Affective pastiche in teen dramas
2024; Oxford University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/screen/hjae009
ISSN1460-2474
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Feminism, and Media
ResumoIn a 2020 article for The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert identified a recent cycle of Netflix teen series that, regardless of their historical setting, share a common aesthetic preoccupation with the past.Citing popular series such as Stranger Things, The End of the F ��� ing World, Sex Education and I Am Not Okay With This, she diagnosed their common aesthetic as 'a strange stylistic space, mashing up old classics into shows about teenagers who aren't old enough to have experienced the originals'. 1 Just as Gilbert observes an 'uncannily familiar' look and feel in these Netflix teen series, her description of their shared qualities will also be instantly recognizable to most readers -as she writes, 'if you were a postmodernist, you might call this trend pastiche'. 2And certainly you might.However, as Gilbert's use of the modal verb suggests, the type of pastiche at play in these series speaks to, but sits uneasily with, its dominant postmodern conception, particularly in Fredric Jameson's famously negative delineation of it as 'blank parody'. 3For in these series, pastiche does not signal anything like the diffusion and/or waning of affect that Jameson laments: 4 it may look like postmodernism, but it performs distinctly un-postmodern, or rather metamodern, affective purposes.Through a study of The CW's The Vampire Diaries and its spin-off Legacies, as well as the Norwegian teen drama Skam, I contend that the trend Gilbert identifies is not merely a pastiche-based retro styling, but an aesthetic strategy founded on what I term, with a nod to Richard Dyer's moving account of his emotional response to Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002), 5 'affective pastiche': the use of pastiche explicitly to elicit emotional response.My decision to focus on affective pastiche in the teen drama is a pointed one, in the context of a dossier that aims to probe contemporary dossier Sophie Gilbert, 'The teen dramas that reject modernity', The Atlantic, 4
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