Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos
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Awkwardness - or cringe, as the kids say - is almost worse to watch than abject mortal terror.
I have found it especially hard to watch anything about the painful awkwardness of adolescence. It's not so much that it evokes bad memories, although it does.
It's that we, as adults, can see how it's all going to end in tears from a mile away and as often as not, we just have to let it happen in slow motion. I always want to skip to the end.
If I feel that way about movies, I can't imagine actually raising a middle schooler. I found that to be a problem when I was working with teenagers. I wanted to help them skip to the lesson they were inevitably going to learn. But that's not how it works.
I could not get through Are You There God, It's Me Margaret even though I fancy Rachel McAdams,* I couldn't see Eighth Grade nor could I deal with Pen15.
I like Mean Girls, of course. That's different. It's very exaggerated and it's as much about adults as it is the kids. And it's about high school, as opposed to middle school, which is awful in a lot of ways, but not in the same nails-on-chalkboard sorta way.
* She had a lot of her own travails in that story, dealing with the uptight bougie moms. That was hard to watch too.
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