Since I was a kid, coming-of-age films have charmed me—I eat them up. Charlie in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, racing through a streetlight-lit freeway tunnel. The Breakfast Club crew sat in a circle, stammering out their secrets. Mean Girls’ Cady breaking her plastic prom queen crown into pieces. Their journeys feel at once innocent and ancient, cathartic and uncertain. As I watched these characters become, I felt I was watching something ageless and universal. I waited my turn.
But it isn’t ageless or universal, I found out as I watched myself grow older than the characters I loved. They graduated high school having grown into people, and their stories ended. Mine didn’t. They had reached their end goal: finished high school and enrolled in university. I had passed those mythologized ages of 16 and 17, but I had not come of age.
It was when I could no longer wait for the growing to suddenly occur—as I reached the designated age and period of life—that I realized just how synonymous the coming-of-age genre has become with teenhood. Looking up coming-of-age movies set during university pulls up articles listing coming-of-age films to watch before starting it. I’ve comforted a friend who was freaking out about turning 18. I have myself occasionally forgotten my real age, stuck to an idea of myself as a seventeen-year-old, as if I had left some growing unfinished.
While graduation is a useful and common ending for coming-of-age media, some pieces acknowledge the fallacy of equating graduation with catharsis. In Lady Bird, the protagonist dreams of getting out of her town and into university; still, the last scene of the film places her at a college party, her conflict with her mother still unresolved, as she realizes that, despite her expectations, she is still unsatisfied. Has she, at that point, moved from childhood into adulthood? She’s grown, but she still has more growing ahead of her. In university and beyond, she could, like many people, re-evaluate her sexuality and gender, drop everything for a passion, go through trauma and reconciliation with loved ones, and have experiences that may be associated with teenhood but are, in reality, not limited to it. And if that’s the case, at what point will Lady Bird—will we—have come of age?
To me, this question is central for understanding what coming-of-age films and TV shows set during university should look like. Whether or not someone is actually in university, this age feels like an in-between. After all, it is different from high school: students have a completed period of life behind them, but their future outside of institutionalized education remains unclear.
My own university experience has been coloured by a flooding sense that I’ve been left unfinished, but life has gone on anyway. Therefore, the coming-of-age media I hold closest to my heart grapples with that desire for continuing growth by extending its time frame. TV is well-equipped to handle this because it has the freedom of more screen time to delve into the way people change as time passes; however, movies can pull this off as well. Moonlight combines together a child, teen, and adult Chiron and shows the way his experiences as a small boy and his unresolved issues as a teenager affect his behaviour as a man. By the end of the film, he has begun to open up, and the catharsis of that step of progress warmed the late bloomer in me.
Watching the second season of The End of the F***ing World felt like breathing fresh air: James and Alyssa, two years after their high school adventures, are still dealing with the trauma of their experiences from the first season, and the events that have happened since. Alyssa is a waitress and is getting married; James is grieving his dad and his and Alyssa’s past. They are both different, and they are both flawed. Their road continues. Watching them, I felt okay that I was taking my time, too.
Normal People conveys this sentiment in another way by dropping in on the main characters over several years, from high school to college, finding them changed each time. Connell and Marianne grapple with their pasts, oscillating towards and away from each other, struggling with problems that have become familiar but keep developing in new ways. There is no central point at which they come of age—they are continuously growing. Like me, I thought with relief, watching the screen with a blanket over my head. Like all of us.
The fear remains that I will age past these characters, too, and still won’t feel done growing. Who will my fictional peers be? The solution isn’t to rehash the classic story in other settings and ages; growing looks different depending on when and where it occurs. As much as I sometimes feel stuck at age 17, I’m not in the same place and I’m not the same person. Perhaps, as I graduate university, I’ll look with new eyes at Pitch Perfect and Legally Blonde; moving further on, I’ll have The Devil Wears Prada and 500 Days of Summer. And I can’t say I’d mind being the same age as Bilbo in The Hobbit.
To me, each of these are still coming-of-age films—with the caveat that coming of age is not a one-and-done, singular process that ends when the last bell rings. There should be movies and TV series with protagonists growing at every age, and for growing people of every age. Rather than promoting a longing towards a certain limited period of life, I want a genre that recognizes that we are all growing, all the time.
