![]() ![]() In scenes of Danni coming to terms with the fact that there are people behind trending hashtags, the film is neither realistic enough to be a portrait of Gen Z nor sharp enough to be a satire. As Bousfiha says: " films tend to be highly stylised, with catchy, memeable lines tailor-made for going viral." Subsequently, they age like milk, and Not Okay is a prime example. In another new film capturing Gen Z's relationship with social media, Quinn Shephard's 2022 black comedy Not Okay takes the topic of performative activism to new heights as Danni (Zoey Deutch), a young woman craving the influencer lifestyle, gets wrapped up in a lie about being a survivor of a terrorist attack. Early on, there's a celebratory popping of Champagne, followed by Alice (Rachel Sennott)'s exclamation: "That was so sick! I can't believe I didn't video that." Alice might be the closest to a stereotypical Gen Z archetype that has emerged on screen so far – an oblivious, entitled, self-absorbed podcaster – yet there is little done to delve deeper into this mindset. The film gestures to Gen Z interactions but fails to unpack the full extent of a hyperconnected climate. It's one of the defining features of this new canon of films, as Xuanlin Tham, film programmer and critic, tells BBC Culture: "Identity and sexuality aren't treated so much as destinations any more, but indefinable, constantly ongoing processes."īodies Bodies Bodies attempts a precarious balance between empathy and mockery, more often leaning towards the latter in widely generalised observations of a plugged-in generation where buzzwords like "gaslighting", "triggering" and "unhinged" are reeled off for laughs. Influenced by the language of social media progressiveness, characters are regularly engrossed in arguments about identity politics. A storm plunges the house into darkness, the first corpse is found, and a whodunnit begins that sees the friends turn on each other in a satire on class and privilege. Halina Reijn's A24 slasher-comedy follows a group of wealthy twenty-somethings who reunite for a weekend getaway. If Do Revenge is the Gen Z Mean Girls, Bodies Bodies Bodies is this generation's Heathers. As culture writer Jihane Bousfiha tells BBC Culture: "The majority of media centred on our generation tends to miss the mark because the people making end up getting caught up in the idea of what Gen Z behaviour is like, as opposed to what the reality is." While Do Revenge is self-aware about Gen Z, it still has a sanitised perspective on today's youth – a viewpoint that is preoccupied with their apparent desire for popularity, and which has a tunnel-vision focus on cancel culture. Teenagehood feels rudimentary and observed rather than lived-in. While the film's feminist approach and lesbian characters can be celebrated, the nuances of teenage life aren't explored – Eleanor's painful isolation is painted as mysterious and Drea's position as a victim of revenge porn is reduced to a plot point. ![]() In practice, Do Revenge is so eager to solve the pathology of the youth, trying to capture the zeitgeist in a cinematic time capsule, it fails to truly subvert the Gen Z stereotypes it tacks on to its characters. The soft aesthetic clashes with a narrative edginess, as sex tapes are leaked and revengeful schemes are concocted, emphasising a distinction between the lived and the presented. The revenge-seeking tale plays out in a sea of mint and lavender-shaded school-uniform berets and blazers. Writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson offers a Gen Z incarnation of Mean Girls with a dark teen drama set in the social scene of a Miami private school. Hollywood's most recent addition to the Gen Z cinematic universe is Netflix's black comedy Do Revenge. So far, in the race to create the Gen Z-defining film, the canon sees predominantly twenty-something women concerned with self-identification, social media literacy, and performativity in search of their authentic self. Hollywood now seems on a mission to grapple with the Gen Z zeitgeist, and to capture our ever-evolving online literacy and virtual social culture.ĭefining the category of a "Gen Z film" remains elusive – the recent spate of releases offers a genre in its infancy as a malleable entity. They are regarded as tech-addicted and device-dependent, having come of age in an era of screens that encourages us to "Be Real" and share everything, with everyone, all of the time. Everyone has their thoughts on Generation Z – known colloquially as zoomers and Gen Z for short, the cohort born in the mid- to late-1990s to the early 2010s – the generation that was raised online and that uses social media as its diary and scrapbook.
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