Audiovisual Teenage Wasteland
Adolescence is a stratosphere that most have the unfortunate discontent of entering, traversing, and enduring, right through to its bittersweet end. Culturally, coming of age is a rite of passage, but, lost in the vicious tumult, systems that pride themselves on civility fail to address the issues besetting youth culture. The consequences are caustic; not all come out intact, nor thrive on the purported “other side” of maturity. A wave of strife is embedded in this period that, frankly, many of our overbears adamantly overlook, deeming the shedding of human innocence an inevitable one-and-done milestone as the teen comes to reckon with relentless truths dispelled about the rubrics of existing. The reality, however, is quite different: naivety’s dissolution may linger, unwaveringly, beyond. Grown complacent, or disillusioned, it is as if adults forget that the grip of traumatic events in teenage years can contribute to the very profile of who we become if this hold seeps into our self-states, uncauterized. There is an irony, for surely the notion of adult itself is to carry some percept of who you once were, unformed, which comes at odds with the reflective distance many seem to selectively conjure, walling off their esteem from the younger (and, hence, lesser). Either way, in the developmental dystopia, the cast rotates, intergenerationally, and novelty lies rather within the problems that establish themselves as paramount intra-group with each era.
Haptically, film has thus been able to externalize what society has not, codifying characters in disquietude to appeal to the inner child of our built selves. While we all too readily expect words to drive the narratives we consume, imparting integral exposition, few works have vitally demonstrated that nihilistic feeling need not be expressed intelligibly via scripted dialogue to cloak the pastures of our youth. Affect defies articulation as a qualitative experience and, in the broadest strokes of scenery, sensation coalesces, tactile through cinematography and sound. Undeniably adult in expression and viewership, there are three films that I feel particularly take the hybridized viewer/listener to the badlands discursively, painting various shades of a universally lived-in experience. Yet, despite this overall throughline, therein lies a spectrum of ways that each entry has actualized the teenage wasteland audiovisually.
‘All About Lily Chou-Chou’ (2001), Shunji Iwai
“The things you hold dear—family, friends, lovers—they hurt you the most. You live with that. That’s why we have ether, a place of eternal peace, That’s the ether.”
Rhythmic, hesitant clicks of an old-age keyboard adorn desolate cyberspace at the beginning of Shunji Iwai’s hazy, chimeric epic, All About Lily Chou-Chou. In rote synchrony, white Japanese symbols puncture a pitch-black screen, bookended by perfunctory ‘mojibake’ characters. Superficially, the logographic semblance of the subsequent strings (e.g., ÉäÉäÉCÅEÉVÉÖÉVÉÖÇÃÇ∑Ç◊ǃ) appears to evade meaning, already greeting the film’s participant with an outstretched arm of alienation, precluding rationality. Their subscribed essence looks impenetrable to decipher—somewhat a product of the film’s hyper-stylized 00s Internet archive aesthetic—but, in actuality, their forms constitute the output of arrant computational confusion. Decoded for us, thankfully through the pairing of subtitles, the enigmatic text of user ‘philia’ asserts that “she”—the elusive, stalwart femme at the film’s glacial core—was born at the exact time of John Lennon’s death. To the backdrop of her tune, the eerie synth of ‘アラベスク’ (translated, ‘Arabesque’), we learn that she is Lily Chou-Chou, and that she is the ether exemplified.
The main protagonist of ‘All About Lily Chou-Chou’ (2001), Yūichi Hasumi (portrayed by Hayato Ichihara), off the beaten path, wired up to primitive earphones, presumably adrift in Lily Chou-Chou’s astral song. The digicam dreaminess of the lens heightens the lush verdant green of grass. It is a transcendental experience; the rural field provides sanctuary for the teen’s seclusion, a place to process the tribulations that new-age Japan has bestowed upon its youth generation. In this film, the end product is a stringent, elliptical narrative, stringing together some of the most repugnant acts to ever be depicted on screen. Image courtesy of Film Movement, made available through Pen.
A collaboration between Iwai himself, singer Salyu, and producer Takeshi Kobayashi, the titular fictional dream-pop star and her in-universe albums provide flight for the plight of Japan’s dilapidated doom generation (most immediately, the motion picture’s innermost ring of ‘shōnen’ and ‘shoujo’ type teens, whose lives we soon follow, out-of-order and in media res). It is not her exalted celebrity itself (idolized, as above, in the immaterial expanse of online forums), but rather the ascendent qualities of her artistry that serve as a safety net for these young people in seclusion, who chime in with their takes via chat rooms, engaging in the most diehard dialects, all in service of a cult-like worship for the information era. She thus compels convergence at a time of disconnection; recession in turn-of-the-century 90s’ Japan foresaw instability for its future adult population, perpetually updated with the armament of new technology, and so the film revels in the sorts of overwhelming dissonance and delinquency felt as a fallout (like many other works of the time, such as 1998’s ‘Ringu’ and 2000’s ‘Battle Royale’), wrest forward into the new millennium. Disenfranchised, the gravity of pent up woe sets the boys in particular onto a frightening trajectory: desensitized by experience, they become aggressive or apathetic, enabling and enacting heinous crimes over the course of the film against the girls and amidst themselves, frequenting run-down shelter at civilization’s outskirts to do so, as if in dissociation from the degeneracy inside.
Without a shadow of a doubt, however, through nocturnal timbres and the saturation of green in a world of grey, Iwai elevates what could be easily juvenile material to creative bounties by transposing the majesty of Chou-Chou’s music onto images of rural Japan. For, unbeknownst to each other in detached reality, but isolated via interconnection in the Internet ether (which, like her own near-facelessness in the film, is shrouded in anonymity, which can only facilitate expounding of personal trauma and experience), Chou-Chou soundtracks the melancholia of victimhood, most prominent perhaps in the film’s most iconic visual: the lone teenaged figure, clad in markedly scholastic uniform, stood in vaseline-smeared, Windows XP screensaver-lite Elysian bliss fields. The result is triumphantly synaesthetic, a holistic depiction of the ether, and its capacity to restore: “A permeating image of pain fills the gaps of serotonin” … “The ether [as the emotive fibres of being] heals my pain”.
‘Nowhere’ (1997), Gregg Araki
“It's like we all know way down in our souls that our generation is going to witness the end of everything. You can see it in our eyes. It's in mine, look. I'm doomed. I'm only 18 years-old and I'm totally doomed.”
Americana crudely draped around protagonist Dark (portrayed by James Duval). If he is the future of the nation, then it is set on an existentially contemplative path–his central quality being his deep-seated glumness, literally inherent in his name. His room is an extension of this. Distributed by Fine Line Features, restored in 4K as part of the Criterion Collection, image has been made accessible via LittleWhiteLies.
Transitioning from the eloquent sombre moods of All About Lily Chou-Chou to the hamfisted angst of Gregg Araki’s Nowhere is tonal whiplash at its finest. Although both strike a false sense of reality in hyperbolizing adolescence as an unproductive landscape, grappling and contending with very mature themes, they could not be at more diametrically opposed odds. Not only is the dialogue of Nowhere quippy, awkward, and contrived, taking on a B-movie quality rather than a subtle arthouse sensibility, but the former pairs feeling with the fully realized symphonies of Chou-Chou’s soundscape as its primary hatch into escapism while, in the latter, Araki funnels the boisterous hyperactivity of a teenaged Los Angeles through careful song selection. Every peak is a high of momentous proportions, exacerbated by the euphoric levity of 90s techno and dance music, while each low brings a valley of depressive alternative and indie tracks, embodying the broodiness of a hopelessly lost age bracket.
And the valley is most literally where Nowhere takes place, as a proto-‘Skins’ cohort of stock caricatures are found wanting utopia in a fool’s paradise. Erratic jump cuts from highly hedonistic deed to rampantly reckless exploit litter the film’s barely feature-length runtime, as we are taken through an overblown avant-garde vision of LA, rendered unrecognizable. Each character is as visually interesting as the modern-art installation of a room that they foreground, or the lizard creature that follows them, color-blocked, graffitied, and stifled to the one-note of their personality in sequestration (think the set-pieces of 1999 queer classic But I’m A Cheerleader, but more devoted to engineering each dweeb, jock, beach boy, and valley girl’s inner worlds). Or, in congregation, their hangouts exude that endlessly cool exterior, almost like a makeshift fashion studio: a homogenized space by which their distinctiveness markedly stands out.
However, entanglements in these wholly unadulterated environments are often where each individual is sporadically put through the ringer, and where nuance emerges through the film’s corny cover (in true Araki fashion; see The Living Endand Mysterious Skin). Universalized, drugs, partying and fornication form a prayer in vice against the violence and Biblical paranoia that proliferates the streets and homes of the damaged youth. Nowhere is a sanctuary in the imminence of end times, which are only made more proximate by the carelessness in which they treat their corporeal forms, and yet the professedly post-religious are proselytized by the imagined apocalypse, clutching onto a televangelist climate of fear that seeds their airwaves. Tapped into broadcasted talk of pandemics, satanic panic, and extraterrestrial invasions, tuned out to musical psychedelia—not the genre, but rather, the tectonics of multiple genres—a numb affinity with death amasses. “It's Armageddon day. The day the world's supposed to end… Have you ever heard of the Rapture?” To that, the absent-minded answers: “The Siouxsie and the Banshees album?”.
‘I Saw the TV Glow’ (2024), Jane Schoenbrun
“It feels like someone... took a shovel and dug out all my insides. And I know there's nothing in there, but I'm still too nervous to open myself up and check. I know there's something wrong with me.”
Finally, like the fandom that catalyzes All About Lily Chou-Chou to a cataclysmic climax, and the neon-tinged turn Nowhere takes, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow most recently fuses similar facets with the seeable and hearable to map out other regions of adolescent annihilation: heteronormative repression, mythologizing media we grow up with, and electric dreams of queer expression.
An example of visual dynamism in ‘I Saw the TV Glow’. The non-naturalistic lighting of a smoking ice-cream truck turns a fond memory of youth into something ominous and unsettling to encounter in the distance. Shot taken from the film’s trailer, courtesy of A24, and made available via ScreenRant.
For the A24-produced flick, which relishes in the decompressed, slow-core qualities of other acclaimed projects that the studio has acquired, it is the false memories of its lead Owen that stem from an obsession with the TV show The Pink Opaque (paralleling Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the first inclination we see of the show being a Buffy-esque bound episode guide) that are central to its nostalgic horror. The closeness of the two—sentimentality and terror—is what heightens the analogy that Schoenbraun draws between the pain of your cherished media’s eventual cancellation (also, a precursor for adolescence’s end) and the dying light of prolonging one’s gender dysphoria into adulthood, never fathoming the actual self into the fabric of cognizance.
Nightmarishly neo-surrealist (think Magdalena Bay’s most recent album, Imaginal Disk), the visual world of I Saw the TV Glow blurs fact with fiction, played out as a person coming apart under the pressures of coming out. The phantom amethyst ink of the show’s protagonists (unifying two bodies under the umbrella of subjugated identity), the lunar emergence of the antagonistic Mr Melancholy (being a stand-in for the implied crescent abuse of father Frank), and the looming threat of many other monster-of-the-week entities (representing the fleet of perpetual, intrusive and debilitating thoughts that ensue), it is more about the messaging we find in the things we deify, vicariously inhabiting the fantasy those spaces offer—misremembered with the pangs of fight-or-flight—rather than their objectively cartoonish qualities that we observe when we come to consume them again at a later point.
A sense of misty-eyed remorsefulness comes too with the film’s sonic provisions, sporting the likes of yeule, Caroline Polachek, Florist, and Phoebe Bridgers, as well as a score overseen by Alex G. The way their songs enter the fold of the film plays out like a teen film of old—fading in at perhaps not necessarily the right moments, nor for the audience’s discernment, but rather as an undertone to flesh out the scene. The atmosphere they imbue is equally as wistful and, by having modern artists excise the 90s haunt of shoegaze and grunge, it shows that what is long dormant (even in culture) never truly yields to the portcullis of conformity. For, written in chalk, in spite of Owen’s suffocating screams, the film’s most powerful motif perhaps surmises the path of their future: “There is still time.”
