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