The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
b-side
Thursday, January 30, 2020 — 3B

Only the lucky ones get to experience the highs and lows of human 
existence. Despite how special your parents insisted you were when you 
were a kid, some emotions are universal — happiness, sadness, nostalgia, 
heartbreak — these emotions that simmer in our core are what bonds 
us as humans. But emotions are delicate. The same happiness you feel 
when you get accepted into your favorite college can easily be elicited 
by your two favorite fictional characters finally confessing their feelings 
for one another. The same deep sadness you get from failing an exam 
could easily be duplicated by an unexpected fatal car crash in your 
favorite television drama series. The cause for these emotions may 
change over time, but the feelings they stir within us remain the same.
I remember being devastated by Troy and Gabriella’s separation in 
“High School Musical 3,” which, over time, evolved into the way I felt 
when Nick and Jess broke up that one time in “New Girl.” Different 
causes, different stakes, same pit of emptiness. In hindsight, sure, I can 
now judge things more realistically. Troy and Gabriella probably should 
have gone separate ways. 
By the time I watched “La La Land” with my early-teenage sister, 
I could tell I was old by how I appreciated the realistic ending whilst 
she was heartbroken over it. At her age, I would’ve likely felt the same 
way, but now, I can’t even imagine being so hung up over something 
that wouldn’t have been right. I tried to help her appreciate the reality 
behind it, but to her, it was a cinematic tragedy. Though we’re only 
four years apart, there was something about our age gap that made us 

different enough to see Mia and Sebastian’s amorous demise in opposite 
ways. 
I’m not sure when the switch happened. Maybe it’s because I realized 
“Gossip Girl” was feeling a little incestuous, or more practically, maybe 
it was because sometimes in my later teenage years, I was given a 
glimpse of what adults have been threatening me with my entire life: the 
real world. All of a sudden, I was expected to know not just my career 
path, but also my five-year plan and how to avoid scams. Life wasn’t so 
glamorous anymore, and I started to watch television in the same way. 
Call me jaded, but “The Office” became funniest when I realized 
that coworkers could really be that stupid and offices really do waste 
that much time on a daily basis. “Parks and Recreation” is at its peak 
when you realize that characters like Councilman Jamm exist in real 

life and make up over half of Congress. When shows can cleverly mimic 
the chaos we experience on a daily basis, it becomes more real to us the 
longer we live. 
Still, everything feels like a finality. When I was younger, and mass-
consumed “Riverdale”-esque shows thinking that they were the epitome 
of television, nothing else appealed to me. I’ll watch shows like this for 
the rest of my life, and it’s all I really need, I thought. Embarrassing, but 
there’s a reason why I can barely remember the shows I was addicted to 
when I was a teenager. They were iterations of one another, and looking 
back, they were as micro in perspective as we are when we’re younger.
I suppose I can’t bash on these shows entirely. For teens, they 
provide comfort — an escape from mundane life. Their impracticality 
isn’t exactly what teenagers are worried about when they watch them. 
For a lot of teenagers, raw emotion is really all they need to feel when 
they watch television. All they need is a stretched image of the life that 
they secretly hoped they could live — a high school drama they could 
vicariously live through, despite the absurdity of it all. 
There’s a side of me that wonders whether there’s any nostalgia tied 
into this mess. I’ve rewatched plenty of shows too many times, and 
while I don’t get the same intensity of reactions that I did from my first 
time, I’m temporarily brought back to the headspace I was in at that 
moment. There are few shows that bring me back in the same way that 
music might, mainly because we listen to music to match our emotions, 
while we often watch tv to make us feel emotions. Most of the time, I 
watch television in random places: in bed, on the treadmill, when I’m 
supposed to be working. Watching a show straight through means 
that, no matter what mood we’re in, the show can be factored into our 
schedule. When we listen to music, or even watch movies, it’s more of 
an emotional commitment — most people carefully tailor them to act 

parallel with how we feel in an instance.
I realize I might have contradicted myself multiple times throughout 
the duration of this recorded stream of consciousness. The reality 

is that television serves different purposes in our life: a distraction, 
white noise, a mood booster, an excuse to bond with a loved one. As we 
continue to grow older, our search for more doesn’t stop with television, 
and it likely never will. This doesn’t mean shows like “Keeping Up with 
the Kardashians” or “The Bachelor” lose all value — even a trash fire is 
entertaining sometimes — but it will never be as satisfying as a show 
that draws you in from the deepest parts of your core and keeps you 
there for reasons that you might not be able to explain. When a creator 
loves their show, you can tell. And that care is what we search for when 
we’re older, because it means that our microscopic presence in the 
world is acknowledged. We’re seen.

B-SIDE: TV NOTEBOOK
The TV of our youth and how it shapes our realities

SOPHIA YOON
Daily TV Editor

There are few shows that bring me 
back in the same way that music might, 
mainly because we listen to music to 
match our emotions, while we often 
watch TV to make us feel emotions.

When a creator loves their show, you 
can tell. And that care is what we 
search for when we’re older, because it 
means that our microscopic presence in 
the world is acknowledged. We’re seen.

I am not the first to say that the later years of middle school 
and early high school were hell. Nor will I be the last. That must 
be one of the few universal truths of childhood. And as someone 
who has struggled with mental illness, especially so in those 
oh-so-cringeworthy years, those pains of adolescence were 
only amplified. Mental illness is by no means uncommon — my 
experiences aren’t unique — but there are still a few emotions and 
sensations that I have never been able to translate fully into words, 
nor have I seen others have much luck with the feat. So, when I 
read Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel “The Virgin Suicides,” I was caught 
off guard. Narrated by a group of now-grown neighborhood boys 
several decades after the events of the main story, the novel is 
about the successive suicides of the five Lisbon sisters and the 
boys’ desperate attempts to uncover why these girls of American 
suburbia killed themselves. The novel explores themes of sex and 
sexuality, femininity and misogyny, mental illness and emotional 
isolation, taboos and all the weird, gross and sticky feelings that 
accompany the early teen years.
What was so interesting about this novel is that, somehow, 
both the narrators and the sisters articulated some aspect of 
my own experiences with mental illness in middle and high 
school. The experiences of these characters obviously don’t 
perfectly align with my own: I can’t speak to the experiences 
of those who are objectified, sexualized and repressed, nor can 
I say I’ve ever shared the misogynistic views of the narrators. 
However, the community and characters portrayed ring familiar 
nonetheless. From the obsessive and insulting way the community 
sensationalizes and elevates the five young girls following their 

deaths, to the deep social anxiety and desperate loneliness that 
both the neighborhood boys and the five sisters exhibit, this book 
was an emotional echo of what I experienced and saw in the early 
days of my struggle with mental illness.
Most reflective of my adolescent years was the novel’s depiction 
of the Lisbon sisters. In particular, the physical and emotional 
isolation the remaining four sisters endured in the wake of 
Cecilia’s death captured my own persistent, pre-teen feeling of 
estrangement.
After about a year of the community’s collective obsession over 
Cecilia’s suicide, the other four Lisbon girls fall into a passive 
acceptance of their grim reality and grow cynical of the world 
around them. They seem disillusioned by the superficiality and 
hypocrisy of the community, their feeling of disconnect only 
amplified further by their entrapment in the echo chamber of 
suicidality. I felt trapped in a similar mindset for years, but the 
similarities run even deeper. Towards the end of middle school, I 
began to notice that when tragedies and deaths occurred, people 
who never associated themselves with the individuals in question 
began to reflect on how well they knew them. And while this is 
not something that is exclusive to youth, going through such a 
difficult time myself made me see these fairweather mourners in 
a different light. 
The narrators note that a bench donated in honor of the girls’ 
memory labelled them as the “daughters of this community, 
despite how secluded the Lisbon sisters were from the rest of the 
community,” Moving beyond the clear irony of the bench, the 
most frustrating phenomenon the book depicts is the narrators’ 
reductionary idealization of and projection onto five girls who 
they, in reality, seldom talked to. “They were too beautiful for 
this world, they were perfect, they were so kind…” As I mentioned 
earlier, performative claims of personal connection in the 
aftermath of a death are a very common phenomenon. One could 

chalk it up to any number of reasons: selfishness, illusions of 
importance or even blatant hypocrisy. Regardless, “The Virgin 
Suicides” highlights the superficiality inherent in this reaction to 
tragedy.
In contrast to the clear parallels I saw between my experiences 
and those of the Lisbon sisters, the similarities I found between 
the experiences of the neighborhood boys and my own are a bit 
more indirect. The neighborhood boys are problematic to say the 
least, but they do embody the agony of being an emotional and 
distraught pre-pubescent middle schooler. As someone who has 
always been shy and, consequently, never great at making new 
friends, I recognized the longing for friendship born out of their 
emotional isolation. Though my own experiences with this were 
more akin to what my friend terms “friend crushes,” (or, meeting 
someone who you think seems really cool, but you are too nervous 
to actually try to be their friend) the underlying social anxiety, 
over-analyzation and daydreaming that the narrators experience 
rings familiar. 

It’s been years since middle school, and I’m guessing that for 
most people reading this, looking back on those times isn’t at 
the top of your to-do list. But, with a book as entrenched in the 
nuanced horrors of middle school as “The Virgin Suicides,” it’s 
difficult not to remember that time period. As opposed to the 
community depicted in “The Virgin Suicides,” we, as readers, 
don’t need to remain stagnant, obsessing over the past. From 
those terrible adolescent years emerges (hopefully) an individual 
who can look back on that time and appreciate how much growth 
has occurred and how much growth there is to come. From stories 
such as these, of those who can never hope to understand why 
suicides occur, of others who are disillusioned and objectified by 
the world around them, we can recognize why growth beyond our 
adolescence is so important, and how much clinging to narrow 
and reductionist views can warp our realities. As we move into 
the future, the problems we face will change, and we will as well.

B-SIDE: BOOKS NOTEBOOK
Adolescent angst and Eugenides’ ‘The Virgin Suicides’

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

TATE LEFRENIER
For The Daily

The experiences of these characters 
obviously don’t perfectly align with my 
own: I can’t speak to the experiences of 
those who are objectified, sexualized 
and repressed, nor can I say I’ve ever 
shared the misogynistic views of the 
narrators. However, the community 
and characters portrayed ring familiar 
nonetheless.

DISNEY

