Watching the Nickelodeon movie, Bratz, made me desperately embarrassed to be a teenager. The four leads, and especially the "leader" of the leads, had moral characters awkwardly shallow and were burdened with overwhelming selfishness and an obsessive vanity. Their thoughts were rarely far from material goods and their own wishes and whims. This was a popular portrayal of the modern youth culture.
The deepest point of the movie was when Yasmin, the leader of the four leads, your typical affluent American teen, whose mom supplies her with a constant stream of fancy shoes in exchange for chocolate, bumps into a boy coming out of a classroom. This boy is named Dylan, and he's a football jock. But before seeing who he is, Yasmin snaps at him, "Why don't you watch where you're going? Are you blind? Hellooo?"
The camera does a close up of her lips, and Dylan watches them for a moment before doing some simple sign language. "No, but I'm deaf." Yasmin gives him this weird, kind-of creeped out look, and says,
"What?" He repeats what he said - he's deaf, to which she replies snottily, "You don't sound deaf."
"Well, you don't look ignorant," is his response, "but I guess you can't judge a book, right?" And off he goes.
This was near the beginning of the movie, when I held out a weak hope that perhaps some moral fortitude could still be found. This could be good, I thought. A portrayal of a real, deaf teenager, going to high school, living life. This could spark some meaningful discussion about all sorts of good things - diversity, friendship, beauty, disability.
It didn't. One more chance encounter between Yasmin and Dylan (when he finds out that if he puts his hand on a speaker, he can sense her voice through a microphone) and suddenly they're now best friends and on the cusp of something more than friendship.
I won't lie - I really felt embarrassed to be the same age as them. Are teens really this shallow? Are our relationships really this meaningless? Are we really so wishy-washy, so fickle? And what about the movie's portrayal of affluence as the only acceptable way of life? Are we really this self-absorbed that we can see no one else? With Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel pumping out movies like this year after year, packaged with the same cheesy dialogue and bad acting, the portrayal of modern youth culture has taken a turn for the worse.
Teens are better than this. We're smarter than this, deeper than this, realer than this. This portrayal of us is a cheap and dirty imitation. The teens in Bratz were almost soulless. Everything about them screamed fake and surface-deep and on the intellectual level of brain candy. They simply weren't real. But we teens are. And so we need to take responsibility.
Culture has its own idea of how teenagers act - just see how Hollywood portrays teenage rebellions as normal, acting out in front of parents and minor acts of criminal deviance as nothing to worry about, trouble with school, trouble with relationships, arrogance, insecurity, self-absorption, carelessness - all things that are just part of the "teen years."
And some of it is true. Teenagers are sinners just like everyone else is a sinner, and we have different temptations and different sins than other generations. We can be arrogant and insecure and careless and rebel against our parents in disobedience. But for the Christian teen, these years are not meant to be marked by rebellion, but by faithfulness. Obedience over disobedience. Selflessness over self-absorption. It can be hard. But there is grace - found first at the cross, at the sacrifice given, and then at the tomb, with its reality realized.
Modern youth culture gets a bad rep. Teens' virtues, struggles, and deeper searches for meaning are besmeared with rebellion against parents and surface-deep pursuits. But teens can make a worthy rebellion against culture's "low expectations," as the Harris brothers put it, and embrace the counter-cultural calling to follow Christ. It is as simple as taking up your cross and following Him. It is a rebellion against modern youth culture.