story: Social Studies
artist: Lauren Greenfield
If you’re a parent, Lauren Greenfield’s new doc about teens and social media ‘is a horror movie’
Documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield had spent her day with a group of high school students when a startling revelation came up that compelled her to go home and ask her two sons, then about 14 and 20, a question: “Is BDSM really a trend?”
“Oh, yeah, choking is what we’re told girls want,” she recalled one of her sons saying in reference to the risky sexual practice that some teens engage in.
It was 2021 and Greenfield was in the middle of her latest creative frontier: delving into the lives of the first generation raised on social media.
She was interested in unlocking an intimate glimpse of how social media has shaped adolescent minds after seeing her own kids’ distinctive relationship with it.
“They’re different generations,” she said recently from her office in Venice. “My eldest is a reader, my youngest gets his news from TikTok. Just seeing the difference and being concerned about the younger one being on a lot was part of the inspiration for this.”
“Social Studies,” a five-part series premiering Friday at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado and arriving Sept. 27 on FX, is Greenfield’s latest foray into documenting teen life in Los Angeles.
Her body of work, which includes 2012’s “The Queen of Versailles” and 2019’s “The Kingmaker,” has long chronicled beauty, wealth and power — and the damaging toll of it in excess.
But she’s held a perennial interest in youth culture: “Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood” is a collection of photos and narratives of Los Angeles youth in the 1990s; “Girl Culture” captured the effects of American popular culture on young girls; and her short film “kids + money” features L.A. teens discussing money.
“When I did ‘Fast Forward,’ which was my first project, I was in a very different phase of life,” said Greenfield, who attended the private Crossroads School in Santa Monica as a teenager. “I was just out of college, just starting my career. I very much identified with the kids.”
But for “Social Studies,” “I came to this project as a mother, in terms of how the kids see me,” the filmmaker said.
Dependence on devices and time spent on social media rose dramatically during the pandemic, as restless, isolated teens looked for an escape. In 2021, the surgeon general issued a public health advisory on teen mental health; however, research hasn’t found a direct link between the crisis and social media use.
Greenfield’s series explores the everyday pressures teens confront that have been intensified by social media, including bullying, body-image issues and comparison culture.
“‘Fast Forward’ was all about media influence and how kids were being changed and impacted by media influence. I called it the influence of Hollywood because I was specifically looking at celebrity and image culture and materialism,” Greenfield said. “I wanted to come back and explore the same subject but with this new influence of social media. It was similar but amplified. Social media was everything I had looked at throughout my career but on steroids.”
The series was largely filmed in Los Angeles and features teens from 10 schools, including Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles and Hamilton high schools. Greenfield shot roughly 1,200 hours of footage over 150 days — covering the 2021-22 school year and some subsequent months. She also recorded the teens’ phone and social media use.
Read the rest if By Yvonne Villarreal‘s article