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 ike teenagers all over the country, I spent a recent Monday night planted in front of the television for a three-hour Laguna Beach-Ashlee Simpson-Miss Seventeen marathon. I'm not sure which was worse: the acute, gut-wrenching jealousy I experienced looking at seventeen-year-olds with better bodies than I've ever had or the intense shame I felt for caring.
My official — if sometimes hypocritical — position on nostalgia for one's adolescence is that it's deeply uninteresting, an emotion for beer-bellied former football captains who now have three kids. Not that it's a gender thing: I don't want to hear women crowing about being crowned homecoming queen fifteen years ago, either. Yet there I was, hypnotized by a bevy of monosyllabic fembots, yearning for a past that I never had and I swear never wanted.
At least I knew I wasn't alone. It would be an exaggeration to say that all my female friends watch The OC, but only slightly. We're the reason that Miss
Seventeen, a show in which covergirl wannabes compete for a magazine internship in New York, debuted first among thirteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds for its time slot on basic cable; thanks to us, the second season of My Super-Sweet 16, which features over-the-top birthday parties of spoiled rich adolescents had an equally stellar opening night. My twenty-four-year-old friend Celia, on vacation in Argentina, "literally had to be dragged out of the house to go dancing in a beautiful foreign country that I was only visiting for eight days after I found a subtitled episode of The OC that I hadn't seen." My friend Elizabeth, twenty-eight, would "rather watch hair-flippy drunken catfights set to Kelly Clarkson than any other shitty scripted stuff." I couldn't have been less surprised to read in Business Week that the WB — purveyor of Everwood, Smallville and Beauty and the Geek — has an average viewer age of thirty-seven. (It's probably why last week the WB merged with UPN, a move designed to better attract the youngsters.)
What the magazine didn't say, but from endless anecdotal experience I can surmise, is that this age-inappropriate audience is mostly female, urban, smart, creative, professional. I'm talking about the kind of woman who scared her classmates by using SAT words in casual conversation. The kind who was bored out of her mind in her lonely little pre-internet hamlet. The kind who couldn't wait until she was an adult, who is great at being an adult, and yet, now that she has escaped the tyranny of pimples and prom, would like to spend whatever precious spare time she has watching the kind of provincial, brain-dead, catty girls she was so eager to get away from in the first place fret over Jason on Laguna. (And by the way, everyone agrees that Jason isn't even hot. So there goes my boyfriend's theory, which is that we all watch this stuff because we "don't want to be old and think all the boys are cute.")
It's not like we're the first generation of females to obsess over adolescence. But if there were plenty of adult women in previous decades who quoted John Hughes films and
Do we all have some deep primal longing to be skinny and pretty and have all of the boys like us? |
made My So-Called Life a cult classic, it was partly because they saw their high school selves in the awkward, sensitive, precocious Molly Ringwalds and Claire Danes and Mary Stuart Mastersons. There are still a few smart, interesting girls on TV, like Veronica Mars, who twenty-nine-year-old Lauren likes to watch tear through her parade of attractive male suitors. "I was hung up on the same guy all through high school," she mourns. "Now is the first time in my life I'm really dating. It's like, I relate. I'm going through what I should have gone through ten years ago." But Veronica Mars is the exception; post-Beverly Hills 90210, it seems like lower a teen TV star's IQ, the more real estate she'll acquire in US Weekly.
We would have hated these characters in real life. Why are we now TiVo'ing their shows so we won't miss an episode? Are we masochists, intent on punishing ourselves for our present successes? Were our own adolescent emotions so complex that it's comforting to see them simplified, soap-opera-style? Do we all have some deep primal longing to be skinny and pretty and have all of the boys like us? There are so many possibilities. Maybe we wish our biggest problem was getting caught accosting McDonald's employees. Maybe we wish we were on the cover of Star. Maybe we've spent so much time with our gay friends that we've absorbed a camp aesthetic — like them, many of us weren't totally out in high school, so now we get to reimagine it with ourselves in all the best roles. (I sat next to a Harvard- and Stanford-educated lawyer at dinner the other night; he went bananas over Bring It On.) Maybe the shows are just hilarious: Elizabeth "laughed for days" when Laguina's tanned, surgically augmented, baby-voiced Casey asked her friends if anyone was hungry and then, from the bed, yelled "Imelda, can you make me un quesadilla por favor?" Perhaps we miss the intensity of adolescence, when
Ashlee Simpson is like a very glamorous car accident. |
having your boyfriend of two weeks cheat on you sent you spiraling. Maybe we really identify with the insiders now or maybe we feel like we can finally make fun of them: "If I were in high school, I think it would be really depressing to watch Laguna Beach, because it would just be a reflection of the popular clique dynamic that I was experiencing," says twenty-eight-year-old Marisa, who also tunes in to Everwood, 7th Heaven, One Tree Hill, The OC, Miss Seventeen, Newlyweds and The Ashlee Simpson Show. "Watching Kirsten, LC and company as an adult, I can see clearly that they are total losers." Twenty-four-year-old Holly agrees: "It's easy to judge people on any reality show without feeling bad in a very high school-y way — and ones that take place literally in high school cater to that impulse. Ashlee Simpson is like a very glamorous car accident where you don't feel bad for the injured because you know they make more in ten minutes than you make in a year." And, she adds, "I wish I had a Chanel bag in high school."
Well . . . at least Ashlee sings about gathering her girls to protect her from her unavailable boyfriend while Beyonce, who is old enough to know better, begs her man to let her cater to him. At least LC really let Jason have it when he cheated on her. At least, in the end, crazy Jen won Miss Seventeen.
But I suspect that there's one other reason we watch. "They're cool, they're beautiful, they're rich, they're stupid and petty — all things I wasn't when I was a teenager," says twenty-nine-year-old Lucy about the Laguna girls. "I imagine what I would do if I was going to school with them. I must secretly long to be part of that crowd, but in reality, I was the nerdy girl they didn't even know existed." A young adult fiction writer once told me that every YA author she knows had a traumatic childhood. All of us teen-TV viewers did too. Who didn't? This kind of nostalgia has less to do with reliving the good old days than with mastering the trauma. We keep picking at the same scab, hoping this time, it will heal differently.
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Kara Jesella is a freelance writer in New York City. She is currently co-writing a book on Sassy magazine for Farrar, Straus & Giroux. |
©2006 Kara Jesella and Nerve.com.
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