Melanie Ashe^[1], Department of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University

Abstract

The UK television teen drama Skins (2007–13) was first promoted as a forthcoming series in a promotional trailer depicting the teen characters at a wild house party. The trailer, now infamous for the furore it created, shows the teenagers getting drunk, taking drugs, and having sex. Drawing specifically from theorists Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, among other scholarship on television and youth culture, this article will examine the representations of rebellion and debauchery as presented in the promotional trailer. The article firstly addresses the highly energetic and sometimes controversial regime of the 'teen party' as it is staged on screen in the promotional trailer for Skins. The second part of the article will explore how the teenage experience of rebellion and experimentation is subsequently repackaged and commodified across culture in the promotional 'Skins Life' party campaign associated with the series. Utilising post-structural theory to argue that 'the teenager' is an arena of cultural production, this article will deliver the critical analysis of how teenage rebellion is simultaneously encouraged and regulated through film style and circulations of culture, profoundly integrated into systems of capital that exploit the teenage identity.

Keywords: Teen, television, commodity, cultural theory, youth culture, capitalism

Introduction

In 2006, an unashamedly brash montage of teenagers 'cutting loose' at an out-of-control house party was aired on UK's Channel E4 as a promotional trailer for the forthcoming teen television series, Skins (4creative, 2010). The trailer plays out like an advertisement for debauchery: a sequence of sexually charged and highly energetic teenagers tearing at each other's bodies, euphorically grinding up against one another on the dance floor, snorting and inhaling drugs, clumping together and messily kissing each other and inevitably at the end of the night, hugging the toilet bowl while vomiting. The trailer and subsequent television series were lauded as a distinct intervention into the production and perception of the figure of 'the teen', a revocation of the 'picket fence aesthetic' (Birchall, 2004: 182) of the teenager as it had been rendered in popular culture in recent television series like Dawson's Creek or The OC. The Skins online blog reflects on series one on a similar basis:

What stood Skins alone was the humour, the honesty (yes some young people do drink and take drugs and don't die) […] We could identify with the crew: after having social issues and unrealistic 'teen' dramas rammed down our throats. (2008)

With over 1.5 million UK viewers tuning in to watch the pilot episode in 2007 on E4, Channel 4's innovative youth digital sub-channel, the success of the trailer marked the beginning of a hugely popular teen series that would go on to be broadcast for six seasons.

Ironically, Skins' popularity and the self-proclaimed 'honest' or authentic representation of the teenage party experience acquired a new relevance some months after the pilot, when several news stories reporting on house parties that had become 'dangerously out of control' cited the series, with particular reference to the season one promotional trailer. With headlines such as 'filthy party-crashing craze is blamed on teen TV show Skins' (Murphy, 2008), the series had been the basis for a new term in popular culture: 'the Skins party'. This article will deliver a critical analysis of the promotional 'Skins party' trailer, drawing on the marketing campaign from the television series, scholarship on teen film and television, and post-structuralist theory and arguments of political economy to track how teenage rebellion has been codified, consumed and commodified in Skins and its surrounding promotional material.

In her recent piece on Skins in The Journal of British Cinema and Television, Susan Berridge identified the representation of sexuality as the key distinguishable factor between earlier series, typically from the US, and the more contemporary British Skins, arguing that the former places 'strong emphasis on the teenagers' sexual vulnerability' while Skins 'instead emphasises teenage independence, rebellion and nihilism' (2013: 786). While both series still share a similar 'teenageness' notable within the television teen drama – adolescent anxiety, friendship, love, sex and impending adulthood (Moseley, 2001: 42) – Skins claims to be free from a conservative, social-issues-based, often didactic narrative symptomatic of the US series. Indeed, unlike these earlier shows, teenagers in Skins are wild: they openly experiment with drugs, embrace fluid and unexclusive forms of sexuality, and often present alternative relationships and identify formations that exist outside of 'traditional' social hierarchies. Created by Bryan Elsley in collaboration with his son, Jamie Brittain, who was only just twenty years old when the series began, Skins proudly claims that, unlike its US counterparts, the series is tapping into its teenage audience. To emphasise this, the series hired amateur actors who were a similar age to the characters themselves, in addition to several 'teenage consultants' to assist in the series development.

The teenage-centric focus of Skins counters a concern often expressed by teen television scholars where 'dramas made for a youth audience, and which represent adolescent experience are, (almost exclusively) produced by adults, and for major corporations' (Davis, 2004: 131). Moreover, as Berridge highlights, there is a strong anxiety surrounding televisual representations of teenagers (2013: 787), and whether they represent positive, negative or 'authentic' representations for their teen viewers. Others identify this as a kind of uni-directional cultural circulation stressing that teen content – not usually made by a teenage audience, but made to be consumed by one – serves up 'readily observable behaviour models for the young' (Considine, 1985: 204). These varying ideas allude towards a larger debate regarding the overall impact and influence of media content and the culture industry on an audience. While the exact nature of influence media has over youth is still a topic of debate, the purpose of this article is not to elucidate on the arguments of viewer identification. Instead, this article seeks to contribute to this discussion through a detailed analysis of the various ways that the teen mythologies, in this case the 'teen party', have been cross-pollinated, altered, and mediated across cultures, an issue that has received minimal scholarly attention in the past.

The infamous 'Skins party' trailer represents an opportune case study for addressing the complicated exchange between the promotional aspects of Skins and cultures of reception surrounding the series. This paper will firstly analyse the transformative images of rebellion and energy of the teenage experience within the Skins trailer, with special attention to mise en scene, editing, cinematography, and sound. Secondly, this article will explore how the representational content of the promotional trailer is subsequently repackaged and commodified across culture in a series of Skins-endorsed party events aimed at its teenage audience. Overall, this article argues there is discordancy within the representation of 'the teen' as it appears in the Skins trailer. With similar reasoning Berridge argues that despite the emphasis on subversive depictions of teenagers' independence and sexuality in Skins, a closer examination reveals a more conservative ideology underpinning its representation. Building on this idea, this article deconstructs the conservative ideologies within the series to suggest that teen representation within the trailer is also profoundly integrated into the systems of capital that exploit and regulate the teenage identity. This paradox, presented by Jon Lewis in his work on teen film as youth as both 'mass movement and as mass culture' (Lewis, 1992: 3) raises important questions about the exact nature of the relationship between capitalism, media, and the cultural category known as 'the teenager'.

To interrogate the ways in which teenage rebellion and desire are captured, regulated, commodified and presented in the Skins trailer, as well as across youth culture, this article will mobilise the theoretical toolbox of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Adapting their critique of modern capitalism, this article positions teen identity as a construct that is organised and developed by popular culture, social discourse and technological apparatuses such as the camera (Deleuze,1986). This semiological system is one that 'conveys representational contents' such as the representation of teenagers in television series, 'but also contributes to the fabrication of new assemblages of enunciation, individual and collective' (Guattari, 1996: 96). In this sense, the screen image of the teenage body is integral to understanding 'the teenager' as a wider social assemblage. Moreover, the aggregate of screen images of youth culture is an arena of cultural production that 'represents, produces and consumes the idea of adolescence as a transnational state for social relations and personal psychic development' (Driscoll, 2002: 205). This article uses the example of the Skins party marketing campaign to demonstrate how the representation of teenage rebellion in Skins is utilised as a platform to influence and exploit rebellious social behaviour in the lives of the teenage fans themselves.

This article will finally assert that the cultural production of 'the teen' is therefore 'machinic', constantly producing, and exchanging with the teen identity, implying profound and dynamic connections between semiological and capitalist systems (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 1-9). Moreover, this machinic analogy underscores the teenager as a created identity that organises the world 'within directions of desire and desiring-production' (Guattari and Seem, 1974: 40). In other words, from a political economy that functions from a consistent, machine-like drive towards production. Consequently, when this project addresses the 'desiring-teen', it unpacks the concept in two ways. Firstly, through the construction of the teen in Skins promotional material as desiring wild and transgressive experiences, sexual or otherwise. Secondly, from the perspective of a broader political economy, how the teenage identity is exploited by commodity culture through the drive to find new ways of capitalising on teenage texts, products and desires.

Put briefly, this is the tension that Deleuze and Guattari describe as the two modes of organisation that occur under capitalism. On the one hand, the desiring-teen rebels against the hierarchical structures of the socio-capital system, in a movement they term 'deterritorialization' (1987). Inversely, and as still contextualised within the confines of that socio-political system, the desiring-teen finds itself 'reterritorialized' as an orderly subject. In the case of the Skins trailer, this tension arises as a discordancy of meaning. The imbalance occurs firstly thorough representation, where the desiring-teen is presented as radical, provocative and nihilistic, a 'deterritorialization' of typical representation of the teenager in media. However, as a cultural product implicitly bound within the institutional and economic controls of the television industry, the desire of the teen to be provocative becomes a platform for promotion, and is thus a commodity. Therefore, the representation of the desiring-teenager in television is 'reterritorialized' by capitalism, always taking advantage of every possible opportunity to gain more capital (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).

Representing rebellion as flow of images

As a screen event, the teenage party has always been a site for excess, transgression, deviance and experimentation. Anything can happen at a party. Your long-time flame can break your heart (+1, 2013); you might finally get the courage to say 'hi' to your crush (Can't Hardly Wait, 1998); you can partake in underage drinking (present in almost every teen film); jump off the roof of the pool house into the pool (Almost Famous, 2000); be invited to an orgy (21 Jump Street, 2012); get arrested (Superbad, 2007); or take drugs, to name only a few examples. The party is an event of limitless potential, ecstatic possibility, and the rupture of social norms.

The teenage party is an instance of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'becoming'. The term describes an ontological series of processes, a metaphysical understanding that preferences 'becoming' rather than 'being'. For example, Guattari describes adolescence as a series of 'becomings':

Becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming sexual […] it is well known that one can become a child again, at the age of seventy-five. One can also never become a child. A twelve-year-old can be an old dotard. One can become a woman; one can become a potted plant.
(Guattari, 2009: 131)

The term is essentially a discursive tool that captures life outside of the binary and hierarchical structures arranged and understood in western culture's predominantly patriarchal, colonial and heteronormative power relations. 'Becoming' does not conform to traditional structural relations of identity and power, but is a tracing of temporal singularities, events and accidents (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 253). Becoming is a way of escaping signification systems, creating 'other relations' and alternative worlds of social structure (Colebrook, 2004).

Every shot within the Skins' season one trailer can be read as a 'becoming' of uninhibited and unrestrained desires and action. The scene shows a group of teenagers at a raucous party scene and mobilises this visual freedom to great effect. Essentially functioning as a music video for popular electro band The Gossip, the two-minute scene is an agitated montage of teens with multiple kissing partners (sometimes simultaneously), in various states of undress and inebriation, taking drugs, touching, dancing, flinging food, firing water pistols, throwing foam, leaping, eating and vomiting. The trailer launches straight into the scene without introduction. By omitting any establishing shot or narrative context, the trailer is not anchored in any external point of reference, capturing the unregulated hedonism and energy of the teenagers. The house is dark, illuminated with fairy lights, and each shot, most lasting less than one second, captures a movement, collision or affectation. These 'becomings' are sutured together, clashing wildly and ungoverned by a chronological or continuous narrative. Exploded close ups of mouths and tongues that swap saliva and drugs transition between a wide shot of a bikini-clad party-goer leaping off a bed to collide with an unknown person in an animal mascot suit. As this scene makes any combination of bodies and objects possible, normative social understandings of desire such as 'hetero' or 'homo' become insignificant.

The 'becomings' of the teens in this scene can be further understood as Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'deterritorialization'; a term that roughly describes a shift away from a rigidly imposed hierarchical, rooted structure into one that instead favours multiplicity, flow and multivalency. In this study, it is mobilised to describe the complex and shifting ideological implications within representation that utilise and simultaneously undermine stereotypes and motifs of teenage culture. To 'territorialize' something is simply to place it within a realm of understanding. Consequently, 'deterritorialization' describes any process that de-contextualises a set of relations and subverts the original structure and 'leaves the territory' via an innovation or change; a 'line of flight' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 559). This 'line of flight' is in essence the very force for contingency, change and mutation. In the trailer, desire is not particularised into such normative gendered castes and sexual categories, instead passing 'from one code to the other' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 16), consciously scrambling all sexual codes and exploring the limits of desire. As the bodies in the scene are transformed, sexualised in various ways, they reject any established distinctions within a discourse of sexual norms, and their bodies undergo several kinds of 'deterritorializations' from their understandings as subjects. The kind of pure movement evident in the overlap and collision of bodies within the scene is a perpetual 'line of flight', devoid of representational assignment due to the sheer nature and pace of the images shown. This transgressive treatment of the teenage party in this scene can be called a 'liberation of desire' (Guattari, 2009: 141–57) in that it seems to evade 'territorialization'.

Although Tom Gunning's concept of the 'cinema of attractions' is originally used in a discussion around early or Hollywood cinema, it is apposite here as this scene can be described as an 'exhibitionist' (Gunning: 2000: 231) take on the teenage experience. As the surfaces and bodies of the teenagers are spectacularised, the narrative structure dissolves into 'a series of transformations strung together with little connection and certainly no characterisation' (p. 231). The scene exists in and of itself to present a flow of desire to viewers. This is particularly resonant in that only in the final moments of the trailer, when titles advertising the television series appear, does the promotional intent become clear.

In addition, the rejection of social conformity is mirrored in the construction of televisual style. Rejecting the norms of continuity editing and causal narrative structure, the audio-visual 'becomings' of this sequence resemble the multi-layered approach of MTV-style video editing that 'undermines the sense of time and space' (Dancyger, 2011: 169) and 'gives rise to new styles of visual storytelling' (p. 167) that engenders a kind of flowing possibility. The fast-paced rhythm of the scene presents over 70 frenzied shots in just over one minute. The extreme cutting reflects the pure energy and possibility that exist in the social dominion of the party, and is a testament to this visual language as appropriate to represent teenage experimentation and liminality.

However, the desiring-teen is not completely liberated from traditional social hierarchies. As transgressive as the 'becomings' of the teenage experience might be, a further analysis reveals they are simultaneously reliant upon the normative codings of contemporary western teenage lifestyles. This is firstly demonstrated through the normalisation of various teenage social expectations. By typifying the teenage lifestyle and portraying it as a fun-filled time, the trailer commodifies the sense of energy and momentum associated with adolescence, capitalising from the 'shock value' of the programme (Berridge, 2013: 794). In doing so, the trailer also fetishises several teen-associated practices such as teen sex, schoolgirl lesbianism and underage drinking.

Moreover, and as Berridge argues, while 'Skins seemingly celebrates teenage sexual activity', the 'conventional gendered sexual norms apply' (p. 796). This is demonstrable in the construction of the females in the scene as the central objects of desire and as predominately heteronormative, despite the multiple sexualities on display on screen. As Timothy Shary has argued is the case for much of teen on screen, 'many youth love/sex films tell young women to resist their image as sexual objects but in their telling objectify them all the same' (2002: 214). In the trailer, the camera prefers the female form, gliding over the preened, slim, young and hairless female bodies. The gaze of the camera fetishises parts of the female body, at one point rushing up a skirt to close in on a girl's bottom.

In this way the trailer commodifies and fetishises components of the teen rebellion that it simultaneously subverts, and therefore remains part of the apparatus that codifies and regulates the expectations of the teen identity. Moreover, this regulation is perpetuated by an overall drive towards production as capitalising on the energetic rebellion and sexualisation of the teens helps perpetuate the series' survival in a competitive television landscape. Thus, teenage rebellion is decoded and reassembled in a double movement that pushes the limits of representation to the innovative, highly energetic and subversive examples seen in the trailer. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this logic is the fundamental basis to the proliferation of capitalism. While the trailer decodes teenage rebellion in order to perform a 'deterritorialization' of traditional social values, it is only doing so in order to 'extract surplus value' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 37). As soon as this occurs, its ancillary apparatuses such as television audiences, institutions or media conglomerations do 'their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process of larger and larger share of surplus value' (p. 37).

Commodifying the party lifestyle

The routine commodification of the teen identity has been noted by many television scholars, and is substantiated by the increasingly convergent film, television, music, publishing and fashion industries (Wee, 2004: 91). For example, the use of soundtrack in a teen television series sets extremely complicated machinery in motion by facilitating 'points of recognition and identification for a certain viewer – one who might relate to this music and think of it as an authentic expression of teen culture' (Dickinson, 2004: 103). In the Skins trailer, the hit single 'Standing in the way of control' by indie band The Gossip is intended to signify an authentic expression of youth culture, designed to attract hip, young audiences eager to identify with veracious entertainment. The music serves as cross-promotion for the band, and thus is symptomatic of the commodification of youth culture. This commodification of is an implicit part of the machinations of modern power that regulate the teen identity, literally bearing on the desire (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 506) of the teenage audience by attempting to influence their musical tastes. It is in this sense that youth subjectivity can be produced and exchanged within the promotional and institutional aspects of these television series.

An example of the 'Skins Life' campaign, a national party tour around the UK that began in 2007, consolidates the processes of how teenage subculture or subjectivity is formulated through interactions with teen media. Produced by the creators of Skins, the concept was a series of party and club events around the UK and Europe capitalising on the furore and success of the original Skins party trailer. Highly anticipated, these events were hosted at secret venues where the location was an unknown unveiled only hours before starting. The 'Skins party' events can then be understood as a dynamic repackaging of the original promotional trailer into an interactive and participatory fandom experience. As fans of the television series and therefore 'active producers and manipulators of meaning' (Jenkins, 2012: 23), the teens who participated were able to enact their own interpretation of the 'independent' and 'nihilistic' actions within the Skins party trailer. In this case however, it is not only the fans that are transforming the series into a 'rich and participatory culture' (p. 23), but also the producers. An online 'Skins Life' community (now defunct) was set up by the creators of the show for fans to share photos, profiles and upload music. The site was even used as a talent-scouting platform, with fans given the opportunity to register for an audition as a cast member in the forthcoming Skins series. Since 2007, the campaign has been reinvented in several formations such as 'Skins Premiere', 'Skins Secret Parties' and 'Skins House'. With the Skins cast actually in attendance at these events, a chance to meet and party with the stars, participating in fandom and star culture while enacting a teen social lifestyle, is available. At these events, fans are able to construct their own understandings (Jenkins, 2012: 23) of being social and having fun at the teen party. However, these personal meanings are simultaneously recaptured or 'reterritorialized' on camera and utilised in future marketing, or scouted as commodities for a future series.

Overall, this case study demonstrates an exchange occurring between Skins, the series marketing and its audience. In the first instance, the desire of the teen audience for 'authentic' teen-centric television (as demonstrated earlier in article) has helped to generate original content for Skins and the trailer. Secondly, where various websites, multimedia and real-life events have created a 'party' lifestyle experience that encourages viewers to engage with and seek out experiences relatable to the show (Gillan, 2008: 186). In turn, this bears directly on the 'language, perception, desire [and] movement' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 506) of the teen audience and therefore plays a role in the construction of the teen identity in popular culture. Furthermore, with the potential for local music and teenagers to be scouted as commodities for the new series, the teenage audience again affects the content for the new series, maximising capitalisation and real-life authenticity for new Skins series. Such examples demonstrate a literal production of specific forms of teen subjectivity. These instances go beyond the usual restraints of a promotional campaign, by not only cultivating publicity and thereby facilitating the success and continuation of the television series, but by also bearing co-ordinated influence on the lives, actions and desires of teenage bodies. As such, even several 'official Skins parties' marketing clips assembled from these events (DJRichiePuk, 2008) available on YouTube resemble the original party trailer for the series in their voracious 'becomings', fluid editing and style.

As Toby Miller argues, the life of a television text is 'a passage across space and time, a life remade again and again by institutions, discourses, and practices of distribution and reception – in short – all the shifts and shocks of a commodity' (2010: 148). As such, the phenomenon of the 'Skins party' continued to be appropriated across culture, shaped and influenced by a number of cultural receptions, audiences, and media bodies. Following the series launch and promotional campaign across Europe, a series of venues all around the continent launched their own club events boasting the 'Skins' tag, and the term began to work its way into other cultural machinations. A definition on the online user-generated 'urban dictionary' dating from 2007 defines the term 'Skins party' as 'a huge party in someone's house' usually involving 'large amounts of drugs, alcohol, sex and loud music'. The term was soon appropriated by the media and given a number of meanings. A club 'Skins party' in France was described by a newspaper as a chance for teenagers from upper socio-economic backgrounds to 'dress in masks and torn stockings [in order to] lose themselves in sex and drugs like the stars of their favourite program' (Balyme, 2010). After £20,000-worth of damage was caused to property at a young teenager's 'unofficial Skins party' thrown while her parents were on holiday (Payne, 2010), the term came to signify a dangerously out-of-control party, taking on several negative connotations in the media that summon an association to Skins, yet have no conclusive relation to the series.

For example, headlines in the UK Telegraph in 2008 declared that a '"Skins party" wreaks havoc in suburban street' (Chivers, 2008). Elsewhere, an Irish newspaper claimed that Skins had 'started a craze of gatecrashing in Ireland, in which homes are defiled by young yobs and left in a disgusting state' (Murphy, 2008). The latter emphasises the anarchy of such rebellion: 'the latest in a series of attacks on homes saw vandals rubbing human excrement into beds and smashing a window to get into the party' (ibid). Such reporting asserts what Driscoll would associate with the notion of 'youth as problem', where media outlets and political voices can coordinate a 'moral panic' in relation to adolescence (Driscoll, 2011: 28–29)

In the example of the 'Skins party' trailer and subsequent party event series, the spectacle of youth problems were initially celebrated and commodified as a site of wild rebellion and expression. However, again through the coupled movement of 'decoding or deterritorializing flows on the one hand and their violent and artificial reterritorialization on the other' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 37) the teenage party becomes a site that is simultaneously encouraged and controlled through varying discursive practices. In the capitalist system that Guattari and Deleuze describe, cultural forces are always pushing one another to extremes, overlapping, in order to take advantage from every flow, energy, or possibility available. In this way, Guattari has reasoned that 'all the capitalist cares about are the various desire and production machines he can hook up to his exploitation machine: your arms if you are a street-sweeper, your intelligence if you are an engineer, your looks if you are a cover girl' (Guattari, 1984: 225). In the case of 'the teenager', it is rebellion and energy – the rupture of the status quo – that seeks to be exploited by the capitalist system. These 'becomings' of the teenage experience are commodified as they are captured, packaged, visualised for television and reframed through extensive marketing campaigns that are aligned with the series. The cultivation of a 'party' culture within the 'Skins Life' campaign is an intervention whereby forms of representation and modelling – the fetishisation of teenage bodies in motion at a party in the Skins trailer – had very literal impact on a teenage audience's perception of themselves and their desire of where and how to be social (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 508; Driscoll, 2008: 235). Ultimately, this is indicative of a society so deeply integrated with systems of media that it can be seen to not only convey representational contents, such as the teenagers in the Skins trailer, but also one that interacts, mediates and exchanges with representations to the extent where it tangibly contributes to enunciations of the teenager as well.

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Notes

[1] Melanie Ashe completed her undergraduate studies in Film and Television at Monash University in Australia and will be commencing a Masters in Cinema Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, later in 2015.

References

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To cite this paper please use the following details: Ashe, M. (2015), 'Teen-Party-Machines:Representing and Consuming Teenage Rebellion in the 'Skins Party' Trailer', Reinvention: an International Journal of Undergraduate Research, Volume 8, Issue 1, http://www.warwick.ac.uk/reinventionjournal/issues/volume8issue1/ashe Date accessed [insert date]. If you cite this article or use it in any teaching or other related activities please let us know by e-mailing us at Reinventionjournal at warwick dot ac dot uk.