ARTS & CULTURE
ON FILM WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS A CALL FOR DIVERSIFYING COMING-OF-AGE MEDIA
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rembling while pinning a corsage on my date to the school formal and pricking a finger in the process. Swatting away ants on the grass by the Mississippi Levee in Baton Rouge watching the sunset. Rolling up my jeans to wade in the creek by a friend’s house and looking for crawfish. Skipping school to go canoeing and writing our names on the underside of the bridge in New Orleans City Park. Speeding over the bridge with snowballs in the cup holder threatening to spill over, blaring a remix of the song Youth by Troye Sivan. Holding hands while strolling through the botanical garden, picking flowers to dry, and to remember this moment by. These are just some of the memories that recount my rich coming-of-age experience in Southern Louisiana. Fortunately, I captured all these moments in my memories, my dinky digital camera from 2008, and in my red Moleskin, because I will never see moments like these in mainstream media.
22 TUFTS OBSERVER MAY 2, 2022
Growing up as a Tamil woman, there were not enough coming-ofage films with characters who look like me. This is a personal tragedy as there is no other genre I relate to and consume more than female-centric coming-of-age media. The growing pain of leaving adolescence and entering this scary woe-filled adulthood is something I feel on a personal level. I’ve dressed up as Emma Stone from Easy A far too often for Halloween, devoured Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels in one sitting, and can frequently be found, quite pretentiously, convincing my friends that Ladybird is simultaneously the protagonist and antagonist of Ladybird. I look up to and adore all of these authors and storylines, as they capture the nuanced essence of growing into womanhood. Taylor Swift said it best: “we are happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time; it’s miserable and magical.” However, this beloved genre is far from perfect. There is one jarring flaw binding all of
By Edith Philip this media together: these films and novels only star white characters, and the white adolescent experience is far from universal. People of color as a whole, and women of color in particular, are rarely given center stage roles in coming-of-age stories and when they do, they are often tokenized or stereotyped. Not only are white-only films often lacking depth due to their homogeneity, but they are also often not enjoyed as much by the audiences that watch them. A new study from UCLA’s Newsroom, a news media and research publication, found that “[f]ilms with casts that were at least 21% minority enjoyed the highest online viewing ratings among all racial groups in the all-important 18–49 age category.” Thus, these films are not only giving the most representation to people of color, but they are also the most enjoyable to the largest demographic of filmgoers. Saira Mukherjee, a South Asian student at the School of the
