Abstract
When teenagers are given access to digital media equipment, their teachers and film club leaders may hope that they will take the opportunity to make films of personal significance. Instead, young people often choose to engage in a parodic dialogue with popular culture, in a process which feels more familiar and/or comfortable to them, providing as it does a creative space unburdened by expectations of sincere expression. From a survey of numerous short films made in Scotland, it is evident that the use of pastiche and parody facilitates both progressive and reactionary perspectives, often within the same film. Exploring a series of detailed case studies of films made by young people in Scotland in the early 2000s, this article argues that parody can provide for young people an aesthetic distance from personal expression, which, ironically, is unexpectedly revealing of generalised teenage sociocultural attitudes.
Highlights
When teenagers are given access to digital media equipment, their teachers and film club leaders may hope that they will take the opportunity to make films of personal significance
From a survey of numerous short films made in Scotland, it is evident that the use of pastiche and parody facilitates both progressive and reactionary perspectives, often within the same film
Exploring a series of detailed case studies of films made by young people in Scotland in the early 2000s, this article argues that parody can provide for young people an aesthetic distance from personal expression, which, ironically, is unexpectedly revealing of generalised teenage sociocultural attitudes
Summary
This survey of three digital short films made in Scotland suggests that teenagers craft imaginative scenarios that tend to express their view that faraway cultures are more imaginatively exciting than local variants. This article has explored these issues by framing such questions as a dialogue between nationalism and postnationalism, albeit from the perspective of young adults, rather than the usual focus on the established literary, historical and philosophical canons Cultural critics such as Beveridge and Turnbull (1989: 15) consciously attempt to recover and encourage scholarly work influenced by a notion of the distinctive contribution of the Scottish tradition, arguing that ‘a central task of cultural nationalism is the recovery of Scottish cultural practices (like these native philosophical traditions) which have been submerged by the intelligentsia’s adoption of English cultural modes’. While cultural excitement may lie elsewhere, the fruit of these fandoms did not fall far from these young trees
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