Not my coming-of-age movie

Growing up, as I cycled through my various stages of adolescence, I always wondered why coming-of-age movies didn’t resonate with me. In my upper years of high school, I was admittedly becoming more enamoured with film. I downloaded Letterboxd, wrote rudimentary reviews, and studied the meaning of popular jargon like “aspect ratio” and “cinematography.” Aside from horror (what’s enjoyable about scaring the shit out of yourself?), there are few genres I haven’t dabbled in. But there was something about coming-of-age films—a genre which, on paper, I should be totally obsessed with—that has always been ill-fitting.

Movies like Lady Bird and Booksmart are notoriously a hit among self-proclaimed film kids on Twitter. However, while I could easily appreciate their sweeping cinematography; the screenwriting that was admirably accurate to teenage colloquialisms; and the soundtracks that intensified the melodramatic scenes of adolescent yearning, there was always something missing. 

Naturally, I assumed this sense of absence had something to do with the plot. A common characteristic of coming-of-age films is their ardent focus on characterization, often at the expense of plot development. They are movies in which nothing really happens, save the protagonist discovering that they truly had been in love with their childhood best friend all along, or finally getting admitted into their dream school after losing all hope of getting off the waitlist. It was all too easy for me to fall back on this excuse. 

That is, until I eventually got around to watching Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight. 

Finally, here was a coming-of-age story with a darkskin lead. Aside from reaffirming my love for film and giving me a newfound infatuation with Trevante Rhodes, watching Moonlight made me realize that coming-of-age movies could be so much more than anything I’d previously been exposed to. I became aware that my issue with the films wasn’t with their plots; my problem with standard coming-of-age films wasn’t even with their mediocre attempts to pass off actors in their mid-twenties as gangly, pimply high school sophomores. I simply could not identify with them because they never featured anyone who looked like me.

For every Moonlight, there are seven Breakfast Clubs. For every If Beale Street Could Talk, there are ten Edge of Seventeens. It is so, so unfathomably rare to see films that depict Black youth just as we are—multifaceted and diverse. With our culture, music, hair, clothes, and vernacular on full display. 

With debates about the merit of “Black trauma porn”—films and TV shows that exploit stories about slavery, police brutality, and other forms of Black pain—escalating on Twitter, now is the perfect time for the film industry to demonstrate its supposed commitment to telling stories that are authentic and indicative of the true human experience. Black teens go through the same motions of falling in love, agonizing about school, exploring and embracing their sexuality, wrestling with body image, and gaining and losing friends that everyone else does; albeit, with the added clause of growing and finding themselves in a world that often degrades and polices Blackness. 

As a moviegoer, I deserve to see films that feature Black teenage girls as more than just stock characters—the “sassy sidekick” who is afforded twenty minutes of screentime to further the white protagonist’s storyline before unceremoniously melting into the background.

The question of accurate representation is one that has plagued the film industry since its inception. This issue undoubtedly spans across multiple genres and executive positions (not just on-screen, but off), and has personally proven to have skewed my impression of film. 

My perception of the entire coming-of-age genre had been utterly warped by the lack of representation that I saw. When those with the power to make executive decisions consciously (or unconsciously) choose to exclusively centre white stories, they contribute to the implicit Othering and further undermining of people of colour. Media that we voraciously consume should embody the intrinsically multifaceted nature of our society, especially within a genre that prides itself on depicting the occurrences of everyday life.

Seeing the sensationalized, raw, all-or-nothing experience of being a young adult on-screen is unlike anything else. The coming-of-age genre is unique in its propensity to take us right back to our first day of high school—rife with uncertainty, new crushes every 48 hours, and the overwhelming perception of things being drastically more critical than they actually are. There is something so special to be found in a genre that embraces the awkward and the ugly, that takes an overwhelmingly universal experience and says, “No, this isn’t too mundane for the big screen. Your experiences are valid. This stage of your life is important.” 

The question, then, must be: if this experience is so universal, why are we only seeing one type of person represented on screen?