Riffing on a concept here: When the first wave of American film studios set up shop in Los Angeles a century ago, one of the benefits (besides evading the clutches of Thomas Edison’s patent-enforcement goons) was the area’s diverse set of looks and locales. Deserts, forests, beaches, grasslands – you could find it all within an hour of the city. And since one of the basic laws of movie magic is that with enough money you can make anything look like anything, Hollywood has recreated practically the entire world within the thirty-mile-zone.

But no matter how good a job you do, there’s always something about an area — a quality or essence — that leaks into the frame and colors it. It’s the way when you watch enough television you recognize when something is shot in British Columbia: because every locale, from the suburbs of Chicago to distant alien planets, seem to have the same Vancouver buildings, the same lake, and the same clump of trees. Most audience members are not world travelers and therefore their only experiences of other places might be their representations in film and television. They see the world through a Los Angeles lens.

This is part of a concept that I’ve become increasingly fascinated with — the way concerns regarding the production of television shows and films change how the audience engages with them. When considering how audiences interact with media, there are usually two focal points: the aesthetic goals and intentions of the artists towards the audience, and the historical context that both exist in. However, there are all sorts of confounding factors that produce unexpected effects. One is something that I’m sure has been written about but I will call the “age illusion”.

I was reminded of it when discussing this week’s episode of Glee, and someone commented about a sexually charged dance number and said “I’m glad that those cheerleaders aren’t actually high schoolers or I’d be a pervert.” He’s probably a pervert regardless, but the truth still stands: most the “teenagers” in film and television are well out of their teens. The high-school stars of Glee (Lea Michele and Cory Monteith) are 23 and 27 respectively.  The reasons for this age disparity tend to be practical; older actors are more experienced and disciplined, and productions don’t have to deal with child labor laws and other regulations that come with working with minors. There is a huge physical, mental, and emotional disparity between a 16-year-old and a 24-year-old, but that difference is usually obviated in film and television. Of course kids are probably consciously aware of how old these actors really are, but narrative is a powerful thing. It tugs at the subconscious.

Theatre fudges with ages all the time, with 40-year-olds playing high-schoolers and vice-versa, but mainstream cinema has this base level of verisimilitude which the age illusion clashes against. When you see a movie with age-appropriate casting or a documentary about teenagers, your first response will tend to be “They look really young.”  This wouldn’t necessarily matter so much until you consider that the greatest consumers of teenager-related media are teenagers and younger. These characters and actors, for better or worse, are role models for a great number of these kids.

Media creates this archetype of a teenager: a standard that many might compare themselves to, and it’s an exceptionally artificial standard. You can break the concept down even further: these teenagers may be played by people in their twenties, but the words they say come from people in their thirties and forties. It’s entirely constructed, and this construction works both ways. The cast and crew try to recreate the reality of being a teenager using the tools they have; in turn real teenagers see these creations and trend towards them and emulate them.  This can get problematic at times; for example, a large number of teenage girls wrestle with self-image problems regarding their bodies. Does it exacerbate the problem that they are essentially comparing themselves to media-images of fully grown adults?

Note that this isn’t a prescriptive piece: there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this mode of production. But it’s interesting to note how something that started as a practical concern can have such a subtle effect.