Camera as One-Way Mirror: Self-Representation in Adolescent Coming-of-Age
The final shot of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) features fourteen-year-old Antoine standing at the edge of the ocean, gazing directly into the camera as it zooms in on his face. Throughout the film, we hardly see him stand still: he runs from his teachers, from his parents, from the cops; his journey to this very beach involves slipping through the gap in a wire fence and fleeing from the juvenile detention center where he has been held. Upon reaching the shore, he splashes his feet in the tide, turns back away from the water, and stares down the barrel of the camera, fixing the audience with his gaze. Freeze frame. Zoom. FIN.
Truffaut’s iconic scene sets the stage for future works of adolescent coming-of-age—a genre that is often overshadowed by stories of slightly older characters’ journeys into adulthood, but nevertheless has its own value. Indeed, a profound feature of this often-overlooked subgenre is the burgeoning self-consciousness of early adolescence, manifesting in the desire to take charge of that self-consciousness, to control it somehow by means of self-representation. In the decades since The 400 Blows was released, this theme has persisted across many generations, despite each era bringing new media, technology, and modes of representation. The medium changes, but the themes are as universal as adolescence itself. Furthermore, filmmakers tend to favor this stage of life when crafting narratives that have elements of autobiography, suggesting the creation of such stories is itself an exercise in self-representation.
Camera as Mirror: What is the role of looking at yourself?
Aftersun (written and directed by Charlotte Wells, released 2022) features Sophie, a Scottish eleven-year-old in the late 1990s who takes a trip to Turkey with her young father, Calum. She documents the vacation using a home video camera, and this footage is incorporated into the film.
Didi (written and directed by Sean Wang, released 2024) centers on Chris, a middle schooler in the late 2000s who also finds an outlet in his camera, filming older kids skateboarding and posting prank videos of himself and his friends on YouTube.
Eighth Grade (written and directed by Bo Burnham, released 2018) tells the story of Kayla, an eighth grader in the late 2010s. She struggles to make friends at school but frequently uses social media; trading the camera for an iPhone, she films life advice vlogs of herself, which she uploads to a YouTube channel with zero subscribers.
Clearly, as technology changes, the impulse to depict one’s self and surroundings remains. For characters in the midst of a life stage rife with change, choosing to face the cameras–to look directly into them as Antoine did decades ago–speaks to the very beginnings of agency, the first bold strokes in the lifelong art of articulating an independent identity.
Camera as Observer: What is the role of looking through the eyes of others?
These characters’ pursuits of self-representation are not attempts to capture only their individual lives, for they are also learning that the world is much bigger than their childhood bubbles. Developing self-consciousness also entails a consciousness of the overarching dynamics of age, race, gender, sexuality, and crucially, how one is perceived through those lenses. Chris, a first-gen Taiwanese American kid, is told by his crush that he is “pretty cute for an Asian”; he then lies to his new friends by insisting that he is half-Asian. Eliciting fraternal praise, he also lets his male peers believe that the encounter—a brief and awkward one that ended due to his embarrassment—resulted in a handjob. Similarly, Kayla tries to attract a popular guy’s attention by claiming that she has nudes of herself on her phone. Later, during an impromptu game of truth-or-dare, a high schooler challengers her to take her shirt off, and sensing his intentions, she refuses to imply. Even Sophie, as an eleven-year-old the 90s, recognizes the heteroromantic dynamic at play when spending time with a boy her age at the resort: she is expected to reciprocate his confession that he “quite likes” her and kiss him on the mouth, albeit with her eyes open.
This speaks to a simple but often overlooked truth: most adolescents are frequently exposed to taboo or “age-inappropriate” content—not only through the media they consume (a frequent cultural anxiety) but through the osmosis of their general surroundings, including casual conversations with peers and siblings that are free from the censorship of adults. Adolescents—viscerally aware of identity, gender roles, and sex from a far earlier age than most adults might realize—are therefore deeply familiar with culturally dominant social scripts, even if they are just beginning to play-act them out. Indeed, many of us, when recalling our middle school experiences, would admit that at the very least the language used and the content discussed among peers was far from PG-13: what does it say that Aftersun, Didi, and Eighth Grade are all R-rated, despite dealing almost exclusively with the lives of typical eleven- to fourteen-year-olds?
Camera as Window: What is the role of looking back?
Notably, all of these projects also mark a type of coming-of-age milestone for their creators: a directorial debut for Truffaut and Wang, and a feature directorial debut for Wells and Burnham. Is it possible that they see themselves in these early adolescence stories; does their protagonists’ foray into independence mirror their own creative emergence?
More than this, all four of these films contain strong elements of autobiography. Truffaut has attested to the semi-autobiographical nature of Antoine’s juvenile delinquency and turbulent home life. Like Chris, Sean Wang grew up in the 2000s in a Taiwanese American family in the Bay Area; Wang’s own grandmother plays Chris’s Nǎi Nai in the film. And although Burnham differs from Kayla with regard to generation and gender, the film stems from the anxiety and unprecedented social-emotional impact of social media that he knows well, having come of age (and come into his career) on YouTube.
Wells’ connection to her film’s story is perhaps the most poignant, inspired by her own childhood and relationship to her father, a man who–like Calum–had her young, and took his own life when she was around Sophie’s age. The video footage that Sophie films of her father on the trip speaks to another facet of film: its ability to preserve precious moments of the past, a time capsule of sorts. And yet with something as profound and overwhelming as grief, such attempts often fall short. As Wells astutely describes: “My generation has more than the generation before, and this current generation record[s] more than ever. And yet sometimes I still forget to point the camera at things that you might wish you had later on. I don’t think that feeling necessarily would ever change, of always reaching for something you don’t quite have. The feeling of chasing somebody lost.”
Camera as One-Way Mirror: Combining three modes of looking.
Not even self-consciousness is immune to the passage of time. As we grow older, both our inner views of ourselves and our outward manifestations of self-expression inevitably evolve. Therefore, adolescent exercises in self-representation are also subject to a third type of voyeur, not just the current self and the eyes of those around them, but also the gaze of the future self. Watching old videos, trying to access old memories, and recreating seeds of past experiences through film as these directors do, all of that necessitates looking back in multiple senses of the word: looking back into the past, and looking back at the version of you that resides there. That is the role of the one-way mirror; such reminiscence can never be reciprocated by an adolescent double, but the image beheld is one and the same.