Every now and then something comes along in the entertainment world that serves as an impromptu cultural Rorschach test of sorts. One person looks at it and responds, “I see this.” Another counters, “But I see this.”
In the last two weeks, MTV’s wildly controversial teen series Skins has been that sort of event (one that I wrote about in detail last week). And it’s been fascinating to continue reading about why so many people think the volatile mixture of sex, drugs and teen life as it’s shown on the show either is—or isn’t—a big deal. This week, I wanted to share some quotes that have stood out to me as the controversy has raged on.
The ball got rolling when Parents Television Council president Tim Winter said of MTV’s latest controversy bait, “Skins may well be the most dangerous show for children that we have ever seen.”
So is it the most dangerous show ever? Is it potentially child pornography, as the PTC also alleged?
First up: Bryan Elsley, creator of both the British version of Skins (now in its fifth season) and MTV’s reloaded American effort. “The show is the opposite of pornography,” Elsley argues. And in a statement to MTV News, Elsley tried to frame the series as a morality play: Skins, he said, takes a “very straightforward approach to [teens] experiences” and “tries to tell the truth. Sometimes that truth can be a little painful to adults and parents. We proceed from the idea, not that teenagers are inherently likely to misbehave, but rather that they are intensely moral and disposed to make judgments on their own and others’ behavior.”
A minority of reviewers out there seem swayed by the idea that Skins is just the latest in a long tradition of deliberately edgy shows that supposedly mirror what the kids are up to. “Why is the show so objectionable?” asks Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Tirdad Derakhshani. “Some social scientists and family-values folks say it distorts real life, twists human sexuality, and will have a pernicious effect on kids. But maybe it doesn’t twist things? Maybe it’s shocking precisely because it’s accurate? A ‘rude awakening’ to oblivious parents, as one 14-year-old Skins fan from Texas puts it?”
Slate television critic Troy Patterson suspects that the show might indeed constitute a kind of pornography, but not child pornography.
You may have noticed, whether by reading the headlines or picking up on an ambient sense of florid hysteria, that our moral guardians are greeting the appearance of Skins by charging that its creators are engaged in child pornography Racy though the show is, with underage actors portraying contemporary teen pleasure-bots, it stops well short of anything so vile. Skins is not created as pornography about children but as a kind of cultural pornography for them. … [Skins] is superlative teensploitation, enabling youth to rejoice in the fantasy of their corruption, among other things.
Not everyone is so dispassionately philosophical, however, about Skins’ glorification of teen vices. New York Times reviewer David Carr contrasted Skins with MTV’s racy reality offerings, noting that even on the worst of reality TV there are consequences. “Even in the most scripted reality programming, the waterfall of poor personal choices is interrupted by comeuppance. People get painful hangovers, the heartbreaks are real if overly dramatic and the cast members have to live with their decisions,” he says. He continues:
Not so on Skins, where a girl who overdoses and is rushed to the hospital wakes up to laughter when the stolen SUV taking her there slams to a halt. Teenagers show children how to roll blunts, bottles of vodka are traded on merry go-rounds, and youngsters shrug off being molested and threatened by a drug dealer. And when the driver of the stolen SUV gets distracted and half a dozen adolescents go rolling into a river, the car is lost but everyone bobs to the surface with a smile at the wonder of it all. … MTV leaves it to real-life parents to explain that sometimes, when a car goes underwater, nobody survives and that a quick hookup with cute boy at the party may deliver a sexually transmitted disease along with a momentary thrill.
In all the articles I’ve looked at, though, I think the one that stood out to me most was religion writer Cathleen Falsani’s assessment.
MTV's Skins is neither authentically sexy nor remotely soulful. Sex scenes are shot with fractured, breathy imagery—a wandering hand or a craning neck here, open mouths and the small of a back over there. … It's not so much dangerous as it is deeply depressing. Spiritually depressing, more specifically. Rather than titillate or horrify, MTV's Skins elicits a certain acedia—a lingering spiritual listlessness or torpor that the ancients counted among the Seven Deadly Sins. But, it's not what the young characters are doing—a lot of sex and drugs and laconic drifting—that is the most unsettling. … What is most disturbing and, perhaps, most 'dangerous' about MTV's Skins, is that the facile young characters are little more than objectified body parts meant to entertain us.
Personally, I think Falsani is onto something. Skins may sensationally reflect the reality of some wild teens’ lives. And, as the Parents Television Council has suggested, the show no doubt glorifies that bad behavior and reinforces the “reality” that the show’s producers insist they’re trying to depict. The end result, as Falsani rightly suggests, is a soul-deadening show that objectifies and dehumanizes its young cast, nine adolescents who may be too young to understand just how deeply they’re being taken advantage of.
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