Locked in a Hotel Room with Prince: Film, Gen Z, and the Absence of Challenging Media

How 80s Movies Taught Us to Grow Up—and Why Gen Z’s Media Won’t

You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for — if you are honest — you have, in fact, no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one. — PL Travers

My parents had this habit of renting movies that were too adult for me to watch. Sometimes it was a welcome journey into early adulthood, like The Empire Strikes Back or 9 to 5. Sometimes, it was just humor beyond my capacity, like Local Heroes. On occasion, it was confusing, like the time at a family reunion in Peterborough, Ontario, when they rented Purple Rain and left me with my older cousins in a hotel room to sort through the thirty instances of nudity or explicit sexuality. The night after my quite literal exposure to Prince, my parents thought they could balance the exploitation with a simple coming-of-age, Brat Pack film. They rented Less than Zero, and then went out for a night on the town in the Electric City, so named not because of its nightlife, but rather as Ontario’s first town to turn on lights. For those who missed the 1987 Brett Easton Ellis adaptation, Less Than Zero follows a wealthy Los Angeles teenager who returns home from college to find his best friend spiraling into addiction and self-destruction amidst a haze of drugs, sex, and hedonistic excess. As he tries to save him, he’s drawn deeper into a glamorous but toxic world of moral decay and emotional emptiness. Oh, and there’s an explicit scene where Julian, played by Robert Downey Jr., performs a graphic sexual act to satiate his habit. That’s my Iron Man.

These memories are no doubt apocryphal. Purple Rain came out in 1984, Less Than Zero in 1987, my parents are good people, and I’m not entirely certain I’ve ever even been to Peterborough. But it is indicative of how my generation was raised, not so much with parents as absentee landlords, but rather in that we were exposed to adult conversations, whether intentionally or unintentionally, at a very early age. Other films from 1987 I do recall watching included Good Morning, Vietnam, The Untouchables, and Lethal Weapon, all certainly beyond my eleven years, but also interesting films in their own right, which discuss an immoral war, prohibition and authoritarianism, and whether or not you’re too old for this shit.

I’m a bit too young for the Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Cameron Crowe coming-of-age films of the 1980s. I would’ve been around 8 years old when Sixteen Candles came out, still pretending to be Han Solo and trying to schedule Dukes of Hazzard viewings around the complexity of my mum’s rules, like only 1.5 hours of TV per day and nothing that celebrates the Confederacy. But the movies were certainly present in my life, and I would’ve seen them all several times before I entered teenhood. The Breakfast Club fed my thirst for rebellion and issues with authority. Weird Science was my huckleberry. I believed myself to be a Canadian version of Ferris Bueller until very recently, and I am patiently waiting for Young Guns III: Old Guns. But what these films had, and what I posit is missing from today’s movies meant for teens, is a sense of message beyond the accumulation of wealth or getting laid, though those are certainly important to coming-of-age films and middle-class America.

I realize that this hypothesis may be both reductive and indicative of my oft-mentioned curmudgeonness. I consume a fair amount of media for which I am not the intended audience, though I have still not watched a frame of Euphoria because I believe that will get me put on some kind of list that mandates a distance from high schools. What I’ve seen in films made for younger audiences, and YA literature and television, is chaste and attenuated narratives that contribute to a generation that continues to live within the confines of helicopter parenting and naivete. Generations past would have read Dickens, Fitzgerald, and Austen, inarguably better foundations for adult reading habits than The Hunger Games, Twilight, and whatever it is that Colleen Hoover writes. And because YA, as it rose to prominence in the mid-2000s, aspired to film adaptation, the narratives became simpler, safer, and as such, perverted the level of confrontation that the audience was capable of.

I suppose what prevents me from reconciling my feelings here is that Gen Z doesn’t consume traditional media, certainly not the way my generation did. Their consumption habits are complex and far more likely to engage in short-form media and social media, particularly YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. Further, they prefer organic singularity, as opposed to artistic populism. “Their approach to media consumption is unique, marked by preferences for interactivity, personalization, and authenticity. Brands and content creators aiming to capture Gen Z’s attention need to understand these nuances and evolve accordingly.” What they’re tuning into satiates the status quo and disengages them from long-form narratives, which increase retention and enhance communication skills.

But “the kids” have no interest in their parents’ media. In fact, “56 percent of Gen Zs and 43 percent of millennials surveyed find social media content ‘more relevant than traditional TV shows and movies,’ and roughly half feel a stronger personal connection to social media creators than to TV personalities or actors.” So, if they’re not interested in film and television, it begs the question: Does their curated and personalized consumption challenge them enough critically, or does it reinforce the rote tenets of adolescence, like a D’Amelio family echo chamber? And if they aren’t interested in traditional narrative forms, then one, what is made rarely appeals to them, and two, what does appeal to them fits into a very narrow and pandering box. And herein lies an important disconnect. If they’re not consuming traditional art forms or media from traditional communities, then how can they have any context for the materials they’re confronted with in the world beyond social media when what they’re consuming simply amplifies the world they inhabit? I’m part of the problem, in that I’m writing about this in a medium no one under the age of thirty is going to have on their radar. And further, I’m dismissing their communities as lesser intellectual entities.

Literature and film serve as gateways to important conversations and critical thinking, essential contributors to the development of the young mind. But when important issues are absent from those entities, a generation devoid of important skill sets suffers. As educator Gretchen Schwarz writes, “What seems to be largely absent yet in most discussions or study of YA literature are questions of quality, purpose, ethical value, and worldview.”

When I was growing up, and being left alone with Brat Pack drug films, media industries were realizing that we were a market that was left unattended to. Our parents and teachers, for better or worse, made the decisions on what we consumed. But as we entered the digital and information ages, teens were able to curate their own consumption, and industries catered to their youth, as Nylon’s Kristin Iversen noted:

All that changed in the mid-20th century as the American conception of youth transformed dramatically, revealing a whole new demographic that could be marketed to. The rise of the teenager in American popular culture can be clearly tracked in mediums like television, film, music, and, of course, literature. And while the teenage years might previously have been not much more than a time to prepare and practice for adulthood, they bore their own unique responsibilities and importance; these years were newly identified as being incredibly formative, a time of creation and even recreation.

But the market tends to appeal to the lowest common denominator and the whims of social politics, and so while originators of YA like S.E. Hinton and Judy Blume interrogated real-life subject matter, they were also leading candidates for book banning. The next generation of YA chose to lean into the market, and the result was offerings that engaged almost entirely with middle to upper-class straight Judeo-Christian values and characters. The current YA landscape shows a diversity of characters that outpaces traditional adult fiction, such as The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas or Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender in literature, and Heartstopper or Moxie in film. But let’s assume that the new administration of Moms for Liberty acolytes will try to set fire to that progress.

Of course, this doesn’t differ too much from Hughes and Crowe, whose work was criticized for its lack of diversity and for perpetuating, or at least satiating, suburban white American values. It was the 1980s, and Reagan had run the table on Jimmy Carter. The left was dead, and its demise featured prominently in the films of the era, whether in the rebellion of Star Wars and Lloyd Dobler’s desire not “to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” But the coming-of-age films of the 1980s were not chaste, and certainly not simplistic. While securely rooted in the middle class, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was an indictment of institutions and authoritarians. Pretty in Pink explores class difference and the search for individuality, while, as the LA Times noted, “lets us watch kids through their own eyes, exploring feelings instead of making caricatures of them.” The Breakfast Club explored the emotional and psychological struggles of youth and the unrealistic expectations that institutions and parents put on teens.

Filmmakers who grew up on the work of Hughes and Crowe et al. responded with films in the ‘90s that deepened the explorations of youth culture. Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats) looked at the role of the shopping mall in promoting a generation of finance bros and the terror of McJobs. Richard Linklater (Dazed & Confused, Slacker) examined sexual freedom, community, institutions, drugs, rock n’ roll, and the lost generation that Douglas Coupland titled “Gen X.” Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides) challenged our notions of female identity and misogyny. Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness) was fearless in his depiction of the dark side of the suburban middle class. These filmmakers and their brethren asked big questions of their audience, while not placating them with safety or simplicity. These films weren’t known for happy endings, but rather their exploration of truth and the net result of a generation that lived through Reagan’s America.

But as the 2000s arrived, much of the evolution of celluloid stories for young audiences regressed under the weight of vampires, wizards, and werewolves. Then crashed entirely in the dystopian wave of Hunger Games and Divergent. This whitewashed post-apocalyptia took the fear of the future out of literature, replacing it with hopeful morality and happy endings, as critic Laura Miller argues in her review of The Hunger Games trilogy:

Because authors of children’s fiction are “reluctant to depict the extinction of hope within their stories,” [academic Kay] Sambell writes, they equivocate when it comes to delivering a moral. Yes, our errors and delusions may lead to catastrophe, but if—as usually happens in dystopian novels for children—a new, better way of life can be assembled from the ruins would the apocalypse really be such a bad thing?

As we now enter the apocalypse, with Suzanne Collins' readership coming of age, that the diluted dystopia that pandered to her audience has resulted in a population not only incapable of pushing back against end times, but they either don’t recognize it has arrived or don’t see it as the End of Days.

Filmmakers in the 2020s who wish to appeal to younger audiences have, largely, reveled in pandering, whether under the umbrella of Marvelization, the juvenalia of Star Wars, or the simplistic, hollow nonsense of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things or the To All the Boys franchise, films which make fanfiction look elevated. Of course, fanfiction is not to be overlooked in its role in the cultural dilution of films aimed at teens, like the After series or whatever that one is that’s Harry Styles porn. These films serve to satiate the audience, to lull them into a comfortable existence, to lead them to believe that the world is fine and there are no challenges to confront that can’t be resolved with a cute boy’s smile. I don’t for a minute think that Gen Z doesn’t want to be challenged. It’s not like the species devolved with the advent of TikTok. But I don’t think those who create traditional mass media have any understanding of how to reach that audience. They used to just appeal to their parents. Appealing to teens is far more complicated.

Adults need to admit some accountability in Gen Z’s artistic consumption. I mean, it’s not like they’re making the movies. Films are still largely dominated made by 65-year-old white dudes—perhaps that’s why Gen Z’s more likely to identify with social media, because they see people their age, representing them, almost in real time, as opposed to the artifice of a production that presents the aesthetic of youth, as opposed to the truth. As we were left alone with James Spader as our parents lived their lives, this generation finds its independence in their phones with Kai Cenat, Hasan Piker, and Adin Ross. It is the only place—in a world of helicopter parents and infinite social competition—where they have autonomy. Within that independent space, they choose Mr. Beast over whatever’s pandering at the local cineplex.

Do I think that today’s kids need to be locked in a hotel room with The Graffiti Bridge and Requiem for a Dream so that they can develop critical thinking skills? Yes, yes, I do. Because immersing a generation in hollow, unchallenging, milquetoast productions meant to occupy time between TikTok videos of self-curated narratives from their peers is leading to a population incapable growing up because no one, and nothing, is asking them to. But goddamn, they could use some exposure to art that asks them to ask questions, to consider their world in context, and to wonder if they’ll ever need to blow someone for coke.