Submersion: Between States of Girlhood in the UK, Abroad and On-Screen
“Navigating adulthood is like moving through water, not quite swimming and not quite drowning”: Eve O’Donoghue on girlhood and growing up
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Growing up is universally marked by the sinking of the myths that cushioned childhood. Whether that is the myth of our parents’ invincibility, or the myth of a universal guidebook to first-times, in losing these beliefs we lose the stories which have always sheltered us in reassurance. It unveils the reality of adulthood in the UK: surviving, adrift, in a sea of uncertainty.
Though I am absolutely not British, I spent much of my girlhood here. In my second year of uni, I lived in a cluttered house with three girls who remain like sisters to me. That year had some of the fairy-dust of a poignant Hollywood teen movie: making stupid mistakes and being loved more because of them, gaining personal power away from my motherland and swelling with hope for my next adventure. But life is rarely so formulaic. That summer I applied to work and live in a hotel on Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands which is draped in monuments to British colonialism. Closed in by its blue shores, closer to France than to Norwich by a long way, the heatwave of those months scorched my naivety. Adulthood, I learned there, was a little more complicated than uninhibited freedom. It also required self-protection and an awareness that my own innocence was hazardous.
The motif of adulthood as a relentless eroding sea is deeply felt in Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (2022) and Molly Manning-Walker’s How to Have Sex (2023). These women are among a new set of British filmmakers who have revolutionised the coming-of-age genre with a new palette. Less dazzling with youthful optimism, these films have the patina of memoir – looking back at adolescence, rather than swimming in it, from an adult lens that is still searching for lost order. Reflecting a nation where the most vulnerable are the most neglected, with an unstable economy and untrustworthy leaders, where individuals seeking safety are routinely abandoned, these British films take the collective nausea of the UK abroad. The cultural anxiety they depict goes beyond their deeply personal and individual coming-of-age narratives. What we see on screen and recognise in ourselves are those moments where the people, the stories and the hopes that give our lives meaning as children and promise for tomorrow are lost to an irretrievable depth. We must learn to float in the vicious tide. The cracks in the culture are exposed and undeniable in the low and bright sun.
“It was my second viewing of Aftersun when I truly felt the danger of the water. Suffocating and disorientating, its threat is shapeless and all-encompassing.”
It was my second viewing of Aftersun when I truly felt the danger of the water. Suffocating and disorientating, its threat is shapeless and all-encompassing. Like in a dream, water suppresses our power to act, to move, to run. Aftersun teaches that navigating adulthood is like moving through water, not quite swimming and not quite drowning. When Sophie plunges into the pool after the older teenagers, she witnesses a yet undiscovered world of sex and adult relationships. The water simultaneously separates her from the action and pulls her into it, powerless except to observe and grapple to understand. Similarly, when Callum tosses her the goggles which she misses, her tool for protection and vision plummets beneath them both. The shot of Callum as he dives into the sea, under increasing pressure, failing to retrieve what was lost is one of the most smothering. The scenes where Sophie searches for Callum in the darkness and blinding light of the nightclub replicate this sense of navigating an unknowable terrain. Callum’s unreliability and carelessness shape Sophie’s loss of certainty as she matures during their time in Turkey. The younger Sophie becomes more unsure and, at the same time, more free. She is given an all-inclusive wristband by an older girl at the resort, which is heavily symbolic of her maturation. Adulthood and financial independence mean nothing is off-limits and yet this limitlessness is hard to mould into security. Callum’s resistance to tying himself down, his going under without a diving licence, is the peril of freedom. Adulthood is as expansive and uncertain as a wide and bottomless ocean.
How to Have Sex is missing the pallor of grief of Aftersun. It does explore, however, the confusion and lack of definitive truths that make up society and relationships. Tara, along with her two best friends, Em and Skye, indulges in the drinking, partying and explicit sexuality of teen Brits abroad. When I first saw this film during the Cambridge Film Festival in October, so much of it seemed plucked from my own life. The clubbing, the dialogue, the complexities of female friendship and the confusing culture of sexual pressure mirrored some of the most difficult parts of my adolescence. Beaches, pools and nightclubs, here as in Aftersun, are sites of overwhelming introductions to naivety-stripping social realities. Wet t-shirt competitions and other sex-based games degrade and humiliate both men and women in a Love Island-style emulation of fun. The myths of our ‘first times’ often take daunting shapes in the shadows of a dark new world. These moments are never what we imagined; so much less wonderful and, yet, so much more life-changing, at times for the better and at times for worse. Tara learns that there is no perfect way to first have sex; there is no too late an age, no perfect person and, most importantly, there is so much not right in our cultural expectations of sex and the prevalence of overlooked non-consensual experiences in our teens and early adulthood. What we see Tara discover is that there is no guidebook, no one’s hand to hold. When Tara returns home, the hopefulness of what early adulthood holds and what it could be seems to slip away from her gleeful imagination.
“The myths of our ‘first times’ often take daunting shapes in the shadows of a dark new world. These moments are never what we imagined; so much less wonderful and, yet, so much more life-changing, at times for the better and at times for worse.”
Like Sophie’s wristband and Tara’s first girls’ trip, this job in Jersey seemed at first like an all-inclusive pass. It involved living in discounted staff accommodation, right on one of the island’s most stunning bays. Like the nowhere of the British holiday resorts in these films, Jersey was both not the UK and unbelievably British, familiar culturally and alienatingly remote. I realised early on that there was a sinister culture of sexual harassment in the hotel, which was dismissed by everyone as natural in an environment where the personal and professional were inseparable and thus indefinable. What started as innocent flings with a couple of boys my age, like ones I might have at uni, painfully branded me through exaggerated, graphic rumours, escalating to include detailed stories about older men I had never even spoken to. This culminated in an aggressive encounter, alone at a deserted bus station, with a male colleague who spat slurs at me when I rejected him and swiped my phone from my hand when I attempted to leave. Something in his sweaty and desperate hunger not only frightened me, but caused me to feel quite sorry for the man, who was so violently lonely. After the incident, I stayed the rest of the summer - I tried to be nice, smiling and pleasing even to people I knew had verbally violated me. I learned within myself to keep my head down, and that growing up involved doubting who and what I could trust, including my own judgement. I continued to receive WhatsApp messages from male colleagues at weird hours, and to feel on edge at the local after a shift. I stayed to prove something of my reserve instead flying back over the water to safety, existing in that limitation of movement water imposes. I often sat on the beach, phoning my mom and my friends who I missed, watching the waves and berating my childishness and lack of foresight. For some time after that summer, a shade of shame washed over small moments of joy.
There is no one map of girlhood, but most contain a similar duality. There is the frail innocence and optimism, which shines with close friends and in moments of softness and affection. There are always times when we can allow our vulnerability to be uncovered, to be delicately opened and shared with those who will be gentle. The other side is that which happens to us as we grow up: the brutal waves that hammer at our sense of certainty and pull our legs away from familiar soil. The tenuous state of the world and this country, the era of post-truth, climate uncertainty and ambivalent politics, is deposition on top of the natural anxiety of growing up. The skill and the necessary lesson of girlhood is to preserve your tenderness as it is slowly submerged.