture actually reproduces the mainstream see Butz (2012). 9The song by the Brooklyn musician Baauer caused some controversy after it became a hit in 2013 due to memes and viral videos. “The Harlem Shake” was criticized by some for having no relation to the actual Harlem Shake, a dance that originated in Harlem in the early 1980s, and thus for an exploitative cultural appropriation that is tantamount to white reclaiming of African-American forms.

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and associated with white and black adolescence, respectively.10 However, wide-ranging the influences, objects, styles, forms, and media are that they draw together as black geek bricoleurs; their identity politics are postmodern, but not post-racial.

Transferring Agency: Bitcoin | Etrade | Weapon Along the lines of Latourian thought, the agency of non-human actants has been foregrounded to recalibrate our vantage point. This is in itself not necessarily a radical strategy to rethink human, non-human and social relations, and rather a self-evident and natural move: “A social dimension to technology? That’s not saying much. Let us rather admit that no one has ever observed a human society that has not been built with things” (Latour 2000, 10). Technological and aesthetic objects are used as vehicles to negotiate the black experience from Dope’s first scenes on. These featured objects not only tap into a connotative or symbolic dimension; instead, technology and media assume the function of Serres-Latourian quasi-objects that do something and have an impact. In the very first dialogue between Malcolm and his mother during breakfast, in front of Malcolm is a cup of coffee, a muffin, and his smartphone, he relates “that money as we know it is dead. Soon the world is only gonna buy and sell products using Bitcoins. It’s like a complicated math equation.” Mrs. White asks: “So, one day we’re gonna buy things with numbers from a math equation?” and Malcolm happily affirms: “Dope, right?” The bitcoin is introduced right away and along with it the default position of a division of those who understand this “complicated math equation” that will rule 10 In an NPR interview, Rick Famuyiwa says: “As [Pharrell and I] talked about the music that these kids would create, we started with hip-hop because obviously these kids were obsessed with ’90s hip-hop. But we also felt how these kids would draw from many different things because they’re of a culture that’s connected to the world through technology in a way that we weren’t. Malcolm and his generation has access to all types of music at the touch of a screen. And so hip-hop would be at the root but also punk and also grunge and a lot of other things that these kids would have access to. And that became the jumping-off point for the band Awreeoh that these kids created” (Famuyiwa 2015).

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the future and those who do not, clearly coded into youths vs. adults. The pattern is familiar from tech-centered teen films (also see the discussion of The DUFF ), the generation gap is narrated here in the form of adults’ and youths’ differing attitudes toward and literacy of technology and social media. In Dope, this pattern will be reinforced multiple times, for instance, when Malcolm, Jib, and Diggy set up their drug packing and distributing enterprise in the school’s science lab, computer lab and band room under the guise that they are working on a project for the Google Science Fair. They can be certain that neither teachers, nor the janitor or hall monitor will catch on: “Nobody’s going to suspect a thing. We’re just geeks doing what geeks do.” When their operation is in full progress, a press event with a local politician leads the adult entourage through the school aisles: “Principal Harris tells me that there are three young men who actually joined the Google Science Fair. Proof that the public school system is still a ladder to success.” Besides the marginal note that it is “three young men,” which shows that principal Harris as another adult figure not only misreads the nature of the “science project,” but also Diggy’s deviation from the heteronormative matrix, the mise-enscène underscores that the adults are lagging behind in every regard: They are peeking through the window, smiling and giving the thumbs-up to the three geeks busy packing drug shipments and genially reciprocating the well-meant patronizing encouragement (see Figs. 4.3 and 4.4). The

Fig. 4.3 “Nobody‘s going to suspect a thing. We‘re just geeks doing what geeks do”

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Fig. 4.4 School as a space for science and crime

arrangement is reminiscent of Ree strolling through the school corridors and peeking inside different classrooms in Winter’s Bone (see Fig. 3.5): While Ree is looking in on something she is not a part of, the adults in Dope are looking in on something they do not understand and realize. High school architecture has its own divisions built in, embodied by the see-through door that functions as a transparent, yet impermeable separation between the ins and the outs. The arrangement also emphasizes how high school is here a space for both science/education and crime: It is on the one hand the location where bullies earlier tried to rob Malcolm of his vintage sneakers and where he and his friends are running a criminal operation, but which on the other hand they can only succeed in because they actually make use of the educational offer of the school system. Their being straight-A-students and academic achievers provides them the skills and the resources they need for the undertaking and for not getting caught. The coupling of crime and education as apparently paradoxical, but actually mutually dependent opposites, plays itself out in the heterogeneous uses of the school space here (other than cinematic teens who leave school’s space and/or timetable to immerse themselves in true life learning experiences such as Ferris Bueller [1986] or The Breakfast Club’s [1985] members). I addition to their status as geeks and the jester’s license that comes with it—at least when using a science lab—they can also safely assume that the adults’ lack of tech savvy will prevent them from even asking,

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let alone figuring out the truth.11 Technology and media as the parting line between youths and adults are even more decisive when Malcolm has his Harvard alumnus interview with local businessman AJ Jacoby and quickly deduces that the drugs that were hidden in his backpack actually belong to Jacoby whose charitable “Boys Club” is a euphemism for the drug ring he is running. Jacoby tries to convey his intent to Malcolm— namely blackmailing him into selling the drugs and threatening him— by trying to address him in what he thinks are young people’s terms and comparing his operation to selling Macklemore or Rick Ross CDs via Amazon.com (Malcolm: I would not order a Macklemore CD. That wouldn’t happen. / AJ: All right. Who, then? / M: Casey Veggies.12 / AJ: Casey Veggies? That’s—That’s an artist? / M: Yeah. / AJ: Yeah, okay. All right. So, you order a Casey Veggies CD from Amazon, right? / M: No, you don’t order a Casey Veggies CD. You just go online and you download it). Amazon as the epitome of electronic commerce and all its connotations is used as a model to explain the workings of economy and an economist’s responsibility toward customers. The subtext is the equation of Amazon and drug dealers, as both are traders that indiscriminately peddle any product their clientele wants, which either neutralizes drug dealing as the legitimate supplying of consumers’ demand, or

11 Accordingly,

the threatening De’Andre (played by rap musician Tyga) is not only a menacing figure as one of Malcolm’s antagonists because of his willingness to use violence, but also because of his ability to use technology—which, as Latour reminds us is never neutral: When he first calls the unassuming Malcolm on his phone, Malcolm asks: “How do you know where I am?” and De’Andre answers: “Find an iPhone. Steve Jobs a motherfucking genius.” He uses the same tracking technology to locate Malcolm and chase him through town, in one hand an ipad, in the other a gun. Technology and their users redefine each other and “good” or “bad” are not essential properties, but determined by use(r)-defined relations, as every object’s script (or program of action) at the same time contains its opposite: “All devices that seek to annul, destroy, subvert, circumvent a program of action are called anti-programmes. The thief who wishes to get through the door, representatives of the opposite sex, are pursuing their anti-programmes” (Latour 2000, 18). 12 Casey Veggies, who also has a small part in the film, was still a well-known, but undergroundish figure from the Odd Future collective at the time Dope came out (his major label debut was released in September 2015, shortly after). The artist actually went to Inglewood High School and features the same landmarks and sites in his music videos that can also be seen in Dope. In “Whip It” (2014), he is cruising the Inglewood streets together with two friends on BMX bikes, reminiscent of Malcolm, Jib, and Diggy traversing their hood.

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criminalizes Amazon (and by extension capitalism) as a faceless institution that solely works profit-driven, without regard to ethics beyond the self-serving “responsibility” to satisfy the customer. On the textual level, Jacoby’s analogy is built on the false assumption that he gets young people and is hip to the music they listen to when in fact he is misinformed and outdated. The funny exchange when Malcolm, despite being in shock over his discovery and its consequences that become apparent now, still makes it his point to clarify that the artists Jacoby refers to are of no interest to him, and that those who interest him work outside the system Jacoby deems to be the way the world works, is a classic youngvs.-old teen film moment. Casey Veggies’ model to offer his music for free on the Internet may take place in the same medial sphere as Amazon selling Rick Ross or Macklemore CDs, but cuts out all the middlemen, using the Internet not to maximize profits, but to offer a product democratically. Even though Malcolm actually is fond of physical media as a collector of vinyl LPs and cassette tapes, the CD as the bridge medium between such analog, physical music media and the internet as digital, non-physical music medium, is overcome. The “analog” model of drug dealing by using young hoodlums as intermediaries Jacoby still adheres to is no longer needed, nor is a bridge model between analog and digital that uses an intermediary such as Amazon, as the darknet is a democratized marketplace that is just as free of an ethics as any capitalist enterprise, but at least has no institution or other human or non-human intermediaries on which blame and responsibility can be transferred, as the actants of each trade, buyer and seller, invisible and anonymous as they might be, are the only human actants in the equation. The transfer of responsibility as a negotiation of ethics was already at issue in an earlier scene: In the backroom of the club where Dom celebrates his birthday and right before the violent ambush takes place, one of Dom’s crew members shows the others actual footage of drone warfare on his smartphone. The aerial images from the drone strike are shown full-screen, one of the instances where the film not only photographs technological objects and media, but lets them actively codesign the visual architecture of the film (see Fig. 4.5). Watching drone strikes on YouTube on a smartphone first of all is in itself a highly mediated sequence. Besides illustrating the relationship of adolescents

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Fig. 4.5 Hybrid visual architecture: the drone footage

and their media and devices, it brings to the fore the drone as the epitome of de-personalized agency. In the drone example, the agency, which could hardly have graver implications, is seemingly dissolved into machinic, non-human actants—and with its moral concepts such as guilt or responsibility. Agency (and power, as the drone is a representative of political institutions—or state apparatuses) is rendered invisible, not only on the material level, as a drone striking from high above is never seen coming, but also by passing on the agency to actually execute the deed to these extensions, thus granting them an independent life as proxies, obscuring the actual shooter and freeing them from ethics. While the crew member’s moral compass is clearly delineated along the binarism “Americans vs. terrorists” as a simplistic and essentialist “good vs. evil” (reminiscent of the rhetoric especially of authoritarian political figures such as Reagan, both Bushes, or Trump), Dom realizes that these demarcations do not refer to essential traits of humans, but are merely semantics. Whoever is in the position to allocate who exactly is a terrorist is able to shift the arbitrary demarcation line at will. The drone is an executive machine of the same power of which language is a legislative function. Knowing that as a drug-dealing gang they operate outside the dominant social order comparable to “the terrorists” who are also by definition outside of that order, Dom remarks: “before you know it,

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they’ll start saying that we’re the terrorists” and thereby raises the foundational question: Who is an American? In this situation, the question is negotiated along blurry lines, as “American” and “terrorist” cannot really be discussed under the same categories. In terms of nationality or ethnicity, it is impossible (even though it hasn’t stopped people trying to construct and perpetuate these terms as racially determined). In terms of “deviation from the dominant social order of the USA,” it would move the dealer crew closer to “the terrorists” than to “the Americans.” But the question who is American, who belongs, can be extended to other juxtapositions that are negotiated in Dope: rich | poor, educated | uneducated, and black | white. That these profound questions about blackness belonging are folded into the drone footage illustrates how the smartphone, the drone, and language are quasi-objects around which powerful material, discursive, and indeed socio-technological networks form in this scene—networks in which the quasi-subjects are redefined by their relations and entanglements, be it the human actant who “pulls the trigger” of the drone, be it Dom and his crew whose positions are defined by their relation to the drone. The Internet as the rhizomatic connection that links the shooter to the drone, and Dom’s crew to the video hosting site to which the footage has been uploaded, situates the Dope ecology within a wider media ecology which also comprises the bitcoin and the darknet as related quasiobjects around which heterogeneous socio-technological networks form. After Malcolm’s visit with AJ Jacoby and inspired by the Amazon analogy, he and his friends set up their Molly trade in the school’s science lab and pretty much become their own Amazon. They team up with their acquaintance William, a college student and computer hacker who functions as their complement: Malcolm, Jib, and Diggy are black, disenfranchised, innocent, yet ambitious kids from the wrong part of town who are into “white shit,” William is a white, gifted upper-class trust fund kid who is also an anarchistic slacker displaying a fetishistic exotism (he is into “black shit,” so to say) and the missing puzzle piece in their plan. William is as much immersed in the world of drug-fueled partying as he is in anti-establishment hacking. Together, they set up a dependable business model to get rid of the backpack full of Molly without leaving any traces. William also comes up with the idea to implement their

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product with a unique selling proposition: Using the footage of Lily, AJ Jacoby’s daughter, who over-indulged on the stash in Malcolm’s backpack, euphorically lost all self-control and obliviously urinated in public (which of course was witnessed and filmed by bystanders) they re-brand the drug as “Lily” (see Figs. 4.6 and 4.7). William organizes a party where a collegiate crowd of tastemakers is introduced to the drug while Awreeoh is playing, and the drug successfully begins to take on a life of its own.

Fig. 4.6 Proliferation of images in an attention economy

Fig. 4.7 The all-seeing human and non-human eye/i: iphone panopticism

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A fast-paced montage that adopts the look of social media and its meme culture visualizes the spread of the videos and memes going viral while Malcolm and his friends are soberly administering the logistics of the enterprise: receiving orders, printing labels, portioning drugs into pill capsules, dropping off the shipment at a mailbox. The simultaneity of events is illustrated by the overlapping pictures, which do not develop as a causal or temporal succession of events, but as a concurrence, unlike the cinematic medium, which by its nature follows a temporal sequence. Even though the widely ramified dissemination of the drug began in the black community, the drug is marketed to a white clientele. Facing the necessity to become their own Amazon and already starting to slip into the interim roles of true capitalists they start to think like business people and identify the most potent customers: white hedonistic millennials as well as their preferred grounds for excess. (“We’re talking about Molly, Jib, not fucking heroin. All we gotta do is find the white people. Go to Coachella, Lollapalooza…. We can backpack and hitchhike and sing Mumford and Sons songs and all that faux fucking shit.”) The memes perpetuated on the Internet show people (mis)behaving in a euphoric and erratic, yet harmless way, with the tagline “People on Lily be like” superimposed (see Fig. 4.8). “Lily” is marketed by purposefully targeting the Id of the white consumerist middle class, who all too easily buy into “that faux fucking shit,” be it the music of Mumford & Sons, a

Fig. 4.8 Excess, exhibitionism, narcissim and voyeurism: meme culture

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rehash of American folk music by a British group, be it “Lily,” a rehash of MDMA marketed by a trio of clean black teenagers. The friction of the darknet operation derives as much from the obvious criminal implications of the illegal narcotics these teens are peddling, as from their advantage over the intradiegetic adult figures and the audience. They have more knowledge about these “complicated math equations” to which Malcolm compared the bitcoin economy, and thus are at least one step ahead of most spectators and of the law enforcement officers who are trying to get behind their encrypted scheme. The drugs and their being sold via darknet channels work here like a classic MacGuffin,13 and the dope in Dope is like the Maltese Falcon in The Maltese Falcon (1941): Eventually, they do not matter as objects in themselves, but as random quasi-objects whose content is of no importance, whose function as connective entity however is crucial. The nomenclature of the dark web/darknet—they use a fictional site named “Black Market,” reminiscent of “Silk Road” or “Atlantis”—to sell the drugs subtly adds to Dope’s reflection on the division between black and white embedded in language and discourse in an allegedly postracial USA under the first African-American president, Barack Obama (who is mentioned numerous times, situating Dope temporally and discursively). The traditional, yet not unproblematic connotations of black as evil and white as pure (as for instance “white hat” and “black hat” in Western films and computer hacker vernacular, see also Etulain 1996, 29ff.), are deeply entrenched in the lexicon of a racially biased culture whose inside and outside are color-coded in every sense of the word. The “Black Market” site has nothing to do with skin color, it does however echo the black–white binarism of language as a hegemonic system that co-produces power dynamics, and thus it resonates with Dope’s explicit and implicit negotiation of the black experience. Dope’s “Black Market” is at the same time a black market in the sense of a shadow economy, as well as in the sense of a marketplace for black marketeers. Besides these cultural and linguistic connotations of the darknet, its entire principle illustrates the rhizomatic Internet and its infinite complexity: Beyond the incommensurably intertwined Internet organism resides another hidden 13 Also

see Alfred Hitchcock (interviewed by François Truffaut) on the MacGuffin, p. 138ff.

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organism. The darknet becomes an example for Latourian multiplicity— every black box contains more black boxes14 —and points to the proverbial two sides of the same (bit)coin: Criminal capitalism doesn’t follow a different logic as legal capitalism, but exactly the same. Amazon represents “the internet,” the “Black Market” site “the darknet,” but both are essentially the same principle, the same technology, only the content—or the product—is different. The stash of Molly is not only a MacGuffin that opposing parties are chasing for their respective, yet identical, purposes. As in Michel Serres’ example of money as a quasi-object, even the bitcoins oscillate between virtual and actual and are a quasi-object with fluid status that needs mediations and translations in order to become effective and assume worth. The bitcoins become files on a hard drive, which then becomes actual money/tender, a succession of form becoming matter becoming form familiar from the Latourian circulating reference. The whole process is made visible by the movement and mediations of the quasi-object and makes visible the symbolic and material dimension of money as an intrinsically valueless quasi-object that enables networks to form. Latour points out that social scientists tend to denounce the belief of “ordinary people” who “imagine that the power of gods, the objectivity of money, the attraction of fashion, the beauty of art, come from some objective properties intrinsic to the nature of things” (Latour 1993, 51) and instead posits that “Gods, money, fashion and art offer only a surface for the projection of our social needs and interests” (Latour 1993, 52). However, “objects are not the shapeless receptacles of social categories” (1993, 55) and neither position acknowledges that the flows between objects and subjects are not unilateral, but an association. The entire bitcoin thread in Dope illustrates the interdependent relation in which the 14 Black boxes/processes of blackboxing help to make infinite multiplicity approachable (cf. 1999, 304) and must be seen in connection to what Latour calls plasma: “I call this background plasma, namely that which is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized, or subjectified. How big is it? Take a map of London and imagine that the social world visited so far occupies no more room than the subway. The plasma would be the rest of London, all its buildings, inhabitants, climates, plants, cats, palaces, horse guards” (2005, 344). The plasma is not-yet-actualized agency that is bracketed or cut out, because it presents a difference that is not relevant for a respective investigation, however is necessary for the functioning of the network.

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object-subject divide is rendered obsolete by the dynamic between quasiobjects and quasi-subjects and their blurred demarcation lines: “The symbolic is there; it is divided and is not divided. What is the symbol? A stereospecificity? It is also a quasi-object. The quasi-object itself is a subject. The subject can be a quasi-object” (Serres 1982, 233). Fidel, the middleman who can turn bitcoins into American dollars, is by profession a producer of counterfeit handbags, a trickster figure at the boundaries of the social order. He tests Malcolm by asking him what or who he is, and whether he is “real” in an analogy to his handbags, one of several instances he is posed this teen-film-(arche)typical question about individualism that forms Dope’s undercurrent. Malcolm’s guidance counselor when discussing his college application essay earlier accused him of being arrogant and asked him: “Who do you think you are?” as did Jacoby when discussing responsibility, and as the college application itself does. The identity question hovers above the film and is explicitly revisited in the end, when Malcolm hands in his essay. Right after Fidel has exchanged the hard drive full of non-fiat currency for a counterfeit handbag full of fiat dollars, the question is further pursued nonverbally, on the plane of another technological object in one of the film’s key scenes. The school bullies who earlier attempted to rob Malcolm’s collectible sneakers waylay the three black geeks, beat Malcolm and take away the money-filled bag. Malcolm pulls the gun that had been hidden in backpack with the stash of Molly and with an unsteady, quivering grip; he holds the assailants at gunpoint, threatening them while desperately pleading: “Please, just give me the bag.” The gang backs off, visibly horrified that their level of semi-serious bullying violence has been escalated by Malcolm to a very real, lethal threat. The shell-shocked Malcolm, still trembling, remains frozen in his gunpoint pose, visibly traumatized, and Jib and Diggy calm and comfort him. The gravitas of the situation is underscored by the soundtrack and the editing: The scene is quite slow and quiet, unlike most of the otherwise fast-paced and loud film, and not at all staged as an exciting action scene in the style of a standoff. The soundtrack is a collage of reverberated synth, string layers and some guitar swells combined with relatively loud ambient sounds; the almost too audible sound of crickets or the zipping-up of the bag

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before it is returned amplifies how suddenly everything is still and petrified, after only moments before the ebullience and yelling of the attacking gang and traffic noise produced a much louder and more agitated soundscape. The sonic design also illustrates Malcolm’s altered state of mind, his heightened perception in this mental state of emergency. That this situation really was an identity-defining, identity-altering traumatic moment becomes all the more clear when the next picture shows Malcolm, still accompanied by the same music which sonically ties the scenes together as causally related, at his computer and starting to write the essay in which he will ultimately sum up who he is and has become during the (re-)defining process he had to go through after coincidentally entering into a collective of humans and non-humans with the drugs and the weapon. The gun scene in its own right is a Latourian tableau par excellence, as Latour uses the gun as an example for a non-human actant that decisively impacts human behavior (1999, 176ff.). His starting point is debating the well-known arguments of those opposing the unrestricted sales of guns and the gun-supporting NRA: “Guns kill people” vs. “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Both positions are flawed, as they (at least rhetorically) identify agency in an asymmetric way on either side, but do not include the relations that result from the scripts (or programs of action) and propositions (“what an actor offers to other actors,” ibid., 309) at play: Which of them, then, the gun or the citizen, is the actor in this situation? Someone else (a citizen-gun, a gun-citizen). If we try to comprehend techniques while assuming that the psychological capacity of humans is forever fixed, we will not succeed in understanding how techniques are created nor even how they are used. You are a different person with the gun in your band…. If I define you by what you have (the gun), and by the series of associations that you enter into when you use what you have (when you fire the gun), then you are modified by the gun … You are different with a gun in your band; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you. The gun is no longer the gun-in-the-armory or the gun-in-the-drawer or the gun-in-the pocket, but the gun-in-your-hand, aimed at someone who is screaming.

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What is true of the subject, of the gunman, is as true of the object, of the gun that is held … The twin mistake of the materialists and the sociologists is to start with essences, those of subjects or those of objects, … that starting point renders impossible our measurement of the mediating role of techniques as well as those of science. If we study the gun and the citizen as propositions, however, we realize that neither subject nor object (nor their goals) is fixed. When the propositions are articulated, they join into a new proposition. They become someone, something else. (Latour 1999, 179–180)

In direct succession, the gun scene and Malcolm processing the traumatic and catalytic experience by writing about it is of course not the single event that has lead to him having become “someone, something else.” However, Malcolm’s coming-of-age has not only been mainly narrated on the plane of inter-human interactions like we’re accustomed to from teen films and that we also have in Dope, such as romance and sexuality as rites of initiation, furthermore his liminal experience has been significantly altered by non-human actants and the ways in which quasi-objects and quasi-subjects have continuously redefined each other become intertwined and fluid.

Hybrid Aesthetics | Hybrid Identities The way in which the Dope characters employ technological objects and what they do with them is one significant element that expands the film from a perfectly generic teen text organized around the expectable ingredients such as individualism, romance, or social status, into something different—even though it is a teen film that deliberately includes all these conventional generic tropes. To connect the previous and the ongoing interrogation of the hybridity that arises from the human–non-human associations in Dope’s machinic milieus, their inseparability and mutual influence needs to remain a central axis: Consider things, and you will have humans. Consider humans, and you are by that very act interested in things. Bring your attention to beat on

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hard things, and see them become gentle, soft or human. Turn your attention to humans, and see them become electric circuits, automatic gears or softwares. We cannot even define precisely what makes some human and others technical, whereas we are able to document precisely their modifications and replacements, their rearrangements and their alliances, their delegations and representations. Do technology, and you are now a sociologist. Do sociology, and now you are obliged to be a technologist … this obligation, this connection, this consequence, this pursuit, … is now (and has been for two or three million years) inscribed in the nature of things. (Latour 2000, 20)

The inclusion of technological objects is an indispensable prerequisite to achieve time-specificity in a movie, as the intrusion into reality always takes place where the historical marker of technology sits. However, a story does not become up to date by merely including a computer or a smartphone as a word or a prop, but only through the way in which the narrative makes use of these devices, how it describes them and how it depicts their complexities. As words or images are not these objects and the signifier is not the signified, the yardstick is not only how these objects are described, but also what effects they cause. Congruence of form and content in this regard for instance can be seen in the scenes in which Dom’s crew watches the drone footage or the montage that visualizes how the memes and videos about Lily (the person and the drug) go viral, similar to The DUFF ’s moment in which the screen dissolves into a mosaic-like multitude of screens. Dope’s mise-enscène from the exposition on is shaped by technological objects, as props, as diegetic quasi-objects, but also as media with their own aesthetics. The sheer amount of screens of different sizes that is present in The DUFF and Dope, especially in comparison with their absence in Winter’s Bone already indicates that the characters move through an almost entirely mediated ecology, interspersed with image-producing devices, only one of which is the cinematic apparatus from which the film will emerge. These different media run parallel to each other, overlap and bleed into each other, sometimes illustrated via split screens, sometimes by incorporating (or imitating) the look of other media, such as the drone, the newscast about Lily’s incident (see Fig. 4.7 on page 163), or the social media channels where they circulate. Their simultaneity causes numerous

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short disruptions in the linearity of the narrative. When for instance Malcolm, lacking the audience’s knowledge of the previous events, wonders: “What the fuck?,” the lyrics of the song that is playing (“Scenario” by A Tribe Called Quest) in the next instant go: “Heel up, wheel up, bring it back, come rewind,” and the scene does rewind, the car chase, Malcolm wondering “?kcuf eht tahW,” and the events in which his friends were involved that led up to this point. This layering and the quick edits display a clear kinship to the look and editing of music videos, but it also abandons the notion of the one master camera. This mode is quite common in postmodern cinema and can be seen as the cinematographic equivalent to the Lyotardian collapse of the metanarrative (1979). The dissolving of the grand/master narrative, embodied by the one centered camera, into a multitude of tiny, localized narratives, in Dope is as much a postmodern narrative strategy as it is a way of coming to terms with the overabundance of images of present media ecologies by incorporating them. Steven Shaviro addresses this cinematographic paradigm shift that “new forms and new technical devices imply new possibilities of expression” in his essay about what he calls post-continuity (including a wink to Latour’s opinion on being “modern”): In recent action blockbusters … there no longer seems to be any concern for delineating the geography of action, by clearly anchoring it in time and space…. The sequence becomes a jagged collage of fragments of explosions, crashes, physical lunges, and violently accelerated motions…. all that matters is delivering a continual series of shocks to the audience … Even if we’ve discovered today that ‘we have never been modern,’ this discovery is itself a product of modernity…. it is not that continuity rules are always being violated or ignored; nor are the films made in their absence simply chaotic. Rather, we are in a ‘post-continuity‘ situation when continuity has ceased to be important … Post-continuity stylistics are expressive both of technological changes (i.e. the rise of digital and Internet-based media) and of more general social, economic, and political conditions (i.e. globalized neoliberal capitalism, and the intensified financialization associated with it). (Shaviro 2012)

The ubiquity of screens and cameras is visualized by showing the people and their devices who take all these images, as well as the images,

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Fig. 4.9 Post-continuity stylistics

thus attaining an aesthetic that is the stylistic articulation not merely of technology, but of technology’s associations (see Fig. 4.9). Reflecting on Simondon’s studies of technological objects, Latour states that “it isn’t the mode of existence of the technological object that we must address but the mode of existence of technology, of technological beings themselves” (Latour and Woolgar 2013, 218) in order to account for the ways in which technology not merely transports, but always translates and re/deforms information. Dope’s aesthetic in that sense is not a collage of different styles, but a visualization of the entangled coexistence with technological objects and the mediations and transformations they take part in.

Ethnicity | Language | Education | Agency The negotiation of race in Dope is inseparable from the identity question that serves as the film’s bracket. Malcolm has to write a college application essay, the first version however is rejected by his counselor Mr. Bailey, a paper titled “A Research Thesis to Discover Ice Cube’s Good Day” (referring to Ice Cube’s 1993 hit “It was a Good Day”): Mr. B: I suggest you go in a different direction. Write something personal about you. Your family, your life.

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M: I mean, I could write about the typical “I’m from a poor, crime-filled neighborhood, raised by a single mother, don’t know my dad” blahblah. It’s cliché. This here, this–this is–this is creative. This shows that I’m different. This is the kind of essay that Harvard wants from their students. Mr. B: Malcolm, I’m gonna be honest with you. You’re pretty damn arrogant. You think you’re gonna get into Harvard? Who do you think you are? Hmm? You go to high school in Inglewood. To the admissions committee, your straight A’s, they don’t mean shit. If you’re really serious about this exercise and you’re not just wasting my time, or yours, then it’s gonna be about your personal statement, your SAT scores, your recommendations and most importantly your alumni interview tomorrow.

While Malcolm definitely wants to engage with his African-American identity on the plane of the black culture he loves and defines himself by, he resists the conventional images of African-American life. Mr. Bailey advises him to cater to the expectations of the dominant white culture, and engage with his racial identity in a stereotypical way, and by exploiting clichés. Even though these clichés really do apply to Malcolm’s situation, this gaze is not one he wants to be subdued by, as he doesn’t view himself as determined by any form of social stratification such as ethnicity, class, or trauma: Indebted both to his nerdiness and his perpetual attempts at assuming agency, he would rather be defined by his cultural interests than by whitewashing his biography by exploiting his status as victim of circumstances and marginalized black adolescent from the wrong part of town. Racial identities in Dope have a linguistic dimension, prominently worked through in the three geeks’ discussions with William about his desire to be allowed to use the word “nigga” and who is entitled to use the n-word, which is always attached to self-image and self-allocation. William: You want to talk principle. What about Jib here, man? This dude isn’t African-American. He’s like fucking Latino or Moroccan or some shit. Technically, he shouldn’t be able to say the word. Why can he use it?

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Okay. Because I’m 14% African. I am 14% African. Ancestry.com.

“Blackness” apparently, at least in the matrix of ancestry.com, is measurable and quantifiable with exactitude. From William’s outside perspective, blackness is a screen on which he, as deviant from his own white upper-class background, projects his desire for subcultural distinction, a cultural capital with the in-built possibility to speak an anti-language and thus claim a counter position to the dominant social order (to which he belongs by birth) by assuming that order’s racial counter position. From Malcolm, Jib, and Diggy’s inside perspective, the question mainly is an administering of blackness and black culture in the form of administering an archive of African-American artifacts and their carrier media. Either way, it is not possible to be black without being attached to an entire black history: being black = being overdetermined. In that regard, Malcolm’s name is already overdetermined and attaches him to a distinct black history for whom Malcolm X stands. That black does not equal black as it maybe does from William’s outside perspective but that there are degrees of blackness15 is shown by the high school students not merely adopting the conventional teen (film) taxonomy, and instead frame it in terms of blackness. When the bullies try to rob Malcolm’s sneakers, one of them says: “This nigga’s speaking African or some shit, like he don’t speak what we speak.” In a predominantly white teen film school, the otherness on which the bully is picking would have been more likely expressed by classist or homophobic slurs, such as geek, nerd, or fag. At the same time, the characters in Dope also have incorporated the white canon through their citation systems: They refer to Molly Ringwald, the epitome of the John Hughes film cycle, to Justin Bieber (“He’s 15 When they first spend time together after escaping the escalated birthday party, Malcolm and Nakia begin their debate on identity as both racial and racially ghettoized identity: Nikia: Thanks for helping me. Most of those niggas just saw me and stepped over me. / Malcolm: Luckily for you, I’m not one of those niggas. / N: Oh, really? What are you, then? / M: I don’t know. I’m just, I’m black as fuck, right? Uh, I guess I’m just used to hearing that, uh, niggas don’t listen to this, niggas don’t do that, niggas don’t go to college unless they play ball or whatever. It’s just time to accept it. I’m just not one of those niggas. / N: Well, me neither then. ’Cause I’m going to college. Just gotta get my GED first.

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a very pretty nigga,” admits the lesbian Diggy), to Back to the Future (1985) (Dom calls Malcolm “McFly” and referring to his retro style comments: “I be seein’ you and your little friends with y’all flattops and MC Hammer pants, riding around in this shit, looking like y’all came out of a DeLorean or some shit”), and upon learning that the tomboyish Diggy is a girl, the club doorman says to his colleague: “This little nigga’s a bitch! Like Boys Don’t Cry.” In this simultaneity of a black and white canon, Dope becomes the missing link between the white suburban Hughesinspired teen film and the black urban hood films as polar teen film positions, modulating either’s preoccupations and biases to find a new position. This in-between-ness deconstructs the demarcations between the black and white teen film as yet another layer on which Dope negotiates racial identity. Mr. Bailey’s question “You think you’re gonna get into Harvard? Who do you think you are?” in that regard doubles as asking Malcolm the identity question—who are you?—and as a rhetorical question, as both know about the restrictions for people on the class and race margins. Harvard as Malcolm’s college of choice is significant and for Malcolm has become something like a promise of salvation, as then-President Obama and his Kenyan father before him famously studied there (when Mr. Bailey announces to Malcolm: “I just found out you’re interviewing with Austin Jacoby. He’s from Inglewood too, so he’ll be able to relate to your circumstances,” Malcolm is clearly underwhelmed: “Jacoby Check Cashing? Harvard? Really?” Mr. Bailey replies, more to Malcolm’s projection than to his disappointment about the less prestigious local businessman: “I’m sorry. They don’t all go on to be president”). Education might be a viable strategy to overcome the culture of poverty (Jib says: “Look, I don’t want to go to jail. I want to go to fucking college. I want to get a good job. I want to help my mom!”), but it is difficult to access. Door openers, as Mr. Bailey sees it, are neither Malcolm’s actual performance nor his essential qualities, but nepotism. And, as the further course of the film will show, crime. When Malcolm in the end delivers his essay and receives a letter from the Harvard admissions, it remains unanswered whether his essay satisfied the committee or his ability as a fast learner to quickly have mastered playing the game and convince-slash-blackmail Jacoby. His essay reads:

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Let me tell you about two students. Student “A” is a straight-A student who lives in the suburbs of Los Angeles. He plays in a punk band with his best friends. He loves to skateboard and ride on his BMX bike. His favorite TV show is Game of Thrones and his favorite band is The Thermals. He’s a ’90s hip-hop geek. Student “B” goes to an underfunded school where teachers who would rather not be there teach kids who really don’t care. He lives with a single mother, doesn’t know his father and has sold dope. Now close your eyes. Picture each of these kids and tell me what you see. Be honest. No one’s going to judge you. Now open your eyes. So, am I student “A” or student “B”? Am I a geek or a menace? For most of my life, I’ve been caught in between who I really am and how I’m perceived, in between categories and definition. I don’t fit in. And I used to think that that was a curse, but now I’m slowly starting to see maybe it’s a blessing. See, when you don’t fit in, you’re forced to see the world from many different angles and points of view. You gain knowledge, life lessons from disparate people and places. And those lessons, for better or worse, have shaped me. So, who am I? Allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Malcolm Adekanbi. I’m a straight-A student with nearly perfect SAT scores. I taught myself how to play guitar and read music. I have stellar recommendations and diverse extracurricular activities. I am a Google Science Fair participant, and in three weeks, I helped make over $100,000 for an online business. So, why do I want to attend Harvard? If I was white, would you even have to ask me that question?

Malcolm’s binarism-defying in-between-ness, as he is neither A nor B but of course both, revisits teen film’s quest for autonomy and American individualism from the perspective of ethnicity: At least for a black kid, identity is always and necessarily also a racial identity, as the baggage of a white gaze and a black history are an indelible undercurrent. Malcolm’s desire for a higher education becomes a metaphor for his dual liminality as an intersectional teen: his desire to overcome the culture of poverty and the boundaries of race, but also to overcome adolescence. The romance subplot is interlocked with the education subplot: He tutors Nakia to help her prepare for her GED, they study together and open up new possibilities for themselves and each other, academic as well as romantic. When at the end Malcolm invites Nakia to the senior prom but waits in vain, the film does not provide the conventional romantic

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quasi-marriage ending as The DUFF or the restored order of the family unit as Winter’s Bone. Instead, Nakia asks him to go to a Six Flags amusement park the next day and Malcolm finds the Harvard letter on his pillow while the programmatic Awreeoh song “It’s my turn now” is playing: It ends with an outlook, to a date and a higher education, and with a possibility. After the bracket had been opened in the first bedroom scene that showed Malcolm doing his hair in the style of the late 80s rappers he loves, the bracket closes when he cuts his hair in one of the last scenes: He has assumed agency and made choices in order to no longer be determined by external forces, be they vintage black styles, bullying, coercion by competing criminals, fatalism and determinism of a life in certain areas, or the self-positioning a white admissions committee supposedly expects. He has finally answered the often-asked question who he is or thinks he is by making the choice not to choose between A and B. While his essay raises the question of whether (American) identity is necessarily a racial identity (especially for non-whites) and implies that most likely this is so, it simultaneously and actively tries to deconstruct binary racial identities. In his summary of what he calls “the African-American crime cycle,” in the early to mid-90s, Shary concludes: The rules to be learned from the African-American teen crime films were plainly clear by this point. Broken families cannot be unified by crime; crime is not lucrative, at least not for long; crimes perpetrated against other blacks only reinforce the racist social system; youth do not have the moral grasp to appreciate the repercussions of their crimes. The eventual outcome of a crime-based life, as Hollywood has told audiences for years, is prison or death, unless the character has the enlightenment to leave town … This cycle of films did not deny the potent temptation of crime, especially given their action-packed violence, nor did they deny race as a factor in the difficulties their young characters face. Rather, these films all suggested that the greatest menace is the city itself, where crime, racism and death are pervasive and constant. (Shary 2005, 86)

The position of Dope in relation to the cycle to whose history it explicitly and implicitly attaches itself—and to whose history it is automatically attached by the spectator just like Malcolm and his peers can never separate themselves from their connotations—is partially revisiting and

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renewing, but also rewriting. On the level of content and aesthetically, the entanglement is redefined, most apparently by the use and reflection of language, drugs, and technological objects. All of these quasiobjects form a connective tissue from which the film itself along with its intradiegetic discourses emerges, and that produces resonances and links with other films from the—black and white—teen film canon. Dope is neither a blackening of white teen films, nor a whitening of black teen films, it is the product of, and negotiates a different mode of (co)existence, of human and non-human actants, objects and subjects, and teen film subgenres and thus suggests hybridity and multiplicity as an inevitable given, albeit one that still needs to be acknowledged, regardless whether when granting non-human actants agency to overcome the subject-object, nature-society, or modern-nonmodern divide, or in an ideally post-racial USA, which in reality is still stuck in old binarisms.

POSTSCRIPTUM Dope’s novelty as a technology-centered teen film is in its incorporation of machines to the effect of generating machinic milieus and aesthetics, as it enables us to grant more agency to technological objects (something that is more self-evident in gadget-laden, techno-centric genres such as science fiction or action movies).16 As an African-American teen film, Dope reintroduces positions on “Blackness” and identity that are clearly rooted in the work of black writers, foremost the experience of a split that W.E.B. Du Bois writes about in his foundational work on the “double consciousness” (“one ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” [2007, xiii]). This double consciousness is an undercurrent of the film, revisited overtly by Malcolm in his college application essay, as are Frantz Fanon’s (1952) 16 One of teen film’s most adaptable subgenres has started branching out into new subgenres that rely heavily on the use and aesthetics of certain media and interfaces from which arose a new strand of teen horror movies. Their machinic milieus exploit the impact of technology and social media on everyday life, especially those of teenagers, and present them in style mixes that incorporate “found footage” or computer screen/desktop film’ modes (e.g., by using webcams or video chats), such as Cyberbu// y (2011), Unfriended (2014), Face 2 Face (2016), and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018).

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thoughts on how Blackness is constructed (among other factors through language). The legacy of both theorists is palpable in Dope as is bell hooks’ writing about marginality (1984) and the concept of intersectionality that was developed by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989).17 Both hooks and Crenshaw have a pronounced feminist core in their analysis of intersecting (minority) identities, which while not foregrounded in Dope, is suggested here by the spectrum of female potentialities hinted at through the diverse and progressive portrayals of Nikia, Diggy, Lily, and Malcolm’s mother. Furthermore, intersectionality is clearly the basis by which Dope explores how social stratification in various forms produces particular social and cultural effects both for Malcolm and his diverse group of ethnically, sexually, or otherwise marginalized friends (and foes). Dope ends ambiguously and doesn’t provide moral or punishment, tragedy or deliverance; it resists the naïve and dangerous convention to suggest that an individual’s resolve, determination, and an American work ethic suffice to overcome adversity, crime, and systemic injustice. We neither learn for sure whether Malcolm escapes into an Ivy League future nor if he keeps dealing drugs for AJ Jacoby in the Bottoms. Ultimately, the determinism negotiated here is more complex, too deeply embedded structurally, historically, and psychologically to be countered by a clever ruse using the darknet to (re-)integrate into a safe middle-class normalcy. Dope’s success is this very ambiguity, and at the same time a reminder that in a “black” film, “blackness as content” is often a given in a culture that offers little modulation between problematizing blackness or whitewashing it. However, this treatment of the every day in which blackness and race are always “text” is an accurate reflection of a lived experience in which people are not afforded much opportunity to forget their blackness in the way whites forget their whiteness to the point that it feels “normal.” Tellingly, most canonic teen films address whiteness almost exclusively in their subtext, if at all, or in their negligence—even the famously class-conscious John Hughes films blank out ethnicity as

17 Also

see Hill-Collins and Bilge’s overview Intersectionality (2016).

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constitutive for teen identities.18 The fact that hardly any “mundane” black teen film exists whose extraordinary achievement it would be to make black lives ordinary while retaining the complexity ordinary life unfolds when treated seriously reveals that Hollywood’s oftentimes exclusionary gaze is not only predominantly male, but also white. An indication that alternatives can be realized is suggested by Stefani Saintonge’s short film Seventh Grade (2014), one of a small number of coming-of-age narratives by a female director that also center on an African-American female protagonist. In this regard, Seventh Grade belongs to the same trajectory as Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992)19 but where Leslie Harris’ Just Another Girl investigated the hood from a non-male vantage point, Seventh Grade leaves this environment—either as setting, as stylistic, generic, or narrative blueprint, and as the defining factor for its protagonists. Seventh Grade’s opening scene shows the main character Yanka cheekily playing with her Barbie dolls (black Josie and white Billy) and simulating them having intercourse (see Fig. 4.10). Teased by her sister for being too old to play with these toys, she eventually discards them in front of her suburban home, where another younger girl comes by and picks them up in the film’s final scene. The Barbie scenes function as a metacommentary on the agency of the filmmaker and, by extension, the cinematic apparatus: It is Yanka as the “director” who constellates the actors and controls the visible gazes involved (even in the closeup of Josie and Billy, we see Yanka’s hands orchestrating the dolls’ romance). As a cinematographic object, the Barbie doll has its own set of connotations, a legacy of toy politics and normativity, but is shown here as 18 “White youth are not the only young people to appear in media, nor are they the only young people to consume and produce media. Yet analyses of them dominate youth media studies to a degree far greater than their demographic numbers would suggest. Why this has happened has everything to do with the racial politics that inform our field and academia, politics that keep the majority of youth media scholars focused on the normative individuals at the center of the frame” (Kearney 2017, 119). 19There are more coming-of-age films and TV shows centering on (or at least including) multilayered female protagonists (e.g., Our Song, 2000; Crooklyn, 1994; Dear White People, 2014; Precious, 2009; or the French movie Girlhood, 2014), however the overlap with films that furthermore were directed by females, let alone African-American women, is extremely small. When—in the context of this discussion of intersectionality—adding the deviation from heteronormativity, Dee Rees’ 2011 film Pariah might currently be the only example, as the critically and commercially more successful black LGBTQ-related coming-of-age film—Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016)—foregrounds a male experience.

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The Barbie dolls as cinematographic objects in Seventh Grade

an object that does not solely prescribe a rigid script/program of action, and instead can be utilized flexibly—in this case, for cinematic experimentation with sexuality and interracial (or even post-racial) relations. The circulation of the object, being passed on to another person (or generation), emphasizes this flexibility: The doll becomes a quasi-object around which new networks and new associations will form, depending on the involved actants. Saintonge’s strategy—leaving the hood, showing how her protagonists assume agency—actualizes a move “from margin to center.” Seventh Grade thus accomplishes a narrative and visual language that modulates between both positions: Neither margin nor center determines the style or content of the film, as the gazes contained and suggested by Seventh Grade are more specifically tied to the respective protagonists. Based on the promise of this short, I look forward to seeing what the director could do with a full-length feature. Race has become a more prominent topic again in teen films after Dope, including Moonlight (2016), Kicks (2016), The Transfiguration (2016), The Hate U Give (2018), Skate Kitchen (2018), To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018), Ma (2019), and Brian Banks (2019). Still, intersectional filmmaking in front of and behind the camera need not only be approached with regard to the dynamics of black|white positions

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or non-heteronormative sexualities, but can also be extended to other positions from the margins and how they might find adequate representation within the entire cinematic apparatus (also see the postscriptum to Chapter 2 and The Miseducation of Cameron Post ’s [2018] treatment of indigenous positions and disability). After all, as Kearney emphasizes in her plea for an intersectional analysis of youth media, many people conflate intersectional analysis with attention to race and, more specifically, racial minorities. Yet all people have intersectional identities. The ultimate goal of such work is to understand how our intersected identities have an impact on our relations to power so that effective strategies for eliminating oppression and maximizing equality are developed and enacted. With regard to youth media studies, this means careful consideration of the interlocking identities of media characters, producers, and consumers so as to create more respectful and democratic media for, about, and by young people. (2017, 119–120)

Teen film, as a hybrid, mutable genre organized around individuation, has a tremendous capacity to interrogate cultural hegemony and subvert, rewrite, or even simply ignore it by proposing plots, styles, and characters whose quests for autonomy and singularity are actually autonomous and singular, and not just reiterations of pre-existing conventions, codes, and formulas. The premise of these narratives in which someone becomes a freshly formed version of themselves is often depicted in a prescriptive manner, suggesting conventional routes through which to individuate. In actuality, a person’s becoming might just as well be narrated as a becoming-more, or a becoming-hybrid, a becoming-complex/singular rather than a becoming-less-complex/conforming (echoed by the primal fear of The Breakfast Club’s “My God, are we gonna be like our parents?”). Just as we need to see greater diversity in front of and behind the camera we also need to see greater diversity in terms of how these narratives are constructed and how they serve their protagonists. We also need more texts, particularly in feature-length films, where a character’s blackness is incidental and not tied to its own restrictive tropes, in addition to those that already define the genre. Multiplicity is a crucial element of the project of democracy and it can be (and has been) tested and enacted in films about prom night, high school cafeterias, virginity, nerds and jocks;

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coming-of-age narratives have the potential to evoke normative interpellations, but just as much, they can be turned into a form of resistance while being as goofy, dramatic, serious, and entertaining as the normative formula variants.

Filmography Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis, Universal Pictures, USA, 1985. Boys Don’t Cry, Kimberly Peirce, Fox Searchlight Pictures, USA, 1999. Boyz N The Hood, John Singleton, Columbia Pictures, USA, 1991. The Breakfast Club, John Hughes, Universal Pictures, USA, 1985. Brian Banks, Tom Shaydac, Bleecker Street Media, USA, 2018. Crooklyn, Spike Lee, Universal Pictures, USA, 1994. Cyberbu// y, Teena Booth, Muse Entertainment, USA, 2011. Dear White People, Justin Simien, Lionsgate, USA, 2014. Dope, Rick Famuyiwa, Open Road Films, USA, 2015. The DUFF, Ari Sandel, CBS Films, USA, 2015. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Stephen Spielberg, Universal Pictures, USA, 1982. Face 2 Face, Matthew Toronto, Green Step Productions, USA, 2016. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, John Hughes, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1986. Girlhood, Céline Sciamma, Hold Up Films, France, 2014. Gummo, Harmony Korine, Fine Line Features, USA, 1997. The Hate U Give, Georg Tillman Jr., 20th Century Fox, USA, 2018. It, Andy Muschietti, New Line Cinema, USA, 2017. Juice, Ernest R. Dickerson, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1992. Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., Leslie Harris, Miramax Films, USA, 1992. Kicks, Justin Tipping, Focus World, USA, 2016. Kids, Larry Clark, Killer Films, USA, 1995. Ma, Tate Taylor, Blumhouse Productions, USA, 2019. The Maltese Falcon, John Huston, Warner Brothers, USA, 1941. Menace II Society, The Hughes Brothers, New Line Cinema, USA, 1993. The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Desiree Akhavan, FilmRise, UK/USA, 2018. Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, A24, USA, 2016. Our Song, Jim McKay, IFC, USA, 2000. Pariah, Dee Rees, Focus Features, USA, 2011. The Plastic Age, Wesley Ruggles, Preferred Pictures, USA, 1925.

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Precious, Lee Daniels, Lee Daniels Entertainment, USA, 2009. Reefer Madness, Louis Gasnier, George A. Hirliman Productions, USA, 1936. Scenes from the Suburbs, Spike Jonze, USA, 2011. Seventh Grade, Stefani Saintonge, USA, 2014. Sixteen Candles, John Hughes, Universal Pictures, USA, 1984. Skate Kitchen, Crystal Moselle, Magnolia Pictures, USA, 2018. Stand by Me, Rob Reiner, Columbia Pictures, USA, 1986. Stephen King’s IT, Lawrence D. Cohen, Warner Brothers Television, 1990. Stranger Things, Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, Netflix, USA, 2016. Summer of 84, Francos Simard, Gunpowder & Sky, Canada/USA, 2018. Super Fly, Gordon Parks Jr., Warner Brothers Pictures, USA, 1972. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Susan Johnson, Netflix, USA, 2018. The Transfiguration, Michael O’Shea, Strand Releasing, USA, 2017. Unfriended, Leo Gabriadze, Universal Pictures, USA, 2014. Unfriended: Dark Web, Stephen Susco, OTL Releasing, USA, 2018. Whip It (Official Music Video), Zack Warren, USA, 2014. Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik, Roadside Attractions, USA, 2010. The Wire, David Simon, HBO, USA, 2002–2008.

Bibliography Akrich, Madeleine. 1992. “The De-Scription of Technical Objects.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 205– 224. Cambridge: MIT Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. America. Translated by Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso. Butz, Konstantin. 2012. Grinding California: Culture and Corporeality in American Skate Punk. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Driscoll, Catherine. 2011. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Oxford and New York: Berg. Du Bois, W.E.B. 2007. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited by Brent Hayes Edwards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1), Article 8. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/ iss1/8/.

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Etulain, Richard W. 1996. Re-imagining the Modern African West: A Century of Fiction, History and Art. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Famuyiwa, Rick. 2015. “‘Dope’ Director On Geekdom, The N-Word and Confronting Racism With Comedy.” Fresh Air. NPR, October 16, 2015. Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Gross, Terry. 2015. “Interview with Rick Famuyiwa.” NPR, July 1, 2015. www.npr.org/2015/07/01/419160423/dope-director-on-geekdom-the-nword-andconfronting-racism-with-comedy. Haraway, Donna J. (1985) 2016. “The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Manifestly Haraway, edited by Cary Wolfe, 3–91. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hill-Collins, Patricia, and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press. hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Cambridge: South End Press. Kearney, Mary Celeste. 2017. “Against a Sharp White Background.” Toward Race-Based Intersectional Research in Youth Media Studies 57 (1): 119–124. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/672998. Latour, Bruno. (1991) 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000. “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things.” In Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, edited by P. M. Graves-Brown, 10–22. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: And Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 2013. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lyotard, Jean-François. (1979) 1984. Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. King’s Lynn: University of Minnesota Press.

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Marx, Karl. 1852. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” Marxists. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch05.htm. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1992. The Communist Manifesto 1848. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McRobbie, Angela, and Jenny Garber. 1991. “Girls and Subcultures.” In Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’, edited by Angela McRobbie, 1–15. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mulholland, Gary. 2011. Stranded at the Drive-In: From The Breakfast Club to The Social Network—The 100 Best Teen Movies. London: Orion. Naughty by Nature, “Hip Hop Hooray.” Track 2 on 19 Naughty III. Tommy Boy Records, 1993, compact disc. Serres, Michel. 1982. The Parasite. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shary, Timothy. 2002. Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2005. Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen. London and New York: Wallflower. Shaviro, Steven. 2012. “Post-Continuity.” The Pinocchio Theory, March 26. www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1034. Sledd, James. 1965. “On Not Teaching English Usage.” The English Journal: National Council of Teachers of English 54 (8): 698–703. https://www.jstor. org/stable/811000. Truffaut, François, and Helen G. Scott. 1987. Hitchcock. New York and London: Simon & Schuster. Virilio, Paul. 1986. Speed and Politics. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

5 Visualization, Images and Inscriptions

Images and Inscriptions: Visual Hybridity as Meta-Commentary in The Diary of a Teenage Girl From a Latourian position, it is not only the written word that constitutes inscriptions, but also visualizations of different sorts do, such as images, graphs, or diagrams (in and as inscriptions). Both film as a Latourian inscription, and the apparatuses from which film emerges as inscription devices have been discussed here along with the material and semiotic dimension of concrete images. The DUFF (2015) and Dope (2015) incorporate the look of social media platforms, ubiquitous screens, and cameras such as phone cameras, newscasts, or drone footage as a visualization of the media ecology in which they are set and the altered relationship of humans and technology. Both films are formally hybrid, consistent with their particular media ecologies and their human-machine protagonists. The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) is a formal hybrid, too, but in a different fashion. The movie adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s eponymous quasi-autobiographical novel/graphic

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novel (2002) is a mixed-mode film that incorporates cartoons and animation into its live-action. This mixing of modes causes a disruption in the “optical consistency” of the film that on the one hand defines its unique aesthetic, and on the other makes its own artifice visible. While The DUFF and Dope are similarly revealing of their mediatic milieus, the mode-mixing in Diary emphasizes that a sizable chain of transformations is being produced by various inscription devices: a life story being transformed into written words and images, which are then transformed again into film. This is important for Diary’s narrative and political project: the images not only contain the film’s action and aesthetics, they also contain a reminder that they are being actively produced and assembled by someone and/or something. By consciously laying bare the being-made, the being-assembled of the film, it also lays bare that everything it suggests—or subverts, for that matter—is not the image of an allegedly objective reality, but a construction of facts, gazes, types, patterns. The images are the construction, but contrary to the majority of mainstream cinema, they also constantly remind the spectator of their status as being constructed and manipulated and thus will function as a meta-commentary on the nature of (moving) images—and any kind of fact, by extension—and reveal the actual subjectivity of any inscription. Female sexuality and the way it is depicted as central themes in Diary as well as the way in which conventional scopic regimes are displaced by alternative ones, cannot be separated from the film’s specific modes of visualization: the subversion of conventional scopic regimes here is achieved visually.

Case Study: The Diary of a Teenage Girl Diary is a film that consists of, and is about cascades of visual inscriptions. Visualization provides as a significant perspective to approach a text that is so concerned with image-making at the content level, and with self-writing, self-imaging, mirror images, and different modes of visualizations, and that at the formal level centers on the construction and disruption of images and image-making techniques. Marielle Heller had already adapted Gloeckner’s 2002 book for the stage in 2010 prior

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to developing it into a feature film as her directorial debut. In this regard, the chain of transformations from which the film emerges is already an example for circulating reference and a multitude of visual inscriptions/visualizations. The narrative follows 15-year-old Minnie Goetze (played by Bel Powley, 22 years old at the time of filming) coming of age in 1976 San Francisco, while experiencing and experimenting with sexuality, relationships, art, music, and drugs. Minnie lives with her younger sister Gretel (Abigail Wait) and her single, 34-year-old mother Charlotte Worthington (Kristen Wiig), making this four for four in terms of the films discussed and their depiction of a father who is (mostly) absent. Minnie’s mother is experimenting with drugs, hedonism, independence, relationships, and coming to terms with her roles as woman, mother, and individual. Both Minnie and her mother are navigating liminal personal spaces in a wider transitional moment in the USA after the Vietnam War, depicted here as a nation in mid-change. During this era of social and sexual revolution, the renegotiation of social contracts is primarily narrated through the changing roles and increased empowerment of women (and the difficulty of tackling these shifts), markers of second wave feminism, but also by changing subcultures and musical movements such as punk rock or glam rock as embodiments of shifting zeitgeist. At the center of Minnie’s coming-of-age are her sexual encounters, especially her affair with Monroe Rutherford (Alexander Skarsgård), her mother’s 35-year-old boyfriend, which oscillates between the sexual self-determination and agency of a young woman and the abuse of a minor by an irresponsible adult. Besides the physical and sexual dimension of her maturation, Minnie also comes of age as an artist, as she starts to draw, inspired by the art of Aline Kominsky and Robert Crumb, San Francisco-based protagonists of the contemporaneous underground comix counterculture movement. Maturation in The Diary is interconnected with self-expression, Minnie’s I-formation does not solely take place on the level of her psyche and her body, but on the plane of writing, voicing, and visualizing the self.

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Teen Films and Female Sexuality Sexuality as the epitome of adolescent rites of passage is self-evidently one of the more important, if not the single most important, trope of teen films. The modes in which sexuality is addressed in mainstream cinema and teen film can be subject to constant and oftentimes radical change. Teen film genre historians such as Considine, Shary, Doherty, and Driscoll give accounts of how these changes correspond to larger cultural shifts, such as the constant renegotiations of taboos and the boundaries of censorship. Generally, teen film’s modes of depicting awakening sexuality have gradually moved from addressing sexuality implicitly and by innuendo to an increasing frankness, always navigating not only the societal taboos for sexual, erotic, or pornographic content in general, but additionally the boundary between what is acceptable.1 The growing permissiveness in narrating adolescent sexuality however follows a discernible gender separation. Female sexuality is primarily used as a projection screen for male fantasies, if female desire plays a role at all, it is commonly staged in a way that is intended to be titillating for a heterosexual male spectator’s gaze (also see Sonnenberg-Schrank [2016]). The sexuality and sexual deviancy in teen films purports a predominantly male, heteronormative perspective with the tendency to depict male sexuality in a more lighthearted manner, as an important transformative experience that can even turn nerds into “real men” (see also Giroux 1991, 131) with the potential for hilarity, and female sexuality in a less playful and often more grave tone.2 There are numerous examples 1This also goes for the depiction of (male) homosexuality, which for a long time was, and had to be, due to the Production Code’s regulations, mainly addressed on the subtextual level and in these narratives inevitably led to dire consequences: “This preoccupation with masculinity played an important role in the screen’s depiction not only of heterosexuality, but also of homosexuality. Sal Mineo was killed off at the end of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) because his needs were suspect” (Considine 1985, 235). 2 In her discussion of American Pie as a late-90s update of the 1980s sex comedy Driscoll says: “Gender differentiations around sex in American Pie are nevertheless clear cut. The film opens with the sound of a pornographic film Jim is using as a masturbation tool before he is quickly caught by his mother. In the second scene, Vicky excitedly learns of her acceptance to college. Together, these establish that girls are more mature than boys and do not require sexual experience for successful psychosocial development. But the reasons for this difference remain as mysterious as everything else about girl sexuality” (Driscoll 2011, 74–75).

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we can look to for depictions of female sexuality (however, only few that aren’t framed by heterosexual norms) and even though there some films about teenage girls’ sexuality that show female self-determination (Easy A [2010], Pariah [2011], The To Do List [2013], and The Edge of Seventeen [2016]), most teen films when dealing with the topic rely on sexist clichés clearly catering to the male gaze, from “sexy” shower room scenes in sex romps such as Porky’s (1981) to the male policing of female desire and virginity we see for instance in Twilight (2008–2012).3 The perspective shift in Diary toward exploring adolescent sexuality from a female perspective is realized directly with the opening low-angle close-up of Minnie’s behind and legs moving in slow-motion against the scenery of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Park, backlit by the afternoon sun. We then cut to a close-up of her face and in voice-over, 14 seconds into the exposition, we hear her first sentence as an inner monologue: “I had sex today. Holy Shit!” Minnie and her sexuality as the theme around which the film will be organized, and as the storyteller who will organize it, are installed right away. Diary’s director Marielle Heller, born in 1979, came of age at a time of teen film’s proliferation, and states in an interview that a strong impetus to pursue the project was rooted in the limited scope teen films have offered to female viewers: As a teen girl, I never felt represented in films and books. Girls were always the object. Boys wanted sex, and girls had to protect their virginity. No one talks about being the girl that wants to have sex. If you are that girl (and most people are), you end up feeling like something is wrong with you because you don’t see that presented as normal anywhere. (Grigg-Spall 2015)

Female adolescent sexuality is by no means excluded from teen films, there are examples of (sexual) agency of female teenagers, however they are often highly problematic: The bad and rebellious chicks from the 1950s juvenile delinquency films are coded delinquent not by violence or criminal activity (as are their male counterparts) but by being “easy” or even promiscuous. The allegorical sexual awakening in The Exorcist 3 Also

see Sonnenberg-Schrank (2013) and Platt (2010).

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(1973) or Carrie (1976) endow the prepubescent Regan and the adolescent Carrie with new powers and desires, but these narratives simultaneously condemn the newly awakened and sexualized powers of the girls by equating them with demonic possession, witchcraft, manipulation, and the goal of hurting others—especially men.4 Female homosexuality, female deviancy, and the desire of the female-to-male transgender protagonist inevitably leads, in Boys Don’t Cry (1999), to tragedy, violent punishment, and ultimately death. Even Sofia Coppola’s adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Virgin Suicides (1999) acknowledges the complexities and limitations of the male gaze without necessarily offering a progressive way through it (other than death). In the majority of cases, female sexuality is the plane on which male desire is played out, either fulfilling those desires, or alternately, as the plane on which male anxiety is played out, denying their fulfillment. Shary observes that “[s]exual pleasure for girls in teen films remains far more problematic than it is for boys, most likely because the majority of teen films are made under the patriarchal standards of Hollywood” (2005, 107). Building his argument on Laura Mulvey’s analysis of Hollywood’s/visual culture’s “male gaze,” he addresses teen film’s gender asymmetry in the depiction of sexuality in a side note: Few of these films could be called feminist, however, and are more often sexist in their portrayals of young women’s exploitation by young men, or at least their formal imaging of girls’ bodies, which are held up for voyeuristic pleasure by the male gaze in much greater proportion than the number of boys who are photographed for the opposite purpose. Many youth love/sex films tell young women to resist their image as sexual objects but in their telling objectify them all the same. (Shary 2002, 214)

Mulvey’s analysis of the common mode of depicting women in Hollywood cinema quickly became a staple of feminist film criticism and it maintains an eminent position—a testament both to its strength, and to the continuing state of affairs regarding mainstream cinema and television’s depiction of men and women—its influence can be felt for instance 4 Also

see Barbara’s Creed’s conceptualization of The Monstrous Feminine (1993, 31–42, 73–85).

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in the popularity of the so-called Bechdel Test,5 a popcultural extension of Mulvey’s concept. Mulvey has called her own premise “limited and polemical” (Mulvey 2009, xvi), but I would argue that both the limitations and polemics are necessary to produce the political insinuations of her analysis as well as the impact it had in deciphering the “‘language’ of woman as spectacle to both visualize and secure sexual difference” (ibid.)—and the demand for alternative ways of representing women (and men) on the screen with a “a new language of desire” (Mulvey 2009, 16). 6 Mulvey built explicitly on the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan—namely Freud’s notion of scopophilia (the pleasure in looking and being looked at) and Lacan’s mirror stage as explanation for the innate human need to identify with external images—and implicitly on the libidinous relation between spectator and screen Baudry and Metz develop following Lacanian terminology. By proposing that “the magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose … from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure” (ibid., 16), she points to a simple and basic truth: films cater to their audiences’ desire to see (and not necessarily in an erotic way). However, “the fantasy world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it” (ibid., 19), which means that it “reflect[s] the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it” (ibid., 16). Thus, a cinema that emerges from a patriarchal order is prone to echo and perpetuate said order. The gaze of the camera, the audience, and the characters on the screen in that sense all result from very real biases and asymmetries beyond the screen and contribute to their reproduction—they “visualize and secure.” Mobilizing Latour’s conceptualization of visualization and Mulvey’s evaluation of Hollywood’s scopic regimes, I will discuss how Diary avoids the scopic 5 In

a 1985 story embedded in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008), Alison Bechdel has a character suggest three questions to ask a film in order to determine whether it offers a depiction of women that follows a logic other than the patriarchal order manifested in the male gaze: “I have this rule, see… I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it… who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man.” 6This is not relegated to cinematic media, but goes for other media as well—after all Mulvey started developing her notion of a “male unconscious” reflecting on the sculptural work of British artist Allen Jones in 1972.

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regime of the male gaze and establishes a “new language of desire” by closely intertwining desire and visuality.

Visualization Latour’s engagement with visual culture and visualizations is a recurring theme in his oeuvre. In his ZKM exhibition Iconoclash, he asked: “Why do images trigger so much passion?” (2002, 14) as a lead-into a negotiation of three different kinds of images—religious imagery, art, and scientific inscriptions—and the way they are perceived differently, even though they are not essentially different, as they all emerge from mediations and translations and therefore are always human-made. Even the scientific image with its perceived built-in objectivity is no less fabricated than other visualizations where the fabrication will seem more selfevident. The relation between a text and the object or reality it refers to is always indirect and only functions when reference circulates stably and the translations are done well—the number and quality of the mediations will determine the truth value, not the representation as such.7 The visual display as “the most powerful tool” (Latour and Woolgar 2013, 67–68) is essential to recognize such processes, to represent them, and thus, to ultimately generate knowledge and displace8 (or translate) it. The inscription device then is a case-specific apparatus and can be pretty much “any set-up, no matter what its size, nature and cost” (ibid.). Even though visualization in itself is neutral, it is linked to domination, as visual (and other) inscriptions make it possible to exert power 7 “To

begin with, for most people, they [scientific inscriptions/images] are not even images, but the world itself. There is nothing to say about them except learning their message. To call them image, inscription, representation, to have them exposed in an exhibition side by side with religious icons, is already an iconoclastic gesture. ‘If those are mere representations of galaxies, atoms, light, genes, then one could say indignantly, they are not real, they have been fabricated.’ And yet, … it slowly becomes clearer that without huge and costly instruments, large groups of scientists, vast amounts of money, long training, nothing would be visible in those images. It is because of so many mediations that they are able to be so objectively true … In science‚ there is no such a thing as ‘mere representation’” (Latour 2002, 19). 8 “Like Michel Serres, I use translation to mean displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies two elements or agents” (Latour 1991, 32, also see Latour 1999, 179).

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from afar by being able to study, command, or scrutinize an object without having to be in its presence, as maps allow to overlook an area, or probes to study a specimen from a remote location: “It is not at the cognitive differences that we should marvel, but at this general mobilization of the world that endows a few scientists in frock coats, somewhere in Kew Gardens, with the ability to visually dominate all the plants of the earth” (1986, 225). Information and inscriptions are bundled in what Latour calls centers of calculation, the sites where knowledge is generated by aligning inscriptions (or “superimposing” them), a milieu where “the obsession for graphism” (1986, 16) and “two dimensional images which have been made less confusing” (ibid.) has become more important than the represented thing in itself. What is so important in the images and in the inscriptions scientists and engineers are busy obtaining, drawing, inspecting, calculating and discussing? It is, first of all, the unique advantage they give in the rhetorical or polemical situation. “You doubt of what I say? I’ll show you.” And, without moving more than a few inches, I unfold in front of your eyes figures, diagrams, plates, texts, silhouettes, and then and there present things that are far away and with which some sort of two-way connection has now been established. I do not think the importance of this simple mechanism can be overestimated. (1986, 13)

Once acknowledged that images are fabrications, their degree of objectivity or subjectivity becomes less crucial, and instead the focus can shift to the ways in which they are fabricated, the processes and participants that generate them. If there is no “mere representation,” an image never merely refers to its sujet, but to a more complex interplay of an entire dispositif or actor-network. The entanglement comprises the apparatus from which the image emerges and that circulates it, as well as the content of the image, and the spectators—no inscriptions without inscription devices. A photograph refers to light, chemicals, or lenses, a newspaper refers to paper and a printing press, and a film to cameras, producers, editors, and actors. As mentioned before, it is also the concern of apparatus theory to identify not necessarily the machines in themselves, but the manifold steps where both affirmative and subversive ideologies inscribe themselves into a film via its human and non-human

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participants. However, our eyes are used to seeing films and are therefore able to disconnect them from their apparatuses and from reality and grant them their own realities. Other than the storied spectators of early cinema who attacked the screen or fled from “oncoming” trains in the Lumière Brothers’ L’arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat (1895), we are aware of the machines that generate the filmic image—and thus we are able to blackbox them, which we unconsciously do in order to endow films with coherence and what Latour calls optical consistency (“The main quality of the new space is not to be ‘objective’ as a naïve definition of realism often claims, but rather to have optical consistency” [1986, 10]). As movie audience, we do not necessarily assume that a film depicts an objective reality: we know the difference between fiction and documentary, we are aware that actors whom we possibly have already seen in other roles are not, but only play a part, but as long as the film retains its optical consistency, we are able to maintain our blackboxing and uphold the filmic illusion, which is also why we can accept an animation film as something that has no relation to “reality” but has narrative coherence and optical consistency. But if the optical consistency is disrupted, the apparatus becomes visible.9 The image’s artifice and subjectivity are revealed, the hand that manipulates and actively constructs the image, the presence of the apparatus that provides the image to begin with.

Teenage Inscriptions: Voicing and Visualizing the Self The diary writing indicated by the film’s title is the premise of and the device that will structure both the narrative and Minnie’s identityforming introspective self-reflection. Besides establishing the theme of 9The narrative/illusional consistency can also be disrupted, as for instance in Brecht’s conception of an “epic theatre,” the breaking of the fourth wall, or with cinematic techniques such as voiceovers, perspective shifts, nonlinearity, self-referentiality, and the self-revelation of the apparatus, which Christian Metz refers to as énonciation; along with enoncé, the context-free “what” is said, the term énonciation (which denotes the act of saying it, per definition tied to a context) was appropriated from linguistics by film theoreticians and especially Metz as a means to distinguish what André Bazin coined a “transparent” cinema (Metz 2016, 68) that “covers its tracks” from a mode of filmmaking which makes its being-made visible.

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self-documentation (also see the discussion of The DUFF ) the information provided by a caption that the diegesis is set in 1976 San Francisco establishes an a priori position of diary writing (which by definition is always retrospective) creating a temporal displacement and turning the film into a period piece. This is on the one hand indebted to Phoebe Gloeckner’s book and its specific historical context; on the other hand, the temporal displacement mitigates the voyeuristic invasion of the diary format’s intimacy, and the explicitness of the film’s content and language. Locating the narrative in “the past” assumes a filter function that in the graphic novel is provided by varied levels of mediation,10 as both drawing and writing are generally perceived as more mediated and filtered than the supposedly more immediate and naturalistic photography. Visually, the narrative is located in the 1970s and coded by its mise-en-scène, as sets, props, costumes, hairstyles, and music are easily decipherable in their time-specificity.11 Diary was shot on a Red Epic, similar to the camera used for Winter’s Bone, with Panavision C-Series anamorphic lenses (a series introduced in 1968) that are known for their slightly grainy, “organic,” less modern, and less sterile pictures. For the most part, Diary was filmed with a handheld camera, which, also comparable to Winter’s Bone, leads to a different movement, stability, and light, more reminiscent of documentary than present-day Hollywood cinema, especially in combination with the anamorphic format that is typically associated with the look of 35 mm films from the 1970s. Camera operator Brandon Trost says in an interview with American Cinematographer that “the movie should feel like you’re flipping through a photo album of old Polaroids— the color palette, the way it faded, the softness of it” (Stasukevich 2015). The photography is characterized by the strong presence of yellow tones 10 Another

filter is the nota bene included in the book’s imprint that despite Gloeckner’s selfavowed autobiographical content of the narrative states: “This account is entirely fictional and if you think you recognize any of the characters as an actual person, living or dead, you are mistaken” (2002, x). The idiosyncratic variation of a standard legal clause for books and films simultaneously doubles as a claiming of authorship and fictionality, blurring the boundaries between author and work. 11The film stock (or more so the camera and lenses used) contributes strongly to a “1970s look,” other than in period teen films such as Grease (1978) which is set in 1959, but whose film stock looks clearly like the late 70s film it actually is, or Detroit Rock City (1999), which is set in 1978, but unmistakably looks like a late 90s film.

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and its desaturated color palette and additionally shifts the film’s action to a bygone era, providing a “safe” distance from which the film’s uncommon perspective on female desire can be experimentally explored. The first time we hear Minnie’s voice—“I had sex today.”—leads quickly to her strategy to deal with her sexuality and her self: after her slow-motion stroll through the park and upon arriving at her house, she gets out a tape cassette recorder from the closet, sits down cross-legged amid a layered cascade of visual inscriptions that includes bedroom walls filled with Iggy Pop and Janis Joplin posters as well as her own drawings and starts dictating into the microphone: “My name is Minnie Goetze. I am a fifteen-year-old girl living in San Francisco California, recording this onto a cassette tape because my life has gotten really crazy of late, and I need to tell someone about it. If you’re listening to this without my permission, please stop right now. Just, really. Stop. Okay?” Recording herself becomes the first of many inscriptions Minnie conducts. For the dramaturgy, it is a convenient device to have the character introduce herself to the audience and simultaneously negotiate the nature of the inscription: “I need to tell someone about it.” The choice of auxiliary verb is decisive here: Her self-documentation stems neither from narcissism nor from a feeling that she is obliged to disclose her intimate sphere it stems from a wish to make her life more tangible by literally turning it into a flat inscription. This inscription also stems from desire: not only the sexual desire of which she is about to give an account, but a desire to document. Minnie goes on, dictating that she does not remember being born or having been an ugly child, the camera pans over several of her drawings before resting on the depiction of a woman that suddenly becomes animated, opens her thighs and has an oversized baby’s head emerging from her vagina. Through the film, animations that materialize or emerge from drawings often appear at moments when the sexual content is explicit, simultaneously defusing and emphasizing it. In this early diary-dictation scene, Minnie recounts how her own illicit relationship with Monroe was initiated and led to the present point, the “I just had sex” she refers to, a path she traces it back to him touching her breast apparently incidentally while watching TV: “I know it seems weird, but I had this strangely calming feeling that even if he touched my tit on purpose it’s probably

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all right because he’s one of our best friends and he’s a good guy and he knows how it goes and I don’t … But I wonder if my breast felt small?” Minnie, wearing pajamas, looks at a drawing she made of Monroe, tenderly touching the portrait’s crotch and asks: “Oh Monroe. Pitter pat. You touched my tit. How was that?” The drawing then becomes animated, Monroe’s face morphs into live action, surrounded by psychedelic floral ornaments while he bashfully says: “Can I just say… touching your breasts—I can’t, I can’t say it. They’re really great. Fantastic breasts, Minnie. Just perfect.” Minnie’s thoughts, memories, and her dreaming become a drawing which becomes an animation which transforms back into live action: The fluidity of different medial forms visualizes the fluidity of the different layers of consciousness bleeding into each other. The second image shows Minnie’s sexualized daydreaming, commented by her voice-over narration: “Maybe I should just ignore everything. But I like sex. I want to get laid right now. I really like getting fucked. Does everyone think about fucking as much as I do? Am I a sexed-up freak or something?” Attaching a wagging cartoon penis to a boy, she sees literally turns him into a projection screen of her active and objectifying gaze. Language seems to be Minnie’s testing ground for finding an approach to sexuality in a tough, quasi-pornographic manner (“I hate men but I fuck them hard hard hard and thoughtlessly because I hate them so much. I hear myself and it sounds so stupid.”), however the colorful animations correspond to another level of her emotional landscape, while simultaneously creating a visual estrangement and a liminal space between modes of visualization (Fig. 5.1a and b). Minnie’s insecurities about her transitioning adolescent body, wondering whether her breasts are adequate in the eyes of an experienced man and fabricating an imaginary conversation to reassure herself, allude to an internalized male gaze. Already in the Yerba Buena Park exposition scene, she checked out a jogging woman’s bouncing breasts and then looked down on her own comparing their figures, where the gaze was emphasized by photography and editing choices that more blatantly fetishized the jogger’s physique. Accordingly, Minnie mirrors herself in what she assumes to be other people’s perception of her. Her mother contributes strongly to the scopic regime Minnie moves through: Even though Charlotte tries to redefine herself as a liberated progressive

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Fig. 5.1a and b Birthing and wagging penis animation: defusing and emphasizing sexual content

woman, she continuously regresses into objectifying herself and other females when she reduces them to their bodies and their to-be-looked-atness. We see this for instance when she repeatedly talks about how attractive she was at Minnie’s age, comments on the looks of Minnie’s best friend Kimmie, and on what she perceives as Minnie’s self-objectifying failures: “It wouldn’t kill you to wear something with a waist.” For Charlotte, empowerment, and sexual empowerment specifically, is necessarily defined by male desire, but not by any female desire uncoupled from male desire: “You know, you aren’t always going to have that body, Min. I know it’s not exactly feminist to say, but I think you’d be happier if you put yourself out there a bit—a little make-up, a skirt every once in

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a while, Jesus. Get a little attention. You have a kind of power, you just don’t know it yet.” Minnie is thus constantly confronted with the perception others have of her, the way she perceives herself, and the images she makes of herself as a function of how she thinks others perceive her. The negotiation of internal and external images, internalized and externalized gazes is conducted via the actual material and mental images Minnie creates and imagines—and the cinematography corresponds to these cascades of images by superimposing the different types of image. The perspective on all these perspectives however is always Minnie’s. The audience is focalized through Minnie, both by her voice-over narration as diarist, as well as by the inscriptions she produces, and by her presence: She is present in every scene, either as an active participant or as an observer, but it is always clear that the story is not only about but also by Minnie, that the perspective is on and that of Minnie. All the gazes are Minnie’s gazes, even though in the beginning her gaze is still that of an internalized male gaze that only gradually becomes determined by her own desire, and enabled through the practice of image-making. That Minnie is, in Mulvey’s terminology, the active “bearer of the look” and not the passive woman-as-image and the object of a male gaze, is a decisive difference to other representations of adolescent female sexuality, for instance that which we see in Lolita (both Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie adaptation) and its negotiation of an illicit relationship between an adult and a pubescent girl. The scopic regime in Lolita is ruled by Humbert Humbert as the narrator through whom we are focalized in both incarnations of the narrative, this makes the

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Fig. 5.2 Mirror scene in the cluttered boudoir

evaluation of agency and victimization different than in the illicit relationship between Minnie and Monroe.12 Diary’s scopic regime is controlled by Minnie’s gaze—even the one time we see her naked in front of her bedroom mirror, the mise-en-scène (especially the lighting, spatial arrangement, and camera perspective) carefully evades turning Minnie into an object of male desire by avoiding to frame the scene as erotic (Fig. 5.2). The mere fact that Minnie has agency and is not simply Monroe’s victim does however not blank the problematic asymmetry in their relations, it instead makes the question more ambiguous and Monroe a more complex character instead of a type. He is not constructed as a one-dimensional depraved pedophile, but certainly as an irresponsible adult, emotionally hardly more mature than Minnie and her peers. In Gloeckner’s book, Minnie enters in her diary: 12 Even though Lolita is not read unambiguously this way, as Georg Seeßlen observes: “Indeed, Nabokov articulates her anguish and revulsion very clearly, and it is obviously not so much a matter of the text, as it is a matter of what a society reads into it, that it has been understood as the tragedy of a lewd old man, and not as the tragedy of an abused child” (Seeßlen and Jung 1999, 120, my translation). In her NY Times article about The Diary (the film), Manohla Dargis points out that the constellation of Minnie and Monroe is orchestrated and contextualized in a way that defies an all-too-clear binarism of identifying a victim or victimizer in either: “[Monroe is] Charlotte’s boyfriend when the movie opens, and he’s also sleeping with the very willing, all-too-eager Minnie, although calling him her lover doesn’t seem quite right—but neither does predator. What you call Monroe, other than an expletive, depends on what you call a man having sex with a 15-year-old girl. The Diary of a Teenage Girl takes place in 1976, when the age of consent in California was 18 (it still is), but it unfolds in an anything-goes milieu in which Monroe might be branded more of an opportunist than a creep” (Dargis 2015).

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It’s just not right that we have to hide our affection. Do you think it’s right? Or do you think that Monroe is just some old lecher who is taking advantage of me? And if he’s not taking advantage of me, do you think it’s a horrible sin all the same? I wish Monroe had a diary so you could read both sides of the situation and tell me what’s what. (Gloeckner 2002, 144)

Besides pondering the lover-or-lecher question, it is characteristic that Minnie wishes there were inscriptions by Monroe as it reinforces the notion that inscriptions have the capability to make a deeper truth (the unconscious maybe), or an objective reality, visible that cannot be otherwise accessed. By a dialectic superimposition of (subjective) inscriptions, Minnie assumes it will be possible to determine “what’s what.” Consequently, the diary in the way she uses and understands it, is an immutable mobile 13 par excellence, an inscription that can be transported or hidden and has the capability to store volatile data that would neither be representable, and perhaps get lost without inscriptions: I keep my diary, which is a black loose-leaf binder, under my mattress. I don’t think that’s a very safe place to hide it. I also have a little Hello Kitty diary that I keep in my backpack but I don’t use it that much because I prefer typing. I have a feeling that they will be found eventually … I’ll never destroy it. How else can you remember your life? (Gloeckner 2002, 167)

The diary as Minnie describes it in the book—and Gloeckner’s book in its own right as the next step in the diary’s chain of transformation—have at least eight of the aforementioned nine advantages Latour ascribes to 13 Immutable

mobiles are inscriptions such as printed matter that can be easily transported and circulated without any loss, as the information and the contained knowledge is massreproducible (and thus becomes immutable), which he sums up into “nine advantages:” besides being mobile and immutable, they are flat, the scale of the inscriptions may be modified at will, they can be reproduced and spread, they can be reshuffled and recombined, it is possible to superimpose several images of different origins and scales and they can be made part of a written text. The example of a map illustrates the process how a visualization is generated and how power is linked to visualizations, to exerting domination with the eyes, the pencil, and then materially and politically. Building on Svetlana Alpers retracing of an ever-changing “visual culture” (1983), Latour shifts the discourse of power to visualization and visibility, to “how a culture sees the world, and makes it visible” (Latour 1986, 11).

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such inscriptions: They are mobile, immutable, flat, their scale is modifiable, they are reproducible and spreadable, they can be reshuffled and recombined, they are superimposable, and they can be made part of a written text—which all applies to the hybrid book into which the diary turns and the hybrid film into which it then turns again. In this way, the thing and its representation as fiction are connected and share a “common place” from which “complete hybrids” emerge: Fiction—even the wildest or the most sacred—and things of nature— even the lowliest have a meeting ground, a common place, because they all benefit from the same “optical consistency”. Not only can you displace cities, landscapes, or natives and go back and forth to and from them along avenues through space, but you can also reach saints, gods, heavens, palaces, or dreams with the same two-way avenues and look at them through the same “windowpane” on the same two-dimensional surface … Impossible palaces can be drawn realistically, but it is also possible to draw possible objects as if they were utopian ones … At this stage, on paper, hybrids can be created that mix drawings from many sources. Perspective is not interesting because it provides realistic pictures; on the other hand, it is interesting because it creates complete hybrids: nature seen as fiction, and fiction seen as nature, with all the elements made so homogeneous in space that it is now possible to reshuffle them like a pack of cards. (Latour 1986, 21)

The layered, collaged, multi-mode mise-en-scène of The Diary embodies and visualizes (and embodies by visualization) not only the in-betweenness of Minnie and other characters or settings in liminal spaces, the fluid state of becoming, but also the very in-between-ness of these visual inscriptions and the fluidity of their mediations and translations.

Une Ecriture Feminine, Une Ecriture Adolescente: Writing the Body, Writing the Self The duality of internal and external images in the form of the interplay of Minnie’s bodily reality and body images is repeatedly addressed in Diary.

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After losing her virginity to Monroe and in post-coital bliss, Monroe says to her: “You look good, you know? Nice.” Minnie gets a polaroid camera from her bag, tries to resume the exact position on which Monroe had just commented and asks him: “Will you take my picture? Please? I just want to see.” Not only is Minnie an almost compulsive imagemaker, furthermore as an artist and someone concerned with the relation of images to the conscious and the unconscious realms of perception, she wonders whether sexual identity inscribes itself on the body. Already, in the first tape recording scene after her deflowering, Minnie grabs her cat and cuddles him, whispering: “Hey, Domino. Do I look different than I did yesterday?” A while later, after her affair with Monroe has been going on for some time, she dictates onto her cassette diary while also riding a cable car full of other passengers, this is another form of coming-out, leaving the privacy of the bedroom and embracing her new sexually awakened persona publicly and without shame “Monroe is a good lay from what I know in my limited knowledge. He is very tall and strong and he has two strong muscular thighs and a big hairy chest. As for myself, I’m not particularly attractive at all. But I do think I look different now—probably my aura. And I think people are noticing.” In order to determine whether she “looks different now” and whether her body has become a visual inscription of her assumedly changed aura (in her first cassette diary entry, Minnie had already posited her loss of virginity as an “official” liminal rite of passage: “That was about an hour ago and I can’t believe I’ve now actually said it out loud. I’m pretty sure this makes me officially an adult. Right?”), Minnie studies the postdefloration polaroid, copies it as a drawing and attaches it to the mirror in her room. Later, she will stand naked in front of this mirror, comparing her body to its specular image and to the polaroid she tried to reenact while also pondering her own teen angst and longing: “What’s the point of living if nobody loves you? Nobody sees you? Nobody touches you? I want someone to be so totally in love with me that they would feel like they would die if I were gone. Maybe Monroe could love me like that? I am so warm. I want a body with mine. I need a man” (Fig. 5.3). The multiplication of her image doubles the position of the spectator, who watches Minnie framed by the screen in the same way she watches herself framed by the polaroid image and the mirror. The scene is not

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Fig. 5.3 Cascades of images: reenacting the polaroid

staged as titillating and it is again Minnie’s gaze that directs the spectator’s gaze and not vice versa. The agency she is starting to assume is a scopic agency, visualized by the directionality of her gaze and her active practice of producing inscriptions and making images. Accordingly, when Minnie is angered by Monroe’s avoiding her, she sits down at a typewriter and writes him an offended and spiteful note, again choosing a cultural practice to mediate her inner turmoil, assuming agency by producing inscriptions (later, she will let Ricky give her a hickey, a physical inscription of her body, and flaunt it in front of Monroe to make him jealous). In Gloeckner’s book, a formally and temporally hybrid collage of her actual diary entries, contemporaneous photographs, more recent illustrations, and comic strips, she addresses the differences of inscription devices. Her entry from Saturday, May 15, 1976 reads: The only reason this is in my handwriting and not typewritten is because I’m not allowed to make any noise so I can’t type. My mother is asleep, Monroe is napping on the couch, Gretel is quietly puttering around and I am sitting peacefully upon my bed … Gretel says she wants to use the typewriter. She wants to take it into her room, and use it for exactly as long as I have. That ruins me sometimes, you know. It ruins the spontaneity of writing things down as I am moved to do so. And then I forget things. When I can’t use the typewriter, I sometimes use a pencil or other such thing, but it doesn’t work as well. With a pencil, I can’t write as fast as I think. Then, because I have the time, I begin to think about how

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I’m writing, not just what I’m writing. And that’s where I get screwed up. (Gloeckner 2002, 72–73)

The film implies this “automatic writing” aspect through Minnie’s hammering on the typewriter’s keyboard with her two index fingers, the immediacy and affect it enables as an inscription device made visible by having the agitated Minnie storm into her room, throw her bag in a corner and type away without hesitation or reflection. Similarly, her mission statement on immediacy-of-mediation is seen when dictating the first entry of her tape diary: “I’m going to continue recording this diary with the intention of making entries each and every day as honestly and as sincerely as is possible for me to do” (Fig. 5.4). The most obvious inscriptions Minnie actively produces though are her drawings and comics, as a language she starts to learn and will develop further throughout the film. While she has been drawing from the beginning, drawing comic strips is a different project as they are not merely about an isolated expression of a single event or feeling, but about turning these into a cohesive narrative. They become a form of selfwriting, being so undisguisedly autobiographical. For Wilhelm Dilthey, a significant function of the “Selbstbiographie” (self-biography) is to give an external form to a life’s singular parts whose inner relation we can now perceive due to the “unity of consciousness” (Dilthey 1927, 195), but whose external relation or greater sense is not evident. Self-writing in that sense is a means to translate memory and perception into a narrative from which meaning and coherence can be derived, to translate unity of consciousness into unity of narration.14 Foucault attests the same function to various forms of self-writing as “a matter of unifying these heterogeneous fragments through their subjectivaton in the exercise of personal writing” (Foucault 1997, 213). Dilthey’s exemplary texts are the autobiographies of “important” male writers such as Rousseau

14 “Only

the category of meaning is capable to overcome the mere side-by-side, the mere subordering of life’s parts. And just like history is memory and the category of meaning belongs to that memory, meaning is the most genuine category of historic thinking. Meaning now has most of all to be developed in its gradual formation” (Dilthey 1927, 202, my translation).

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Fig. 5.4 The immediacy of the inscription device: a page from the book where Gloeckner/Minnie tests automatic-machinic typing as opposed to consciously writing

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or Goethe, while Foucault develops the four functions of self-writing— Self-cultivation, Self-disclosure, Self-affirming, Self-effacing—by analyzing practices of notebook- or letter writing. Both address practices of text production, but their findings apply to Minnie’s graphic self-writing as an extended notion of text in the sense of Derrida’s écriture (1988) or Latourian inscriptions: The visual inscriptions she produces are a practical strategy in the constitution of the self. It is after Minnie discovers Aline Kominsky (“I’ve decided Aline Kominsky is my favorite cartoonist.”), one of the first and few female protagonists of the underground comix movement and also one of the first comic artists to produce clearly autobiographical comics, that she starts drawing comics, studying the art first by tracing Kominsky’s and writing a letter to her idol in which she asks about the types of paper and ink she uses. Minnie’s own first strip is a one-page comic called “A Walk through the City” that shows her graphic alter ego traversing San Francisco. In the film, live-action Minnie morphs into her cartoon counterpart, while her voice-over reads a letter to Aline Kominsky, merging diegetic levels to generate visual hybridity by superimposing visual inscriptions of different sorts. The perspectives of Minnie’s drawings are distorted and deliberately un-naturalistic, strongly reminiscent of Robert Crumb’s (Aline Kominsky’s partner in life and art) exaggerated and elaborate quasi-three-dimensional depictions of female bodies with oversized thighs and behinds, and Kominsky’s figures with equally distorted physiques and completely flat two-dimensionality. Both Crumb’s and Kominsky’s aesthetics and narratives, as dissimilar as they are, are characterized by their frankness and deviant erotics. Their use of proportion and perspective fetishizes especially the female body and at the same time satirizes this same fetishization, again by making visible the underlying gazes as a function of male desire. They both use visual inscriptions to decipher, reveal, and dismantle the language of desire (Fig. 5.5). Minnie’s distorted perspectives attach her then in the first instance to an artistic tradition, secondly they negotiate the scopic regimes of visual culture by literalizing gender asymmetry visually, and thirdly they illustrate her processual in-between-ness as someone in a constant state of becoming. Despite their erotic content, they do not cater to the male gaze, on the contrary, they subvert it and are unsettling for Monroe’s

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Fig. 5.5 Becoming hybrid: Minnie morphing into her cartoon counterpart

viewing habits: When he looks at some of Minnie’s drawings in her notebook, he remarks: “You shouldn’t really show these to people. I mean, it’s just gonna weird people out. It’s so freaky. Are they supposed to be sexy?” He is neither aroused, nor offended, he is instead confused because he is unable to read them as legible because they do not adhere to any scopic regime he is used to: These inscriptions are not visualizations of his desire (and therefore they are deviant). All of Minnie’s inscriptions, her letters, cassette diary, and especially those inscriptions of a visual nature, retrace her process of not only coming-of-age (and agency), but also coming-of-femininity, coming-ofart, and coming-of-self. Her trajectory as an artist echoes her psychological and physical development: She finds her own voice by first imitating another woman’s art as a starting point toward artistic liberation, and she finds her own desire by gradually outgrowing and actively displacing the dominance of a patriarchal scopic regime. In her own way, she has found an écriture feminine like Hélène Cixous posits (1976) in her manifestolike rhetoric as she pleads for female self-representation: “I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man” (1976, 4). Cixous explicitly connects the claiming of female authorship to the claiming of the female body and—even if mainly for rhetoric reasons—the liberation of female sexuality, masturbation, and orgasms to female self-writing.15 Minnie’s 15 “And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written.… Because writing is at once too high, too great for

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form of self-writing is “taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus,” (ibid., 881) and is a claiming of agency, both as a female as well as an adolescent, an intersectional position from which she breaks free on the level of visuality. Her contributions to establish an écriture feminine by narrating her Self, her own story and biography, and her own, teenage, female desire via voice-over, drawing and writing are just as well une écriture adolescente, a multi-medial, hybrid diary of a teenage girl that manages to suggest one of the very few progressive positions on female sexuality amid the totality of teen film.

“Everybody Wants to Be Touched.” Victimization vs. Agency, Male and Female Desire Minnie’s coming-of-age is, as in most teen narratives, a negotiation of agency and autonomy, even though her quest for self-actualization is not played out on the more traditional objectives such as “getting the guy,” graduating, getting the scholarship, winning the competition, escaping social class or a culture of poverty, or freeing herself from the labels of the various teen film taxonomies. Already her relationship as a minor with an adult man and the resulting question of victimization vs. agency works toward Diary’s negotiation of agency as a redefinition of female identity. All the characters Minnie encounters will prove to be catalysts for her development; the most important figure beside herself however is

you, it’s reserved for the great—that is, for ‘great men;’ and it’s “silly.” Besides, you’ve written a little, but in secret.… as when we would masturbate in secret … And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty—so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time. Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don’t like the true texts of women—female-sexed texts. That kind scares them … By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display … Write your self. Your body must be heard” (Cixous 1976, 876–877, 880).

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her mother. The single mothers in The DUFF, Winter’s Bone (2010), and Dope are all more or less important figures in different ways: The DUFF ’s Bianca has a close and eye-to-eye relationship with her mother and both women ultimately go through a comparable transition, Winter’s Bone’s Ree has a quasi-autistic mother whose mental state forces her to assume responsibility and agency, the relationship of Dope’s Malcolm to his mother is convivial, however her screen time totals less than a minute, rendering her mostly important by being so absent—the Charlie Brown Effect. The relationship of Minnie and Charlotte is an especially interesting relationship in this sample as Charlotte is the mother figure here to whom the highest degree of complexity is granted, further emphasizing the progressive and feminist stance of Diary as a teen film that also takes non-teens seriously and not merely using them to generate a young-vs.old juxtaposition. One of the defining questions in regards to Minnie’s sexual coming-ofage—namely agency vs. victimization—is doubled through Charlotte’s parallel attempts at defining herself, and her femininity. Charlotte is presented as self-absorbed, and as a mother figure she is neither constructed along the lines of the clichéd nurturing mommy, nor as an uncaring egotist without regard to the well-being of her children. Just like Monroe is not reduced to a simplified type, Charlotte, too, is a layered character in an in-between space. She has a hard time holding down a job or any other form of conventional structure of adult life, she regularly drinks, uses drugs and parties, and she even allows Minnie to partake. Extending Minnie’s perspective, the film does not evaluate this behavior as the personal failure to be a responsible adult, but shows Charlotte’s struggle for independence as a state of profound confusion. She tries to manage her female desire in a male-dominated culture at a time when the legal situation for women had started to shift toward equality, and the models of the disenfranchised Victorian Woman or 1950s housewife, who was supposed to be content as a de-sexualized, desire-less mother and assistant to her husband, had theoretically been outmoded, but most actual lived experiences were still defined by restrictive and outdated roles for women. Charlotte longs for independence, but she cannot fully break free from being stuck in an order she tries to overcome without being able to locate a stable counter position and the attempts to free herself from patterns she continuously falls back into corresponds with Minnie’s agency/victimization ambiguity—and again, visualizations make these

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conflicts visible. The first time we are introduced to Charlotte and Gretel for example, they are both watching TV news coverage of Patty Hearst’s trial. The following dialogue staged like a dialogue between the all-female family and the male-dominated media and experts commenting on the case: TV anchor: Patty Hearst, the kidnapped heiress whose story has riveted the world, appeared in court again today. She was described as pallid, dull in complexion and lacking in energy. One court reporter described her demeanor as “zombie-like”. When Ms. Hearst was asked to describe the closet that her captors held her in… Charlotte: Oh Minnie. Come watch with us. Gretel: Yeah. It’s history in the making. TV: Prosecutors brought in Dr. Harry L. Kozol, an expert on sex-offenders and mentally ill criminals… Minnie: No thanks. C (addressing the TV): She’s not mentally ill! Fuck this guy. Just because she ran away from her bourgeois family and started over. I know how you feel, Patty! (toasting the TV with her gin and tonic) M: What kind of person falls in love with the people who kidnap and torture them?

The male “experts” who are trying to make sense of Patty Hearst’s Stockholm Syndrome victimize Hearst—symptomatic of the patriarchal culture to which Charlotte, too, is trying to find an alternative and which is furthermore played out in Minnie’s falling in love with and delivering herself to Monroe. Later on, Patty Hearst’s sentencing is covered by the TV news, Charlotte switches her position without being aware of it and adopts the standpoint of victimization instead of empowerment, thereby also adopting a male gaze that strips the female off of agency: Charlotte: I just think it’s barbaric that she was found guilty! Even if she knew what she was doing in that bank—she was still a prisoner. Kidnapped, raped! Come on. She’s a victim! Monroe: I don’t know. I guess it does seem kinda counter-progressive or something. C: It’s bullshit. It’s fascist, misogynistic bullshit. You need to pay more attention to this stuff. Read the paper every once in a while.

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The mise-en-scène of the Patty Hearst TV moments with the spectators lounging on a couch and looking in from a safe distance on the personal tragedy and traumatic experience of a woman in a violent situation, oscillating between victim, empowered individual and violent bank robber, uses the TV screen as another inscription device that produces and circulates a visual display, and ultimately a panoptic domination. Whether Patty Hearst is a brainwashed victim of the Symbionese Liberation Army whom she joined after being abducted by them, or an empowered woman who supports their cause out of free will is a moot point, but she certainly is victimized by a judgmental and invasive media violence that literally puts her on display as a spectacle to be gazed at, turning her into an object of voyeurism by visualization. Through the incorporation of the original footage of the Patty Hearst TV coverage whose staging so clearly constructs Mrs. Hearst as femme fatale-like “beautiful terrorist” Tania (her SLA nom du guerre), it becomes evident that these images contain residues of eroticism that serve as a reminder that the victimization/agency debate is not relegated to the dimension of choice and personal interaction, but that to some extent, it is a debate of power and domination that also has a visual component. Heller’s decision to include the Patty Hearst theme and footage, besides anchoring the diegesis in a particular cultural moment, works to define a problem central to the female experience that unites Patty Hearst, Minnie, and Charlotte: The boundaries of where their actions, desire, and agency are self-determined or male-dominated are constantly disputed (and watched) by others. When Minnie tells her best friend Kimmie about losing her virginity to Monroe, Kimmie is—legitimately—skeptical: “Don’t you kinda feel like he’s taking advantage of you or something? I mean, you’re so much younger than him.” And even though Pascal, Charlotte’s former husband and Minnie’s step-father, is no longer part of their day-to-day lives, it is him who has determined the relationship between Minnie and Charlotte (“My mother was married for a long time to my step-dad Pascal. He is a science-y guy, a PhD. He has a lot of ideas about how the world works—doesn’t think women should drink or smoke”). Voice-over Minnie recalls at one point: “My mother doesn’t touch me much if she can avoid it. She used to touch me a lot, in a motherly way, when I was little. But then…”—and

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via flashback we are taken back to a childhood memory of Minnie in which Pascal mansplains to Charlotte: “There’s something sexual about Minnie’s need for physical affection from you. It’s not natural.” It is the father who has suspended the mother-daughter bond: that he deems the physical closeness between Charlotte and Minnie “sexual” says more about his gaze and the resulting desire to police the infant’s polymorphous perversity in order to channel it into a heteronormative sexuality, than it says about the degree of how sexual or libidinous the tenderness between Minnie and Charlotte is. Again, it is his, the (step-)father’s gaze that determines the sexuality of the women, the nom du père that regulates normative behavior. In addition to the adult male gazes (from both males and females), Minnie is confronted with and that are either classifying, policing, objectifying, or confused by her, her peers also adhere to the same scopic and sexual regimes, as her high school classmate Ricky Wasserman displays the same internalized controlling of her behavior. Once her sexuality is awakened, Minnie starts exploring and has relationships with various partners male and female, her affair with Ricky becomes the animated cartoon “The Making of a Harlot,” in which an oversized Minnie alter ego roams the San Francisco vista in the fashion of King Kong or Godzilla (Fig. 5.6). The scene cuts back and forth between the cartoon and Minnie and Ricky making out in his car until he stops them

Fig. 5.6 King Kong and the white boy: Minnie’s comic strip “The Making of a Harlot”

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and says: “You’re just so … intense.” Already when they first have intercourse and Minnie switches from the missionary position and gets on top of Ricky, ecstatically moving and panting, Ricky is visibly uncomfortable, foreshadowing his calling out of Minnie’s initiative taking and lack of submission as intense.16 Minnie is shamed, the giant cartoon Minnie heartbrokenly drops the tiny victim-Ricky—the distorted perspective mirroring the asymmetry resulting from Minnie assuming agency, which entirely disrupts Ricky’s sense of protocol. What in Ricky’s eyes is an “intense” female is visualized in its absurdity by an inflated Minnie cartoon, once more interrogating gender organization via a visual inscription and literalizing a discourse of inequality not only on the level of dialogue, but through visual exaggeration, thus turning not only Minnie’s diary into a cartoon, but also the patriarchal order that has allotted positions to females other than the ones Minnie assumes. For Latour, the significant ability of visualizations lies in “the unique advantage they give in the rhetorical or polemical situation—‘You doubt of what I say? I’ll show you’” (1986, 13). In this regard, Minnie’s cartoon becomes not only a self-expression, but also a polemical satire of an entire regime: “I’ll show you.” The insecurity that arises from Minnie not subordinating her female desire to male desire and which is either perceived as “being taken advantage of ” or “being too intense” is worked through with the support of an imaginary, animated Aline Kominsky, taking a walk with live-action Minnie: Minnie: Dear Diary. I did not go to school today. I didn’t want to see superficial Ricky Wasserman. I feel so awkward and ugly and naive and lonely. Animated Aline Kominsky: I know how you feel.

16 In the “polemic preface” to her feminist critique/analysis of the “ideology of pornography,” Angela Carter regards the missionary position as an embodied power dynamic: “The missionary position has another great asset, from the mythic point of view; it implies a system of relations between the partners that equates the woman to the passive receptivity of the soil, to the richness and fecundity of the earth. A whole range of images poeticises, kitschifies, departicularises intercourse‚ such as wind beating down corn, rain driving against bending trees, towers falling, all tributes to the freedom and strength of the roving, fecundating, irresistible male principle and the heavy, downward, equally irresistible gravity of the receptive soil” (Carter 2001, 8).

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M: And I have no friends. I don’t want to go to school ever again. Nobody loves me. Maybe I should kill myself. A: Nah, alienation is good for your art. M: Maybe I should paint a picture. I should paint a picture. A: It doesn’t matter what kind of art you do. It will be intense and expressive. Just do it. M: I want to discipline myself to draw every day. That’s what I have to do, right? (Aline nods.) M: I get distracted sometimes. Overwhelmed by my all-consuming thoughts about sex and men. I always want to be touched. I don’t know what’s wrong with me… A: I don’t know either. Maybe you’re a nympho. (laughs) I’m fucking with you. Nothing’s wrong with you. Everybody wants to be touched.

The emotional connection Minnie cannot establish with her mother is relocated to the artistic connection she enters with an imaginary Aline Kominsky (the actual Aline will reply to her letter in the end, informing her about the Indian ink she uses and encouraging her to keep producing art). Charlotte conveys a progressive femininity that she confuses with an extended adolescence characterized by a hollow hedonism and the inability to assume responsibility. She is not yet capable of defining herself as an independent individual and adheres instead to the hegemony of the male gaze, which constitutes Diary’s engagement with the teen film trope of generational conflict: The paradigms for female identity have changed significantly in the 19 years since Charlotte was Minnie’s age and the starting point from which Minnie can develop her identity and sexuality is different from her mother’s. The maternal super-Ego friend Minnie constructs for herself however in an imaginary Aline Kominsky as fairy Godmother is able to counsel her in art, life, and sex-related issues by reassuring her that her alienation is not failure but a potential asset, and that her desire is not a perversion but a basic human need for warmth and companionship. Accordingly, Minnie’s conciliatory conclusion at the end of the film is that “I always thought I wanted to be exactly like my mom. But she thinks she needs a man to be happy. I don’t.” Right before this insight with which Minnie might not absolve her mother, but shows understanding and empathy for her, she has a last encounter with Monroe who was banished after Charlotte found out

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about his and Minnie’s relationship by invading Minnie’s privacy and listening to her tape diary. While this last meeting is awkward for both, Minnie realizes that her attachment to Monroe is overcome, he has been deprived of his mystique since the moment they took LSD together which led to Minnie being at ease, self-contented, and literally high, illustrated by her flying to the room ceiling with animated golden wings, Monroe however experiencing the drug trip as utter emotional breakdown (Fig. 5.7). Only then, he is able to profess his, and even beg for Minnie’s love and she realizes: “He was afraid and weak. I felt distant and confused. A kind of perverse pleasure. Because I’d finally got what I’d wanted from Monroe, but now I had no desire for it.” By actively and desperately demanding Minnie’s love, he can no longer function as a projection screen, which changes the relationship dynamic and demystifies him. Minnie moves on and reattaches her desire when she begins a homosexual relationship with a lesbian girl named Tabatha and together with her descends deeper into drug experimentation and for a short time runs away from home. Different from Gloeckner’s book, the film omits the vignettes concerning rape and hard drugs and mainly narrates Minnie’s finding and losing herself and finding herself again along her relationships with her mother, Monroe, Ricky, random men in front of whom she and Kimmie pretend to be prostitutes, or her stepfather. The chance meeting with Monroe marks Minnie’s crossing of a liminal boundary: The ideal she has built up is deflated, not because the ideal

Fig. 5.7 Literalization of the metaphor: Minnie is high on LSD

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has changed, but because it is no longer needed. Characteristically, they meet while Minnie is at the beach with Gretel, selling her drawings and self-printed zines. The drawing of a transvestite Minnie gives Monroe, and which he apparently doesn’t like very much, embodies the ambiguous in-between spaces she feels drawn to—which is once more attached to a visual inscription that characterizes both of them individually as well as their estrangement. Together with narrator-Minnie’s sendoff before the final credits roll, closes the bracket around the diary-bound narrative: “This is for all the girls when they have grown. Signing off, trusty Diary. Love, Minnie Goetze”—Diary reinforces its not necessarily didactic, but certainly political project. The dedication, which also precedes the book, turns Minnie’s experience into the offer to generalize it as a universal female coming-of-age experience, as Gloeckner intends the book to be read. In her preface to the revised 2015 edition, she adds: “Although I am the source of Minnie, she cannot be me—for the book to have real meaning, she must be all girls, anyone … factual truth has little significance in the pursuit of emotional truth. It’s not my story. It’s our story” (XV). The renouncing of personal authorship in the sense of congruence between author and protagonist together with the claiming of authorship in the sense of an écriture feminine corresponds to the Latourian inscriptions. It is not the specific story about one specific teenage girl that is decisive, but the movement that derives from the chain of transformation it involves: [I]nscriptions are not interesting per se but only because they increase either the mobility or the immutability of traces … Again, the precise focus should be carefully set, because it is not the inscription by itself that should carry the burden of explaining the power of science; it is the inscription as the fine edge and the final stage of a whole process of mobilization, that modifies the scale of the rhetoric. Without the displacement, the inscription is worthless; without the inscription the displacement is wasted. (Latour 1986, 10, 16)

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Elaine Showalter proposes a feminist criticism that works “in relation to what women actually write, not in relation to a theoretical, political, metaphoric, or visionary ideal of what women ought to write” (Showalter 1981, 205). This in order to establish a women’s writing that not only works in terms of deconstructing notions of gender, but one that “is not the serenely undifferentiated universality of texts but the tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of difference itself ” (ibid.). Diary then is a twofold form of écriture feminine, of “inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text” (ibid., 185): Minnie produces visual and textual inscriptions, and the film is in itself a visual inscription that emerges from an apparatus whose percentage of female participants enables an écriture feminine that works toward a “wilderness of difference.” In her overview of modes of feminist literary criticism, Showalter summarizes: What we need, Mary Jacobus has proposed, is a women’s writing that works within “male” discourse but works “ceaselessly to deconstruct it: to write what cannot be written,” and according to Shoshana Felman, “the challenge facing the woman today is nothing less than to ‘reinvent’ language, … to speak not only against, but outside of the specular phallogocentric structure, to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of masculine meaning.” (Showalter 1981, 191)

While Diary does “ceaselessly deconstruct” male discourse, and does acknowledge a male-dominated discursive and visual culture, its modes of visualization, the composition of its imagery and of its cinematic apparatus,17 culminate in the proposition of a language of difference. 17 Bel Powley comments in an interview on the composition of the film crew as not male by the majority and how that informed the filmmaking process: “One of the things that attracted me is that it’s a film about women, for women, by women. I think if a man had directed it, it would be weird … A man hasn’t had the experience of what it is like to be a teenage girl—that’s what it comes down to. If a guy had directed it and said, “Bel, I think you should do this, or have sex in this position or whatever,” I wouldn’t feel so trusting of him because he hasn’t gone through that. He doesn’t know what that feels like, whereas we have both been teenage girls … It’s always weird, but it wasn’t bad weird. We had a closed set: the first AD was gay, our gaffer was a woman, the DP and his assistant were husband and wife” (Grigg-Spall 2015).

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Voice-over Minnie says: “I know nothing’s changed, but everything looks totally different to me now.” Minnie’s coming-of-age reaches a resolution at the film’s end, but not in the form of closure. She neither enters into a heteronormative quasi-marriage, nor repairs the family, nor moves on to another town and life stage such as college or a career—her coming-of-age is concluded as a successful coming-of-difference, forever processual. Accordingly, her sexual identity is a queer one, liberated from the binary protocols of “the two sexes,” and an ambiguous expression of an ambiguous character. The prominent use of close-ups in the film contributes to this ambiguity, as they produce an intimacy and specificity by allowing us to “get close” to Minnie and the other protagonists—in correspondence to us seeing and hearing her very private inscriptions. Simultaneously, the close-ups defragment the characters’ bodies, thus defy a (reductive and less specific) visual totality of these bodies and, by extension, of their selves. They stay fluid and hybrid. Consequently, the hybridity that defines the film’s mise-en-scène and all its stages of inscription results in a hybrid gaze instead of a more clearly gendered gaze. Even though director Marielle Heller states in an interview: “We were playing with the female gaze and making it from a girl’s point of view. That affected all of our choices in the movie—the way we shot the sex scenes, the way we looked at other characters, down to the choice of underwear—it’s all from a female perspective” (Grigg-Spall 2015). The Diary’s achievement then is that there has been no simple reversal of gazes and the attached conventional roles, which would only change the relations within the order, but not the order itself. Instead of countering the male gaze with a female gaze, a different gaze—more specific, localized, and singular—is configured through the assuming of agency. As a strategy, this displacement of traditional scopic regimes is necessary to establish a “new language of desire” from Minnie’s, or by extension, a more generalized female perspective, but after all also from a male perspective, as the male gaze is just as prescriptive in the way it

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organizes male desire in limiting ways.18 Eventually, this gaze of difference put forward and tested in The Diary emerges from visualizations of difference, the film’s aesthetics becoming its politics.

POSTSCRIPTUM—The Laboratory of the Self An echo of Diary’s politics can be felt in Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird from 2017—or rather an interest in doing similar things with a coming-of-age narrative. In an interview, Greta Gerwig mentions Diary and Pariah having “meant a lot to me … I, for one, selfishly am so pleased that these movies are being made because I’m interested in young women occupying personhood” (Harris 2017). The critical acclaim and commercial success of Lady Bird and its all-age appeal elevated it into discourses different from those of many of its predecessors, yet Gerwig openly embraced the specific teen film legacy to which the film also belongs. In Pamela Hutchinson’s Sight & Sound article, Gerwig speaks about a conscious choice to remain true to the format, but with an intention to offer a different kind of narrative: “So often, what stories we give to women and tell them are worth it are stories of ‘will she get the one guy?’ … there’s always meaning conferred to a female character choosing the right mate and having that mate choose her. And that’s a really dangerous thing to tell ladies, that that’s where they get their power from or that’s where they get their meaning from” (2018, 20).

18 A

related project can be found in Mike Mills 20th Century Women from 2016, incidentally, featuring Greta Gerwig as one of the titular women the 15-year-old Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) grows up with. The film obviously centers on the lives and experiences of women, but also contains the coming-of-age story of Dorothea’s (Annette Bening) son. Regardless whether read as a “neo woman’s film” as Molly Haskell does or as a feminist teen film, Mills achieves to dissolve the limitations of the male gaze and suggests a different set of gazes in and by the film, emphasizing that a film’s politics and scopic regimes are never essentially determined by the gender of their filmmakers, but by their respective choices and agencies. Haskell: “There are movies about women by men who lust after them, and by men who love them, and many even convey—often thanks to the actresses themselves—a woman’s point of view. But how rare is the director who is truly, genuinely, passionately interested in a woman’s perspective, in women’s minds as well as their bodies, and is still interested in those minds and bodies as years and experience pile up, and they are no longer in their camera-ready sensual prime” (2017, 26).

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Lady Bird is extremely class-conscious and overtly revisits Pretty in Pink’s (1986) wrong side of the tracks’ motif when interrogating social status. However, foregrounding Lady Bird ’s class discourse shouldn’t eclipse its many other achievements including its depiction of homosexuality, which is at once parenthetical and dramatic (with Lucas Hedges from Boy Erased (2018) and Mid90s (2018) reappearing here in the role of a closeted teen): Christine/Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) interrupts her well-to-do boyfriend with a male lover, yet the conflict and hurt is not hers as cheated protagonist, but his own fear of being socially humiliated. His breakdown in a back alley pleading Lady Bird not to out him adds a variant of an on-screen depiction of gayness that is not characterized either by fatalism or by a relaxed and/or courageous “owning it.” This is already part of the film’s feminist project, which overall is not exclusively anchored by Lady Bird’s sexual identity, even though it is a central theme and Christine, comparable to Diary’s Minnie, is keen to experience, and experiment with sexuality (like Minnie, she also makes it a point to experience her first intercourse on top). Instead, Gerwig puts but an emphasis on relationships that are non-romantic love relationships. When Christine and her best friend Julie, both students at a Sacramento Catholic school, are lying on the floor and eating communion wafers, framed upside down with their legs against the wall, Lady Bird adds one of the most unusual and memorable images to the teen film archive, an at once effective reminder that teenagers aren’t only tangled up in romantic pursuit, but enmeshed in relationship experiments and many further incarnations of love and friendship, previously a depiction that was mostly limited to male platonic relationships (Fig. 5.8). The depiction of adult figures is similarly differentiated, providing the film with another narrative engine in its fraught but tender mother–daughter relationship. Aesthetically, Lady Bird is characterized by a pacing, color palette, and editing style that is clearly informed by Gerwig’s body of work rooted in less mainstreamed mumblecore/indie/arthouse contexts, especially visible in the vignette-like storytelling which contains some abrupt cuts that don’t necessarily segue into the next section of the dramatic arc but are far more episodic, an attempt to not repeat a teen film “master language” and to instead come up with new modes through which to explore new

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Fig. 5.8 Holy sisterhood: snacking on communion wafers in Lady Bird

sensitivities, or even an écriture feminine of sorts not unlike what we see in Diary. In that regard, it is only consequent that Lady Bird like Diary is also intradiegetically concerned with the theme of writing, self-writing, naming, and renaming. Assembling her person in a figurative laboratory of the self, Christine calls herself Lady Bird (“Is that your given name?” / “Well, I gave it to myself. It’s given to me, by me.”), alters clothing, makes up a false persona to impress a rich friend, or, after jumping out of a driving car during a fight with her mother and injuring her arm, scribbles “FUCK YOU MOM” on the cast. Her mother writes letters to her and discards them, the desire to express oneself and feeling unable to do so not relegated here to angsty teens, but part of the human condition. Albeit not as overtly as Diary, Lady Bird still is organized around inscriptions and practices of inscribing. Nostalgia as a traditionally (and increasingly) important element of teen films is woven into the fabric of most of the films from the past chapters; in The DUFF, nostalgia is a metadiegetic device that transforms canonic texts, in Dope it appears as an intradiegetic preoccupation of Malcolm and his friends as late-80s/early-90s aficionados, and in Diary it functions as a device that creates the temporal displacement of a period piece. These different utilizations of looking backward indicate

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that being teen and making teen films is to some extent about reinvention, appropriation, reclaiming, and rewriting—as regards the respective characters as well as the filmmakers. As a “revisionist teen film” Lady Bird occupies an peculiar position, engaging with genre history and cultural history, evincing how coming-of-age narratives rely on strategies to address multiple cohorts. Teen film is traditionally often engaged with the past, both reflecting the socialization of the filmmakers, their intended audiences, as well as cyclical cultural preoccupations with particular revivals of styles, or subcultural affiliations from past eras, oscillating between regress and critical interrogation.19 These re-imagined eras are in constant flux, as not all teen films project into the same cultural moment and the same teen film image repertoire. Where American Graffiti (1973) saw George Lucas reimagining his 1960s adolescence, or Paul Feig and Judd Apatow’s TV series Freaks and Geeks (1999) revisited the early eighties, Lady Bird sees Greta Gerwig retracing the time of her youth and situates the narrative in the odd cultural moment after 9-11 when the nineties crystallized into the 2000s. The early 2000s are not only an object of nostalgia in itself but also mark a transition, an era that at this point is still consolidating and finding new paradigms, a liminal historical space. Another significant element in Lady Bird that is entangled with its nostalgic mode and its particular diegetic present in the early 2000s is performing—and not only in the Butlerian sense: like in The DUFF, the idea of performance is centrally embedded, but moreover, it is visible. Certainly, already Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause or the members of The Breakfast Club (1985) are concerned with the roles they (have to) perform with the objective to accumulate social capital. However, the performative acts as such, the malleability of the roles, and the necessity to learn how to perform them, only started to become visible and self-awarely reflected in the nineties, the era of the camcorder. Laney in She’s All That (1999) takes her love interest along to her improv theater group’s stage performance, back then still intended as indexical of the artist type’s weirdness, but the idea of performing something and/or 19 Also

see Smith’s discussion of “the complex politics of the nostalgic teen movie,” how (and which kind of ) the past is constructed, by which devices and with which outcome (2017, 105–145).

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documenting it recurs in texts as different as The DUFF, Dope (the gang with a YouTube channel, the viral clips), Diary, the short-lived 2018 Netflix series Everything Sucks! (where the A/V club runs an in-school TV channel, cooperates with the drama club to produce and screen their own feature film—inscriptions in the making!), Easy A (the protagonist using a webcam/vlog to tell her version of events), Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015; auteur filmmaking and parodying arthouse cinema), or Mid90s (which incorporates the filming and the aesthetics of 1990s skate videos to generate a specific subcultural milieu).20 Lady Bird ’s Christine also has a “performative streak” and joins the drama club of her Catholic school in beautifully stylized auditioning scenes. The theater becomes a literal and metaphorical space for the extreme force and rawness of the emotions (and the performance thereof ) all the participants of a high school ecology are exposed to. All of these instances employ the device of performance/film differently—not all of them are “meta,” “behind the scenes,” or film-in-film—but the sheer number of texts that show teens acting, producing, staging, directing, and making films all to some extent address their own status as well as their audience’s media competence, symptomatic of how teen film aesthetics and narratives change in accordance with their particular media ecologies. Eventually, there is resolve when Lady Bird ends—after moving to New York to study, Lady Bird reappraises her given name and becomes Christine again, also embracing Sacramento, the origin she once despised. Yet, this reconnection doesn’t convey that her journey has now come full circle, nor that it is just about to begin, but rather that it is 20 As an eminent articulation of adolescent boredom, infrastructural improvisation, appropriation of adult-defined (and capital-ruled) spaces, and mobility, the position of skateboarding in youth culture was only occasionally echoed by its position in teen films, as for instance when Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly casually skates through Hill Valley in Back to the Future (1985), young Christian Slater as Brian Kelly through the investigation of his adopted brother’s death in Gleaming the Cube (1989) or Larry Clark and Harmony Korine’s Kids (1995) as yet another expression of their ennui and debauchery. Crystal Moselle’s Skate Kitchen (2018) and Jonah Hill’s directorial debut Mid90s (2018) were released almost simultaneously and both used skateboarding as the central vehicle for their respective site-, era-,and gender-specific comingof-age narrative. While Skate Kitchen portrays a group of skateboarding girls in present-day New York, Mid90s as another current revisionist teen film conjures up the 1990s and situates its characters in the Los Angeles skateboard subculture through the plot, sonically, and visually, for instance by opting for the 4:3 aspect ratio, and an imagery that is clearly indebted to mumblecore films and skating videos.

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an ongoing process, constant movement, perpetual change. The majority of American teen films suggest that there is an outcome to the adolescent transition, which is sometimes disruptive (the cautionary tale), but preferably positive as a variant of narrating American individualism. However, being a teenager is not an end in itself and doesn’t necessarily lead up to something, it’s a vignette-like station whose dramatic arc often only becomes visible much later, as suggested by Lady Bird ’s editing: excitement, boredom, movement, and stasis are all equal parts in an individual’s becoming, a constant flux, always same, always different. Opting for processuality in content and form ultimately is what gives the film its edge: the beauty and productivity of inconclusiveness.

Filmography 20th Century Women, Mike Mills, A24, USA, 2016. American Graffiti, George Lucas, Universal Pictures, USA, 1973. Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis, Universal Pictures, USA, 1985. Boy Erased, Joel Edgerton, Focus Features, USA, 2018. Boys Don’t Cry, Kimberly Peirce, Fox Searchlight Pictures, USA, 1999. The Breakfast Club, John Hughes, Universal Pictures, USA, 1985. Carrie, Brian De Palma, United Artists, USA, 1976. Detroit Rock City, Adam Rifkin, New Line Cinema, USA, 1999. The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller, Sony Pictures Classics, USA, 2015. DOPE, Rick Famuyiwa, Open Road Films, USA, 2015. The DUFF, Ari Sandel, CBS Films, USA, 2015. Easy A, Will Gluck, Screen Gems, USA, 2010. The Edge of Seventeen, Kelly Fremon Craig, Sony Pictures, USA/China, 2016. Everything Sucks!, Ben York Jones and Michael Mohan, Netflix, USA, 2018. The Exorcist, William Friedkin, Warner Brothers, USA, 1973. Freaks And Geeks, Paul Feig, Paramount Worldwide Television Distribution, USA, 1999. Gleaming the Cube, Graeme Clifford, 20th Century Fox, USA, 1989. Grease, Randal Kleiser, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1978. Kids, Larry Clark, Killer Films, USA, 1995. Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig, A24, USA, 2017. Lolita, Stanley Kubrick, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, UK/USA, 1962.

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L’arrivée D’un Train En Gare De La Ciotat, Auguste Lumière, Louis Lumière, 1896. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Fox Searchlight, USA, 2015. Mid90s, Jonah Hill, A24, USA, 2018. Pariah, Dee Rees, Focus Features, USA, 2011. Porky’s, Bob Clark, Astral Films, USA/Canada, 1981. Pretty in Pink, Howard Deutch, Paramount Pictures, USA, 1986. Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray, Warner Brothers, USA, 1955. She’s All That, Robert Iscove, Miramax Films, USA, 1999. Skate Kitchen, Crystal Moselle, Magnolia Pictures, USA, 2018. The To Do List, Maggie Carey, CBS Films, USA, 2013. Twilight Saga, Summit Entertainment, USA, 2008–2012. The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola, Paramount Classics, USA, 1999. Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik, Roadside Attractions, USA, 2010.

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———. (1985) 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: The University of Minneapolis Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. “Signature Event Context.” In Limited Inc., 1–25. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1927. “Das Erleben und die Selbstbiographie.” In Gesammelte Schriften VII: Band, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, 191–204. Berlin und Leipzig: Teubner Verlag. Doane, Mary-Ann. 1985. “When the Direction of the Force Acting on the Body Is Changed: The Moving Image.” Wide Angle (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin) 7 (1–2): 42–57. Driscoll, Catherine. 2011. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Oxford and New York: Berg. Foucault, Michel. 1997. “Self Writing.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Translated by Robert Hurley, 207–233. New York: The New Press. Fox, Alastair. 2019. Coming-Of-Age Cinema in New Zealand: Genre, Gender, and Adaptation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Giroux, Henry. 1991. Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics: Redrawing Educational Boundaries. New York: SUNY Press. Gloeckner, Phoebe. 2002. The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Grigg-Spall, Holly. 2015. “The Diary of a Teenage Girl: Interview with Phoebe Gloeckner, Marielle Heller, and Bel Powley.” Issue Magazine, August 11. www.issuemagazine.com/thediary-of-a-teenage-girl/#. Harris, Aisha. 2017. “Greta Gerwig on Lady Bird, John Hughes, and Being “Ready” to Step Behind the Camera.” SLATE, December 8. http://www. slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/12/08/an_interview_with_greta_gerwig_ on_lady_bird_and_coming_of_age_stories_audio.html. Haskell, Molly. 2017. “In the Company of Women.” Sight & Sound 27 (3): 24–28. Hutchinson, Pamela. 2018. “Fly Away Home.” Sight & Sound 28 (3): 18–21. Kennedy, Barbara M. 2002. “Choreographies of the Screen.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 1: 63–77. https://ir.uiowa.edu/ijcs/vol1/iss1/7/. Latour, Bruno. 1986. “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together.” In Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, edited by Henrika Kuklick, vol. 6, 1–40. Cambridge: Jai Press. ———. 1991. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

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———. 2002. “What Is Iconoclash? or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?” In Iconoclash, Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art, edited by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour, 14–37. Cambridge: MIT Press and Karlsruhe: ZKM. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: And Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 2013. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Metz, Christian. 2016. Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film. Translated by Cormac Deane. New York: Columbia University Press. Mulvey, Laura. (1975) 2009. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other Pleasures: Language, Discourse, Society, 14–26. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Platt, C. A. 2010. “Cullen Family Values: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Twilight Series.” In Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, & the Vampire Franchise, edited by Melissa A. Click, Jennifer S. Aubrey, and Elizabeth Morawitz, 71–86. New York: Peter Lang. Seeßlen, Georg, and Fernand Jung. 1999. Stanley Kubrick und seine Filme. Marburg: Schüren. Shary, Timothy. 2002. Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2005. Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen. London and New York: Wallflower. Shaviro, Steven. 2010. Post Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zero Books. Showalter, Elaine. 1981. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” Critical Inquiry: Writing Sexual Difference (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) 8 (2): 179–205. Smith, Frances. 2017. Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sonnenberg-Schrank, Björn. 2013. “My Most Prized Possession, an American Obsession: Virginity and the Sexual Politics of the American Teen Film.” Exursions Journal (Brighton: The University of Sussex) 4 (2). ———. 2016. “Forbidden Bodies. Teens, Taboos and Porn.” Pornorama: American Pornographies: Visual Culture, Literature, History. Edited by Claudia Deckers et al., 115–134. Münster: LIT.

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6 Conclusion

Looking Back to the Future: Conclusion and Outlook I don’t think you can ever read too much into a film. (Nadine Boljkovac)

I started this book by speaking about the increasing diversification and complexity of the American teen film genre, the proliferation of new or other modes, styles, and voices. However, this book isn’t a celebration of how great everything is, but a plea to look for these new voices. As a lifelong consumer and fan (and longtime scholar) of the teen film, I experience each new movie, series, film cycle, or wave with approximately the same amount of excitement and frustration. When for instance Netflix started distributing and producing more and more of their own content, they didn’t overlook the teenage demographic and from early on bought or commissioned many teen-oriented shows and films. Some of the results were satisfying insofar as they helped the genre progress into new forms, expanding and reimagining it. One case may illustrate the point: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (Johnson 2018) adheres to generic © The Author(s) 2020 B. Sonnenberg-Schrank, Actor-Network Theory at the Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31287-9_6

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conventions in almost every regard, however its novelty is that it is the first American teen film to be organized around an Asian-American protagonist—but at the same time, it doesn’t treat Lara Jean’s ethnicity as something that defines her identity and experiences. However, each such instance of the genre progressing or diversifying brings with it several instances of stagnation or regress that serve as reminder that neither the medium nor the genre carries within it a guarantee of novelty or quality (among the texts on Netflix specifically working within the domain of teen film that can be seen as stagnant or regressive are for instance SPF18 [2017], The Kissing Booth [2018], Dude [2018], Sierra Burgess Is a Loser [2018], Teenage Cocktail [2017], You Get Me [2017], The Perfect Date [2019]). Still, it is a fact that these other, innovative, or even progressive articulations increasingly exist within the teen film genre, and that they are being noticed—of course also outside of VOD channels many films in the recent years added new facets to the canon, or intensified, changed, and complexified the portrayal of particular themes and tropes (as for instance male homosexuality in Love, Simon [2018] or Call Me by Your Name [2017]). A similar development as regards proliferation and diversification can be found in teen film scholarship, which at this point is a full-fledged field, no longer a niche. A large share traditionally consists of the contributions of the genre historians, the eminent studies coming from Considine, Doherty, and Shary, whose meticulous teen film historiography is unsurpassed in accuracy and breadth. They have retraced film histories, identified thematic clusters, and framed teen films in relationship to economy, technology, politics, and other social factors in order to define teen film as a genre that functions according to a set of noticeable principles. If The Breakfast Club (1985) is the Citizen Kane (1941) of the teen film genre, then the contributions of the genre historians fulfill a similar function in teen film scholarship: a foundation on which we can build to explore further avenues. There is not much need to retrace the typology and taxonomies of the teen film anew, as Shary, Kaveney, Driscoll, and others have done that work—so we might as well move on and unturn new stones. Especially since these studies are essential groundwork, but concerning the individual films, they can also be reductive and oftentimes do not identify how specific mechanisms

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and material-semiotic regimes, such as ideology, are constructed—even though these factors have canonically led to specific readings, effects, and affects. Echoing the increasing complexity of the films, the past years’ scholarship has begun to accommodate the changes, consistencies, and novelties of the genre. Catherine Driscoll has introduced concepts from critical theory or psychoanalysis to expand the methodologies of teen film scholarship, which Frances Smith has recently advanced further. As one of the foremost teen film scholars besides jan jagodzinski (2008) to apply psychoanalytical theory and critical theory to an engagement with teen narratives, Driscoll unfolds readings that consider teen identity, cultural context, and media ecologies but that also pay close attention to the films in their own right and not mainly as epistemic expressions of a certain zeitgeist (she is also one of the first scholars to address teen films from non-American cultures in a transcultural comparison). I addressed films that have not been covered broadly by other scholars while introducing Latourian philosophy to provide new critical registers with which to read these films. The Latourian position I suggest is a toolbox that can be filled depending on what each text demands; it is not a theory in itself but a flexible practice that doesn’t give priority to a certain methodology over the artifact in question. The neutrality of ActorNetwork Theory and related concepts as pre-theoretical approaches into which theories can be inserted that then become useful for each respective account is by no means a despecified “anything goes” and “everything is everything.” On the contrary: The slow and thorough modus operandi of such a Latourian film semiotics may not be the ideal method when the goal is to develop a broad, or more general overview of the genre, subgenres, cycles, or other clusterings within them, but a very helpful one when the goal is to take each text serious as a source of knowledge. Instead of applying or affirming beliefs and theories, we can now grant each film a way to “let it speak.” It is evident that teen films produce and circulate influential patterns, construct, subvert, and redefine roles and ideals, and the ANT position enables us to identify how these narratives are able to do so by identifying the actants and agencies from whose interactions they emerge. The ANT approach thus puts description before commentary and explanation, which I implemented in my discussion of

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films by not solely addressing characters or plots, but their entire composition, the apparatus/dispositif/collective/actor-network from which they emerge, observing the multiplicity of human and non-human, discursive and material, visible and invisible actants. And yes: At the end of the day, this isn’t a textbook, but a work of free-range criticism and these analyses can be seen as close readings or thick descriptions—however, addressing the garbage, animals or light in Winter’s Bone (2010), or the technological objects in DOPE (2015) provides different positions that generate different insight—including, but not restricted to the probing of movies as sociological and historical artifacts. I didn’t provide a transnational/transcultural perspective on other coming-of-age-cinemas outside the USA, simply not to lose sight of the project to be as specific as possible in the engagement with each respective text. Even though Hollywood is still the dominant global force in terms of (teen) film production, my focus on American cinema is not at all an acknowledgment that it is the only or best one. Other teen cinemas exist, of course, just as much as other voices within the American teen film genre exist, but I wouldn’t have been able to do them (or the American texts) justice by embedding them in a generalized overview and therefore opted for zooming in on examples that are related by their temporal and national origin.1 I compiled the films at the center of each chapter in accordance with the increasing complexity and diversity of the teen film: One of the four films was produced by a major studio and three by independent companies, two are directed by women, one by an African American filmmaker. One plays in a suburban setting, two in an urban setting, one in rural America. Three of the main protagonists are girls, one is a boy. Their ethnicities, sexualities, and class differ strongly. The fact that a large portion of my sample is not the “usual suspects” does not contain an evaluation—of course, the well-known and most successful narratives from Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to The Breakfast Club to Twilight (2008–2012) have, at least, the same capability to touch, entertain, represent, influence, challenge, change, bore, offend, and make their audience pay as any independent film, as sophistication and complexity 1 Also

see Shary and Seibel’s edited volume on Youth Culture in Global Cinema (2006) for a broad range of perspectives or Fox’s monograph on Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand (2017) as one exemplary study of non-Hollywood teen film.

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are not essential traits bound to the mode of production. But on the one hand, there is already ample scholarship on the “big” teen films, on the other hand it is important to acknowledge the heterogeneity of teen film in general and the increase thereof in recent years. These four central films and the connections and associations they enter into cover a wide array of typical teen film tropes, elements, settings, eras, types, and rites of passage, and each of them corresponds to the canon in specific ways, repeats, references, varies, or deviates from it. In order to identify each film’s theme(s), I suggested perspectives building on Latourian philosophy that help to make visible what each film does, how it achieves this by going “back to the thing itself,” and only then moved on to an analysis. The methodology of my ANT-inspired Latourian film semiotics is by no means restricted to an engagement with teen films, it can be transferred, and thus also served as a litmus test to determine whether the ANT position generates new questions for film studies. The disassembling of cinematic artifacts and the reshuffling of agency mainly took place by approaching a film as an actor-network and identifying its actants and flows. Each film however is also an actant in its own right and enters into an intricate choreography with its audience. Like any object, films, too contain scripts/programs of action, making propositions for how they can be used. Teen films as artifacts provided by adults for adolescents are especially prone to having a didactic quality and assuming some socializing function, or depending on the viewpoint even a function of discipline, coercion, and indoctrination. Attributing such qualities to the films’ scripts contains the danger of becoming an ideological project in itself when film’s agency is treated as a force field governed by the invisible powers of the Hollywood behemoth instead of in terms of relations. The agency of film and cinema’s relationship with the spectators have been investigated, among many others, by Frankfurt school philosophers who acknowledge the potential and the dangers of cinema as a manipulative institution of power, by psychoanalytical film theoreticians who identify a libidinous spectator-screen relation that runs on desire, or by adherents of affect theory who approach the complex

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interaction of spectator and film from a quasi-neurological perspective.2 Generalizing the scripts/programs of action of films tends to separate film and spectator, attesting either side too little or too much agency. Ultimately, it is not possible to seriously and conclusively identify what (teen) films make us do, believe, and assume about ourselves and others, they do not have an essence from which their scripts ensue. Since a film’s one, unified agency is unaccountable and incommensurable, it is possible (as well as necessary and productive) to attribute it with dialectic, sometimes even contradicting meanings: Twilight can be read as thoroughly patriarchal neo-conservative propaganda, and it can be read as progressive and empowering. No film, let alone an entire genre or body of films, pushes a single ideology, which makes a monolithic reading of the teen film dangerous as well as impossible. But: Through disassembling a film’s composition by looking closely and moving slowly, we can at least identify where, by whom and by which means in the process of its assembling invisible agencies such as ideology enter the picture. ANT with its material-semiotic approach and its focus on the relations that make up any assemblage allows for a film semiotics that does not pretend to be objective or brackets out personal viewpoints, but is careful not to favor the semiotics over the material. The emphasis on the material and the description before commentary as a way to “follow the actants” and let them speak does not mean that we only talk about stones or the color yellow, on the contrary. The identification of actants and accounting for their relations provides a foundation on which to talk about concepts. Actually, it would be negligent not to talk about capitalism, neoliberalism, sexism, racism, classism, ageism, or other hierarchies and power dynamics when engaging with teen films, and the ANT position provides a film semiotics in which an allegorical reading emerges from a thorough descriptive account. Following this M.O., the reassembled film in each chapter was analyzed in its own right and through the lens of the American teen film as a specific strand of film (or even genre), in

2 For

the eminent Frankfurt school reflections on film and popular culture see Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno, or Marcuse; for psychoanalytical film theory and apparatus theory see Baudry, Metz, or Mulvey, for affect theory see Deleuze (Cinema 1 and 2), Shaviro (2010), Boljkovac (2013), Kennedy (2002), Doane (1985) or Sobchack (1992).

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order to account for the high degree at which these artifacts are culturally engaged: The DUFF (2015) unfolded a discussion of, among other aspects, the makeover film, Winter’s Bone a discussion of the teen film for adults, DOPE a discussion of teen films and their depictions of blackness, technology, and drugs, and The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) a discussion of teen film’s depictions of female sexuality. As teenagers by definition outgrow their teen existence quite soon, the ways, formats, and media in which the film industry addresses and appeals to them are subject to constant and quick successions of shifts and renewals. The diversification of the modes of existence of cinematic teen narratives in recent years has not led to dilution, even as certain cycles or subgenres continuously exhaust themselves, as is their nature. Teen film remains consistent and dynamic, and while a big portion of new production is indeed reselling formulaic patterns, teen film has also increasingly become an arena for aesthetically and politically progressive, experimental, heterogeneous, and complex films. A Latourian, ANT-inspired film semiotics accommodates this development as its central project is embracing and accounting for multiplicity.

POSTSCRIPTUM: TeenAgency Teenagers will remain, and possibly even become more important in the future. Not only due to their purchasing powers or sheer numbers, as a market and as a statistic, as they were often evaluated in the past. It’s part of the innumerable absurdities of Trump’s America (and beyond) that “30 percent of the population—old, rural, and white—controls the destiny of a new and diverse generation of Americans” (Taplin 2018, 35). One of many instances in which such imbalances of power and representation were publicly addressed was the aftermath of 2018s horrid Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida with ensuing mass protests and political demands of teenagers regarding gun laws. The Parkland student activists and “March for Our Lives” organizers around Emma González—famously featured on the cover of TIME Magazine with the superimposed headline “ENOUGH”—embody a new

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type of self-empowerment of teens questioning the status quo. Different from the culturally allotted types as in-between individuals “figuring it out” or teen film’s lone adolescent rebels, they entered the discourse as a self-organized bigger collective; the “Fridays For Future” movement and its figurehead Greta Thunberg represent further cultural moments in which teenagers make themselves seen and heard—not only in the pleasant, marketable, and adult-driven ways as the traditional teen pop stars from David Cassidy to Michael Jackson to Justin Bieber. New medial environments may produce filter bubbles, “alternative facts,” and give rise to new forms of manipulation and abuse of power; however, they also seem to have a potential to make teen film’s promise come true: that there might be a media-savvy cohort of kids who no longer need adult gatekeepers to find (self-)representation, who are capable of accessing their own channels, and who see through the corruption, lies, and hypocrisy of adult authorities. When the British glam rock band The Sweet set their era’s youth revolt to music in 1973 by envisioning the “Teenage Rampage,” they notably weren’t just singing about a revolution, moreover, they framed it with juridical terms in the proclamation of “teenage legislation” and a constitution (“Imagine the sensation / Of teenage occupation / Imagine the formation / Of teenage legislation / So come join the revolution / Get yourself a constitution / And recognize your age it’s a teenage rampage. Now!”). In hindsight, their sloganeering seems naïve, or at least premature, given the status of teenagers back then and the means available to them to actually make demands, form up, or achieve self-representation—after all, the song’s teenage revolution was also rather adult-determined, considering that the songwriters and performers were all in their late twenties. But in the almost five decades since, the media ecologies in which teenagers are embedded and their scope of action has changed significantly (for the better and for the worse, if we regard the violent and very real teenage rampages carried out by teenagers in a growing number of devastating school shootings). Time will tell if The Breakfast Club’s forecast is true that “when you grow up, your heart dies,” but for now the visibility and indeed the agency of teens is something worth observing. We’ll see how and where the teen film genre, always adult-defined, but always adaptable and quick to react to real-life teen interests and discourses (and also always

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a potential projection screen for both the optimistic idealism as well as the fears adults feel toward teenagers), will find its position(s). In the third season of Stranger Things (2019) as another teen-centered Netflix show, some of these recent developments were already worked through allegorically: a monster, purely Id, that literally consists of human scum and infested innocent bystanders, dissolved into amorphous slime, which is then reassembled into a lethal swarm intelligence (and brought into power with the help of Russian infiltrators in the first place—it’s hard to not read this as a Trump analogy) may have subdued and contaminated many people including, of course, the elderly, the political caste, and the chauvinist media representatives. However, it will ultimately be overpowered by the solidarity and resourcefulness of a heterogeneous group of teens and children and the few sympathetic adults left; not the one girl with superhuman telekinetic abilities will prevail as the lone American hero that beats the monster, but the cohesion of the teen-led group of nerdy bricoleurs. Regardless whether these characters and plot points are interpreted as an echo of Trumpism, of Greta, and of teens getting in formation, or whether they are simply used as contemporary teen-centered entertainment (nostalgic in its 1980s setting, modern in its mediality): It’s evident that watching teens—and watching teen narratives—is relevant, more future-oriented and more political than ever. Teens matter, as matters of fact and matters of concern. So do teen films. Do we really know that little? We know even less. (Latour 2005, 345)

Filmography The Breakfast Club, John Hughes, Universal Pictures, USA, 1985. Call Me by Your Name, Luca Guadagnino, Sony Pictures Classics, USA, 2017. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, RKO Radio Pictures, USA, 1941. The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller, Sony Pictures Classics, USA, 2015. DOPE, Rick Famuyiwa, Open Road Films, USA, 2015. Dude, Olivia Milch, Netflix, USA, 2018.

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The DUFF, Ari Sandel, CBS Films, USA, 2015. The Kissing Booth, Vince Marcello, Netflix, USA, 2018. Love, Simon, Greg Berlanti, 20th Century Fox, USA, 2018. The Perfect Date, Chris Nelson, Netflix, USA, 2019. Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray, Warner Brothers, USA, 1955. Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, Ian Samuels, Netflix, USA, 2018. SPF-18, Alex Isreal, Netflix, USA, 2017. Stranger Things Season 3, Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, Netflix, USA, 2019. Teenage Cocktail, John Carchietta, Netflix, USA, 2017. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Susan Johnson, Netflix, USA, 2018. Twilight Saga, Summit Entertainment, USA, 2008–2012. Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik, Roadside Attractions, USA, 2010. You Get Me, Brent Bonacorso, Netflix, USA, 2017.

Bibliography Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1976. “The Apparatus.” Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory 1: 104–129. ———. 1985. “The Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus.” In Movies and Methods: An Anthology, edited by Bill Nichols, 531–543. London: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter. (1936) 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J. A. Underwood. London: Penguin Classics. Boljkovac, Nadine. 2013. Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and the Ethics of Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Considine, David. 1985. The Cinema of Adolescence. Jefferson: McFarlane. Deleuze, Gilles. (1983) 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (1985) 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Doane, Mary-Ann. 1985. “When the Direction of the Force Acting on the Body Is Changed: The Moving Image.” Wide Angle 7, nos. 1–2: 42–57. Doherty, Thomas. (1988) 2002. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Driscoll, Catherine. 2011. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Oxford and New York: Berg.

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Fox, Alastair. 2017. Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand: Genre, Gender, and Adaptation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. (1944) 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. jagodzinski, jan. 2008. Television and Youth Culture—Televised Paranoia: Education, Psychoanalysis and Social Transformation. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaveney, Roz. 2006. Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Films and Television from ‘Heathers’ to ‘Veronica Mars’. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Kennedy, Barbara M. 2002. “Choreographies of the Screen.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 1: 63–77. https://ir.uiowa.edu/ijcs/vol1/iss1/7/. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: And Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Marcuse, Herbert. (1964) 2007. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London and New York: Routledge. Metz, Christian. 1974. Language and Cinema. Ghent: De Gruyter. ———. (1977) 1982. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Translated by Celia Bretton et al. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2016. Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film. Translated by Cormac Deane. New York: Columbia University Press. Mulvey, Laura. (1975) 2009. “Visual Please and Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other Pleasures. Language Discourse, Society, 14–31. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Seibel, Alexandra, and Timothy Shary. 2006. Youth Culture in Global Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press. Shary, Timothy. 2002. Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2005. Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen. London and New York: Wallflower. Shaviro, Steven. 2010. Post Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zero Books. Smith, Frances. 2017. Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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The Sweet [Connolly, Brian, Steve Priest, Andy Scott, Mick Tucker, and Chinn and Chapman], writers, 1973. “Teenage Rampage.” Side A on The Sweet, Teenage Rampage. RCA Victor. Taplin, Jonathan. 2018. “Rebirth of a Nation: Can States’ Rights Save Us from a Second Civil War?” Harper’s Magazine, November. https://harpers. org/archive/2018/11/rebirth-of-a-nation/.

Index

A

abject, the (Julia Kristeva) 92, 94 absence 97, 106, 111–113, 117, 118, 124, 125, 131, 138, 147, 170, 171 Actor-Network Theory (ANT) actors | actants 9, 18–20, 23, 24, 88, 90, 235 ANT account, 18, 20 black box, blackboxing, 166, 196 circulating reference, 90 a collective of human and non-humans, 17, 89, 110, 141, 168 follow the actors, 16, 18, 90 human and non-human actors, 16, 88, 90 inscription, 18 laboratory studies, 12 material-semiotic, 16, 238

matters of concern, matters of fact, 11 network, rhizome, dispositif, 13, 236 participation, 89 plasma, 166 politics, morality, intentionality, 13 reassembling, 17, 22 theory, ANT as non- or pre-theory, 18, 19, 90, 235 translation, transformation, chain of transformation, 13, 18, 23, 34, 90 Adorno, Theodor W. 113, 114, 238 Affect theory 237, 238 Agee, James 96, 129 agency agential shift, agency of spectator 8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Sonnenberg-Schrank, Actor-Network Theory at the Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31287-9

245

246

Index

distribution of, 15 of objects, 21–23, 178 reshuffling of, 7, 237 TeenAgency, 7 Akhavan, Desiree 75, 78–80 Akrich, Madeleine 13, 18, 140 Alpers, Svetlana 203 Althusser, Louis 17, 40, 63 Altman, Rick 53 Amazon 36, 159, 160, 162, 164, 166 American Graffiti 4, 24, 225, 227 American Honey 128, 132 American impressionism 108 (American) individualism as ideology 41, 238 American Karate Tiger 50, 80 American Pie 190 animals 17, 105, 110, 123–126, 129, 131, 236 animation 24, 188, 196, 198, 199 anthropological teen film 72 anthropology shot 72, 96, 119, 148 anti-essentialist genre theory 53, 90 apparatus 4, 7, 13, 17, 24, 44, 55, 60, 63, 69, 90, 128, 161, 170, 180, 182, 187, 194–196, 220, 236 apparatus theory 17, 195, 238 Appropriation 3, 8, 154, 155, 225, 226 A$AP Rocky 142 auteur 6, 13, 16, 17, 226 autonomy 7, 39, 41, 48, 49, 52, 53, 60–62, 87, 112, 122, 127, 131, 176, 182, 211

B

Back to the Future 175, 183, 226, 227 Barthes, Roland 8 cars as projections of the ego, 97 connotation and denotation, 9, 40, 48, 57, 64, 66, 143, 145–147, 159, 165, 177, 180 reality effect, 106 Batman 47, 48 Baudrillard, Jean 10, 147 Baudry, Jean-Louis 17, 193, 238 Bazin, André 196 Beach Rats 128, 132 Bechdel test 193 bedroom culture 152, 153, 177, 198, 202, 205 Benjamin, Walter 130, 238 Berressem, Hanjo 108 Beverly Hills 90210 3, 24 Bildungsroman 2, 87, 116 Bildungszitat 43 bitcoin 143, 156, 162, 165–167 blackness black culture 173, 174 black identity politics, 156 blackness as content, 21, 179 black stereotypes, 145, 173 construction of, 146, 179 degrees of blackness, 174 double consciousness, 178 intersectionality, 179 marginality, 179 Blaxploitation 154 Boljkovac, Nadine 238 Bolter, Jay D. 3 Bourdieu, Pierre 33, 63 Boy Erased 75–80, 223, 227 Boyhood 128, 132

Index

Boys Don’t Cry 77, 80, 175, 183, 192, 227 Boyz n the Hood 138, 143, 144, 183 brainwashing 43, 75, 214 Brando, Marlon 35 The Breakfast Club 8, 24, 33, 43, 48, 50, 66, 72, 80, 115, 117, 132, 158, 182, 183, 225, 227, 234, 236, 240, 241 Brecht, Bertolt 196 Brian Banks 181, 183 bricolage 153 But I’m a Cheerleader 75, 80

C

Caldwell, John T. 15 Call Me By Your Name 234, 241 Callon, Michel 13, 18, 44 camera camcorder 225 camera lenses, 106, 195, 197 cameras, 107, 140, 171, 187, 195 camera techniques, 107 camera types, 39 Can’t Buy Me Love 50, 80 capitalism 51, 94, 112, 114, 144, 145, 160, 166, 171, 238 capital, social and cultural 66, 179 Carrie 192, 227 Carter, Angela 215 changes changes in media ecologies 22, 226 changes in modes of spectatorship, 7 Charlie Brown Effect 68, 212 Christine 50, 80 Chronicle 128, 132

247

cinema verité 107, 129 cinematographic object 16, 148, 180 circulating reference 23, 35, 74, 90, 166, 189 Cixous, Hélène 210, 211 Clark, Larry 226 Class 21, 23, 32, 33, 40, 42–44, 51, 55, 57, 61–63, 66, 72, 87, 88, 91, 94, 119, 121, 122, 127, 128, 138, 143, 144, 146, 148, 162, 164, 173–175, 179, 211, 223, 236 Class Act 50, 80 A Clockwork Orange 75, 80 Clueless 33, 41, 49, 72, 80 coexistence 125, 130, 149, 172 collective of human and nonhumans 16, 17, 89, 110, 141, 151, 168 college 77, 121, 131, 139, 142, 154, 162, 167, 172, 174, 175, 178, 190, 220 comics 3, 5, 24, 50, 65, 68, 139, 150, 154, 155, 193, 206, 207, 209 convergence culture 7 conversion therapy 74–76 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 179 Crooklyn 180, 183 Crumb, Robert 189, 209 cultural and social capital 33, 52 culture of poverty 98, 120, 121, 143, 144, 146, 154, 175, 176, 211 Cyberbu//y 178, 183 cyberbullying 39, 55, 71, 143

D

Dawson’s Creek 8, 24 Deal of a Lifetime 50, 80

248

Index

Dean, James 35 Dear White People 180, 183 degrees of blackness 174 Deleuze, Gilles 13, 89, 238 Derrida, Jacques 209 desire homosexuality and desire 192, 218 male and female desire, 190, 191, 198, 200, 211, 212, 216 object of desire, 24, 46, 56, 202 Detention 9, 24 Detroit Rock City 197, 227 The Diary of a Teenage Girl 22, 24, 187, 188, 202, 227, 239, 241 diary writing 196, 197 Dilthey, Wilhelm 207 direct cinema 107 discipline 14, 39, 40, 44, 54, 60, 69, 237 dispositif 13, 120, 195, 236 distributed agency 16 The Divergent Series: Insurgent 24 Dope 22–24, 93, 132, 137–139, 142–148, 150–153, 156–159, 162, 165–167, 169–175, 177–179, 181, 183, 187, 188, 212, 224, 226, 227, 236, 239, 241 double consciousness 178 Driscoll, Catherine 1, 2, 33, 35, 61, 63, 88, 139, 148, 190, 234, 235 drugs 85, 92, 98, 112–115, 117, 119, 120, 122–124, 137–139, 142, 146, 150, 151, 154, 157, 159–161, 163–165, 168, 170, 178, 179, 189, 212, 218, 239 Du Bois, W.E.B. 178

Dude 234, 241 The DUFF 22–24, 31, 33, 34, 37, 39–41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 51, 53, 55, 56, 59, 61, 63–65, 68, 70–72, 74, 80, 93, 98, 107, 132, 137, 143, 145, 157, 170, 177, 183, 187, 188, 197, 212, 224–227, 239, 242

E

Easy A 191, 226, 227 Easy Rider 97, 132 ecocriticism 131 ecology 11, 12, 14, 89, 92–94, 97, 100, 102, 106, 107, 109, 110, 114, 115, 119–121, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 142, 147, 162, 170, 226 economy and shadow economy 165 Eco, Umberto 7, 8 écriture feminine 210, 211, 219, 220, 224 The Edge of Seventeen 191, 227 Edgerton, Joel 75 Education 40, 43, 63, 71, 98, 118, 120, 121, 144, 158, 175–177 empiricist film philosophy 23 Engels, Friedrich 144 énonciation 196 environment 33, 38, 75, 76, 89, 91, 94, 96, 100, 106, 111, 127–130, 143, 152, 180, 240 epic theatre 196 etrade 156 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 148, 183 Evans, Walker 96, 128, 129 Everything Sucks! 226, 227 The Exorcist 191, 227

Index

F

family, the American family 95, 124 Famuyiwa, Rick 142, 156 Fanon, Frantz 178 fatalism 77, 115, 122, 127, 177, 223 The Fault in Our Stars 118, 132 feminism 189 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off 111, 132, 183 fetishization 54, 55, 209 film stock 23, 105, 197 Foucault, Michel 13, 40, 44, 60, 63, 207, 209 dispositif, 13 panopticism, 44 power, 40, 60 Freaks and Geeks 225, 227 Freud, Sigmund 193 Fridays for Future 240 FSA photography 96

G

Garber, Jenny 153 gaze theory female gaze 215, 221 hybrid gaze, 24, 221 male gaze, 45, 51, 54, 55, 180, 190–194, 199, 201, 209, 213, 215, 217, 221, 222 urban gaze, 95, 106 white gaze, 176, 180 gender performativity 45 genre 2, 7–9, 21, 35, 37, 43, 50, 53, 65, 73, 80, 86, 127, 128, 131, 148, 155, 178, 182, 190, 225, 233–236, 238, 240 Gerwig, Greta 222, 223, 225 Gleaming the Cube 226, 227

249

Gloeckner, Phoebe 24, 187, 188, 197, 202, 203, 206, 207, 218 Gordon, C. (Calvin) Wayne 37 Granik, Debra 95, 128–131 The Grapes of Wrath 94, 97, 112, 113, 132 Gray, Mary L. 77 Grease 33, 50, 80, 197, 227 Greek mythology 87, 123 Grusin, Richard 3 Guattari, Felix 13, 89

H

Hall, G. Stanley 2 Halloween 10, 25 Haraway, Donna 125 cyborg, 151 response-ability, 125 hashtag 34, 46, 69 The Hate U Give 181, 183 Hearst, Patty 213, 214 Hedges, Lucas 223 Heller, Marielle 188, 191, 214, 221 hermeneutis and materialism 19, 21, 23, 92 heroism 122–124, 127 Hick 128, 132 high school 9, 11, 22, 32, 33, 37–40, 42, 44, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 62–64, 66, 77, 87, 100, 119, 121, 142, 143, 146, 158, 159, 174, 182, 215, 226 Hill, Jonah 226 hip-hop 142, 153–155 hood film 23, 137, 138, 143, 144, 146, 175 hooks, bell 179 Horkheimer, Max 113, 114, 238

250

Index

horror 8, 37, 65, 69, 76, 98, 101, 118, 178 housing bubble 103, 104 Hughes, John 3, 62, 79, 118, 174, 175, 179 human and nonhuman actants 12, 16, 17, 22, 23, 88, 90, 91, 101, 139–141, 156, 161, 162, 169, 178, 236 human bodies and corpses 92, 101–103, 123, 124, 126 The Hunger Games 6, 25, 51, 80, 128, 132 hybrid aesthetics 169 hybrid gaze 24, 221 hyperreality 10, 147

I

idealization of the child 115, 116 ideological state apparatus (ISA) 40 images 9, 15, 42, 46, 59, 71, 78, 96, 98, 99, 101, 103, 105–107, 113, 138, 149, 151, 160, 170, 171, 173, 187, 188, 193–195, 201, 203–206, 214, 215, 223 immutable mobiles 203, 204 inscription 10, 18, 23, 24, 36, 43, 90, 116, 140, 187–189, 194, 195, 198, 201, 203–207, 209, 210, 216, 218–221, 224, 226 inscription device 140, 187, 188, 194, 195, 206, 207, 214 internet and darknet 142, 143, 160, 162, 165, 166, 179 interpellation 32, 40, 183 intersectionality 176, 179, 180, 182, 211 intertextuality 43, 57

It’s Kind of a Funny Story 118, 132

J

jagodzinski, jan 8, 235 Janney, Allison 64 Jawbreaker 33, 80 Jenkins, Henry 7 Johnson, Susan 233 junk 92, 95, 97, 102, 110 Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. 180, 183 juvenile delinquent 2, 50, 117, 191

K

Karate Kid 50, 80 Kaveney, Roz 72, 234 Kicks 181, 183 Kids 11, 132, 139, 183, 226, 227 Kindchenschema 115 The Kings of Summer 128, 132 Kittler, Friedrich 70 Kominsky, Aline 189, 209, 216, 217 Kristeva, Julia 92, 94, 102 Kubrick, Stanley 55, 75, 201

L

Lacan, Jacques mirror stage 59, 193 nom-du-père/Name-of-the-father, 48, 63 the Symbolic, 48, 59 Lady Bird 34, 80, 118, 132, 222–227 language desire, language of 75, 78, 193, 194, 209, 221

Index

ecological language, 128, 130 Lakotan language, 78, 79 Latour’s cinematic language, 11 linguistic relativity, 48, 79, 146, 165 logocentric teen film, 47 neologism, 145 normative language, 48, 79 quasi-object, language as, 141, 145, 150 slang as counter-language, 146 visual language, 47, 181, 194, 209, 220 word class, 32, 146 Latour, Bruno 11–14, 16, 18–22, 35, 36, 63, 74, 89–91, 95, 125, 139–141, 150, 152, 156, 159, 166, 168–172, 193–196, 203, 204, 216, 219 Law, John 12, 13 Lawrence, Jennifer 85 Leave No Trace 129–132 lenses 106, 107, 195, 197, 238 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 153 LGBTIQ 76, 77 light 23, 105, 107–109, 111, 194, 195, 197, 236 localization 13, 107, 171, 221 local color, local color fiction, 95, 106, 108, 125 local light, 107–109, 130 logocentrism 47 Lolita 55, 81, 201, 202, 227 losers on bikes 148 Love, Simon 234, 242 Lumpenproletariat 144 Lyotard, Jean-François 171

251

M

Ma 181, 183 MacGuffin 165, 166 machinic milieus 71, 169, 178 makeover 23, 31–34, 38, 41, 44, 49–51, 54–56, 60–63, 66, 67, 74, 143, 239 male gaze 45, 51, 54, 191–194, 199, 201, 209, 213, 215, 217, 221, 222 The Maltese Falcon 165, 183 mapping 36, 72, 116, 146, 148–150 March for Our Lives 239 martial arts film 50 Marx, Karl 114, 144 Marx, Leo 110 material objects 104, 105 The Maze Runner 6, 25, 51, 128, 132 McLuhan, Marshall 69, 70 McRobbie, Angela 49, 153 Me and Earl and the Dying Girl 72, 118, 132, 226, 228 Mean Girls 33, 64, 65, 72, 81 media ecologies 22, 71, 162, 171, 187, 226, 235, 240 medial shift 3, 5–7 mediation 9, 16, 37, 71, 112, 140, 166, 172, 194, 197, 204, 207 media use 5, 67, 69, 71, 151 Menace II Society 144, 183 Metz, Christian 17, 193, 196, 238 Mid90s 128, 132, 223, 226, 228 mimesis 35, 36 mirror stage 59, 193 The Miseducation of Cameron Post 75, 77–81, 182, 183 mixed-mode movie 24, 188 Mol, Annemarie 13, 19

252

Index

Moonlight 180, 181, 183 Moonrise Kingdom 128, 132 movement 21, 23, 36, 39, 53, 78, 79, 90, 96, 103, 106, 107, 116, 119, 147, 148, 166, 189, 197, 209, 219, 227, 240 Mulvey, Laura 51, 192, 193, 201, 238 N

name-of-the-father (nom-du-père) 48, 63 Napoleon Dynamite 128, 132 Neale, Steve 37, 53 neoliberalism 52, 144, 238 Never Back Down 50, 81 Nietzsche, Friedrich 115, 116 nostalgia 4, 7, 8, 152, 224, 225 Not Another Teen Movie 54, 66, 81 Nuderscher, Frank 108, 110

Peeping Tom 55, 81 The Perfect Date 234, 242 The Perks of Being a Wallflower 65, 81 The Plastic Age 33, 61, 81, 139, 183 Porky’s Bob Clark 191, 228 pornography 190, 199, 215 post-cinema 5, 22 post-continuity 10, 171 post-irony 10 postmodernism 3, 8, 10, 22, 40, 154, 155, 171 post-racial USA 156, 165, 178, 181 Powley, Bel 189, 220 Precious 180, 184 Pretty in Pink 33, 34, 39, 51, 62, 66, 81, 87, 88, 132, 223, 228 The Princess Diaries 33, 81 production of knowledge 14 production studies 16 prom dance 63 Psycho 55, 81

O

obsolescence 91–93, 95 Once Bitten 50, 81 opioid crisis 112, 117, 131 optical consistency 188, 196, 204 optical unconscious 130 Our Song 180, 183

Q

Quasi-Object and Quasi-Subject 23, 139–141, 152, 162, 167, 169

R P

panopticism 44 Paper Towns 128, 132 parents Carlie Brown Effect 68, 212 single parent, 87 participation 7, 89, 101, 118, 119, 125, 141, 144

Rambo: First Blood 131, 132 real estate 103, 105, 120, 131 reality and representation 9, 10, 35, 94 reality effect 106 (re-) assembling 22 Rebel Without a Cause 4, 25, 190, 225, 228, 236, 242

Index

Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical 138, 184 Referentiality 3, 7, 9, 10, 35 remediation 3, 6, 7, 10 reshuffling of agency 7, 237 responsibility and response-ability 11, 87, 111, 118, 122, 124–127, 159–161, 167, 212, 217 rethinking material-semiotic relations 16 the rhizome 13 Ringwald, Molly 3, 66, 142, 174 Risky Business 111, 132 Riverdale 3, 4, 7, 25 Ronan, Saoirse 223 rubbish theory 98 rural America 23, 77, 95, 96, 98, 106, 112, 113, 117, 236 rural high schools 88

S

Saintonge, Stefani 180, 181 Sandel, Ari 64 Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark 128, 132 Scenes from the Suburbs 148, 184 scopic regime 45, 188, 193, 199, 201, 209, 210, 221, 222 scopophilia 193 Scream 8, 10, 25 screens 2, 4, 15, 22, 42, 47, 58, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73, 78, 103, 145, 151, 156, 170, 171, 174, 178, 187, 190, 193, 196, 199, 212, 214, 226, 241 script and program of action 19, 140, 159, 181

253

(self-) referentiality 7, 8, 10, 196 (self-) surveillance 44 self-writing/autobiography 46, 188, 207, 209, 210, 224 seriality studies 7 Serres, Michel 89, 139, 141, 156, 166, 167, 194 Seventh Grade 180, 181, 184 sexuality heteronormativity 24, 190, 215 virginity, 31, 191 Shary, Timothy 1, 50, 67, 68, 71, 114, 128, 138, 177, 190, 192, 234, 236 Shaviro, Steven 8–10, 171, 238 She’s All That 33, 39, 51, 54, 55, 64, 66, 81, 88, 133, 225, 228 She’s The Man 33, 81 Shift 3, 5–8, 11, 17, 36, 59, 129, 161, 171, 189–191, 195, 196, 198, 203, 212, 239 shopping mall 9, 54, 57, 98 Showalter, Elaine 219, 220 Sidekicks 50, 81 Sierra Burgess Is a Loser 234, 242 Simondon, Gilbert 140, 172 The Simpsons 52, 69, 81 single parent 87 Sisco, Marideth 105 site-specificity 148, 150 Sixteen Candles 66, 81, 138, 184 Skarsgård, Alexander 189 Skate Kitchen 181, 184, 226, 228 skateboarding 96, 103, 148, 154, 155, 176, 226 Smith, Frances 1, 32, 41, 51, 56, 63, 225, 235

254

Index

social media 5, 34, 46, 47, 60, 64, 69–71, 73, 143, 157, 164, 170, 178, 187 Some Kind of Wonderful 33, 34, 62, 81 Sontag, Susan 21 Souriau, Étienne 15 speech act 47–49 SPF-18 234, 242 Spider-Man 50, 81 Stand by Me 148, 184 Standing Up 128, 133 state institutions 161 Steinbeck, John 94 Stephen King’s IT 184 stereotypes bully 34, 48, 71, 167, 174 cheerleader, princess, 9, 32, 42, 48 geek, nerd, 32, 42, 146, 174 jock, 32, 42, 48, 57, 67 Stockholm syndrome 213 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting 239 Stranger Things 148, 184, 241, 242 Strasser, Susan 92, 93, 97 Stray Dog 129, 131, 133 subjectification 13, 55, 62, 96 the sublime 110, 125 Summer of 84 148, 184 Super Dark Times 128, 133, 148 Super Fly 154, 184 Sweet, the (band) 240 the Symbolic 23, 40, 48, 59, 62, 88, 91, 94, 101, 102, 145, 152, 156, 166, 167

T

taxonomy 8, 32–34, 43, 174, 211, 234 Technicolor 110, 111 technology machinic milieu 71, 178 technological objects and media, 140, 152, 160, 167, 169, 170, 172, 178 teen tech, 67, 71 teen film for adults 2, 7, 22, 68, 111, 112, 117, 157, 237, 239, 240 teen film lexicon 142 Teenage Cocktail 234, 242 TeenAgency 7, 122, 239 10 Things I Hate About You 33, 80 Thompson, Michael 98 Thoreau, Henry David 110 Thorne, Bella 65 Thunberg, Greta 240 To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before 181, 184, 233, 242 The To Do List 191, 228 The Transfiguration 181, 184 translation and transformation 23, 34, 36, 37, 43, 53, 90 transportation, modes of 148 trash 92–95, 97, 98, 101, 102 A Tribe Called Quest (band) 171 Trump presidency 86, 131, 161, 239, 241 20 th Century Women 222, 227 Twilight Saga 6, 25, 81, 228, 242 typology 8, 32–34, 43, 234

U

Unfriended 178, 184

Index

Unfriended: Dark Web 178, 184 urban gaze 95, 106 urban high school 22, 143

V

victimization vs. agency 202, 211–214 violence 50, 76, 87, 97, 98, 113, 114, 123, 144, 159, 167, 177, 191, 214 The Virgin Suicides 192, 228 Virilio, Paul 145 visualization and visuality 110, 125, 172, 187–189, 193, 194, 199, 203, 204, 210–212, 214, 216, 220, 222 voyeurism 55, 214

W

WarGames 68, 81

255

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape 77, 81, 87, 88, 133 Whitaker, Forest 142, 143 white gaze 176 white trash 93, 94, 102, 117 Whitman, Mae 54, 64, 65 Wiig, Kristen 189 Winter’s Bone 25, 88, 116, 118, 121, 122, 128, 131, 133, 184, 228, 242 The Wizard of Oz 77, 81 Wood, Robin 87 Woodrell, Daniel 85, 86 Woolgar, Steve 12, 90, 140, 172, 194 Wray, Matt 93, 94

Y

You Get Me 234, 242 youth problem film 114, 139 YouTube 55, 57, 68–71, 150, 151, 160, 226