Roxana Hadadi’s “‘Mid90s’ Uses a Super-Uncomfortable Sex Scene to Make Its Young Protagonist Cool, Because Of Course It Does” misses the point SO hard.
Barely anything these kids did was cool, and it’s fairly obvious the film is aware of that. I had to make a quick comment on this as it brings to mind some of the complications related to the topic of teen sexuality, which I felt was worth the mention.
First of all, the protagonists of this film were more or less the “lost boys“. Abandoned and abused by their parents they found solace amongst each other. They were not upstanding moralist of any sort, not even Ray, the “cool” even keeled symbolic leader of the pack. He was himself after-all still a kid, willing to risk his life taking a ride from his drunk buddy Fuckshit, rather than taking a stand against his friend’s dangerous behavior. These are after-all dysfunctional youth, and the film is essentially teensploitation, a subgenre dedicated towards exploring such dysfunction. Mid90’s was a snapshot of the lives of so many familiar youth of my own childhood during the 90s. The dysfunction is quite familiar.
Hadadi points out that Fuckshit is a junior in highschool, and therefore must be at least 16. However, I would not assume based on that alone that Estee is the same. In fact, based on her social behavior she could easily have been younger. No more than 14/15 if I had to guess. In which case she would also be a teenager, a “child” in my eyes, officially adolescent. Though her attraction towards the 12/13 year-old Stevie is perhaps unusual, it’s certainly not unimaginable. A similar circumstance of an older teenage girl “hooking up” with a shy preteen may have produced a Fuckshit in retrospect. Hadadi astutely points out that if the genders were reversed, the approach to the subject may have been radically different from the casual approach of Mid90s. This film was however focused on neglected youth, and so seems to work either way.
The teens in this film are clearly not meant to appear socially healthy. They are rather products of a specific environment. Notice how not one parent enters the picture besides Stevie’s mother who’s only barely present. The “lost boys” are left essentially to fend for themselves, and raise each-other without guidance, and within a culture dominated historically by noxious conceptions of masculinity. In the context, boys congratulating boys on a painless first sexual experience isn’t unusual at all. Likewise, if roles were reversed, I can see it being quite similar for young girls. Surviving your first time in tact is meaningful. It represents a kind of coming of age in modern culture, for better or for worse. The same logic appears when Stevie fails to clear the gap on the roof of the abandoned building, and nearly dies. He gains street cred through his demonstration of bravery, and survival. He falls, and he gets up (to borrow from promotional material), and this is how he becomes a legend amongst his peers.
Perhaps the gap could be a metaphor for that wide leap between child- and adulthood. Sex is one experience which often fits somewhere in the jump, and socially in the air. We all lived it but then “we” (not so much me) seem to simplify it when judging its ethics for the teens behind us. The reason I think we make such judgements to begin with, is that sex can be dangerous and traumatic even for adults. The risks for the inexperienced are that much higher, and during a crucial moment in development. I’d wager that most of us wanted to experiment, regardless of the risks. That being said, the booze may have been just as dangerous, if not more so to the experience of childhood, and I would wager most of us experimented with that as well. Why then not the same outrage over depictions of underage drinking and drugs as for sex? What is it about sex that makes it so taboo and uncomfortable when it involves teens?
I imagine the shock over Freud’s conception of child sexuality has some relationship with the outrage over cinematic portrayals of teenage sexuality. Part of what makes the seen in Mid90s so “uncomfortable” is precisely the fact that teens/children do have sexuality, and that they are like us “corrupted” adults in that way. While at the same time, un-like many (not all) of us, they have not developed, or been fully socialized into the symbolic order which prohibits and regulates such practices. It is is precisely in this lack of regulations I think where teen sexuality becomes “scary” and uncomfortable. It is not the loss of virginity which entails the loss of “innocence”, but rather the failure of the prohibition.
Admittedly my language here is limited, but I plan to revisit Lacan again soon, and perhaps be able to offer more incite. For now I’ll close just pointing toward the one feature potentially missing from an otherwise well done teensploitation. That is an even deeper, more rich exploration of the subject matter. Preferably one involving a socio-economic critique reflecting the affects of the material system on the culture produced. Perhaps that’s for next time. In the moment what’s clear is the situation isn’t all sorted out. I’ll let it fly over the gap a bit longer.
