Review
Culture
Film & TV
3 min read

A child’s lesson on how to grow up

Looking beyond the bravado-fuelled adolescent friendships, Lauren Windle reviews Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. She finds vulnerability, audacity and intention.

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

A mother and child, wearing 70s clothing, look to the left.
Rachel McAdams and Abby Ryder Fortson.
Gracie Films.

You couldn’t pay me to be an 11-year-old girl again. There is no amount of money that would convince me to re-subject myself to the confusion, self-consciousness and awkwardness of my pre-teen and teenage years. But sitting in the Regents Street Cinema watching a midday screening of the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s popular book Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, it was 1999 again. I felt like I was rolling up my school skirt like the older girls and Sam Eavis had just skateboarded past setting my tummy fluttering.  

Margaret is a 1970s year-six pupil (Abby Ryder Fortson) who moved from New York City to New Jersey with her mum (Rachel McAdams) and dad (Benny Safdie). As with any 11-year-old, she failed to see the absolute joy in not worrying about romantic relationships, financial hardship and gainful employment. Instead, she strived to grow up as fast as she possibly could. But faced with bad friends, boy trouble, changing hormones and a feuding family, Margret turned to God for guidance as she navigated the complex new stage. 

Margret accompanied her milestones with admirably honest prayers to God, asking for guidance, reprieve, support and protection for her family. 

Margaret and her friends moved through the usual rites of passage for a schoolgirl in their sprint to maturity. They obsessed about their first kiss with a boy, starting their periods, getting their first bra, being able to fill out the undergarment, gossiping and bitching between friends and desperately trying to fit in. But, unlike me, Margret accompanied her milestones with admirably honest prayers to God, asking for guidance, reprieve, support and protection for her family. 

I felt pleased for Margaret. Not because she was navigating these challenges like a pro. She was doing as well as any us (read: poorly). I was pleased for her because she felt comfortable to loop God in. I never prayed about a boy I fancied or petitioned God to start my period. As a teenager, I was convinced the messy practicalities of life didn’t have a place in the Church and I would certainly never bring them up in prayer. I stuck to the simple formula of sorry, thank you and please. All subjects were highly palatable, like my grades at school or family outings. 

Angst-riddled Margret however, learned something that I only picked up on years later when I came back to faith at 25; God cares about the details. We can be so caught up in presenting our best to Him that we forget he’s seen it all anyway. We may want a better sex life or bigger boobs or for someone to be attracted to us, but we wouldn’t pray for it. It’s too embarrassing. Not for Margret – from how she was getting on with her friends to the size of her bra, nothing was off limits in her prayers. There’s a lesson there for us.  

Margret wasn’t raised in a church or subscribing to any religion. Her mum (a Christian) was shunned by her family when she announced that she would be marrying her dad (a Jew). The subsequent pain meant that they decided to raise their daughter without any religious affiliation and let her choose for herself. When she started her first prayer Margaret opened with:  

“I’ve heard a lot of great things about you.”  

When she was desperate to be accepted in her peer group she cried out:  

“Let me just be normal and regular like everybody else.” 

 When she felt lonely, she called out and asked God where he was and when she thought he may not exist, even then she took her frustrations to God, crying out in prayer:  

“I’ve prayed and prayed and everything just gets worse. Maybe the truth is there’s nobody out there. There’s nobody listening. It’s just me.” 

It's the vulnerability, audacity and intentionality of her honesty that takes Margaret leaps and bounds further in her search for faith. That’s a level of transparency with God that I lacked in my youth, and at times in my adult life. The fact that Margaret hadn’t been to church ironically freed her up to approach God in a refreshing, childlike way. She didn’t have any of the pomp and ceremony of religion. Rather she just came to her creator and started talking, like a child to her father.  

So, what can we learn from Margaret’s search for God? Several things. Stuffing your bra looks ridiculous. Adolescent friendships are solely fuelled by bravado. The fragility of pubescent womanhood is both a joy and agonising to watch. And we can talk to God anywhere, anytime, in any mood and about anything.  

Seems like we don’t need to go back to school to learn a thing or two after all.  

Article
Comment
Digital
Film & TV
Masculinity
4 min read

How our social media turns us against ourselves

We treat others differently when our eyes and hearts are forced inwards.
An unhappy father sits next to a scared son in a police interview room.
Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper star in Adolescence.
Netflix.

My wife turned to me this week whilst watching the compelling Netflix drama Adolescence and asked if it was based on a true story. That proves the quality of the acting, script, and storyline. But it also demonstrates the drama’s prophetic nature. Conceived two and a half years ago by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, the perversion of Jamie’s underdeveloped brain and developing masculinity by social media forces has come to reflect real-life extreme violence by young men. With the sentencings of murderers Axel Radakubana and Nicholas Prosper in recent weeks, Jamie’s actions resonate deeply. Adolescence isn’t based on a specific true story, but that doesn’t prevent it from being true. 

What about the role of social media in these narratives? Radakubana and Prosper were radicalised by violent content they had accessed online. With social media, extreme content does well, particularly on sites with no filters on pornography and violence like Reddit and X. We are beginning to discover that content algorithms are not neutral, instead siloing us into echo chambers that are deliberately forming us into better consumers of content, advertising, and objects. Social media harvests our data and sells it on- meaning it cultivates us as the product. 

Yet these manipulations cover over the deepest issue. Social media depersonalises us, preventing us from making genuine human connection and perverting our view of anybody but us. The German philosopher Martin Buber differentiated between two different ways for humans to exist in the world. One was I-It; in a person treats everyone and everything they come into contact with as an ‘It’- something to be used or taken advantage of. 

The other was I-Thou, in which humans approach every other person as a unique being, with resources to offer the I which ensures that a mutual, open, present connection ensues. For Buber, the ultimate ‘Thou’ was God, with whom humans can have the deepest and most transformative connection. 

Social media ensures we see life in ‘I/It’ mode by removing genuine contact with others and providing curated, fake, existences that can never be open to genuine connection with others. Love and affection become commodified; likes, follows, reactions. Our presentation of ourselves becomes more extreme, more perfect, more beautified, to keep mining the commodities. Our eyes and our hearts are forced inwards, and we lose any sense of encountering a ‘Thou’ on the way. We just keep encountering the I: our own thoughts, needs, desires, self-radicalised by our own insular minds. 

This can be our contribution to the conversation on the culture our young people, and particularly young men, are growing up in. To live I/Thou lives.

The great St Augustine back in the fourth century developed the idea of ‘original sin.’ All humans are prone to destruction: it’s in our DNA. The evidence for such an idea is found in every human experience, as the destructor and the one destructed. Left unchecked without genuine connections with others to challenge and expand our hearts, an I/It life digs deeper and deeper into these destructive impulses until our humanity is twisted into violent obsessions. 

The I/It life focuses completely on self-glorification through any means, something amplified by social media. What if we don’t get enough likes, follows, reactions? What if we cannot achieve self-glory through the more banal mediums of attraction, attention, popularity?  

Both Radakubana and Prosper said they wanted to be notorious, attempting to find the most extreme channel for their violence as possible to ensure they are never forgotten. They will not be the last. Jamie continues to deny his crime but in episode three of Adolescence he states that he could do whatever he wanted to Katie, the young girl he murdered. The same impulses come through; others as objects to take advantage of in achieving self-satisfaction. 

The good intentions for human connection that some of those early social media sites were set up for has been largely lost. But the good intention can remain in our own resolution to live an I/Thou life. Putting down social media and picking up connections with humans in the real world by seeing the other with curiosity and openness will ensure that we are constantly turning our heart outwards, embracing genuine relationships, and finding space in our heart to think of the other before ourselves. These are the relationships that will make us more human. 

Ultimately, Buber was right that the ultimate ‘Thou’ connection we can make is with God. The Christian story is full of God’s desire to seek out relationship with humanity, to allow us to find a connection with God that surpasses our own human experience and transforms us to be people that slowly grow away from our destructive instincts.  

What might Christian faith have to contribute to the conversation on the culture young men are growing up in? To live I/Thou lives that are curious, open, and seeking truest divine and human connection. Such a life might even touch those who have been ravaged by social media and ignored by other I/It lives. It might even inspire them to compassion and curiosity that look beyond the content that turns them inwards, to turn outwards and find a healthier future. 

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