Insightful thread!
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At its heart, [Young Americans is] a drama for teens. I just can't see it actually dealing with existential angst on the level it was meant to be at, which is complete despair from the bottom of your heart. It's a sense of complete freefall. And I just don't think WB teen shows can be cut out for that. ... Existential angst is very much an internal thing, it's not about communication at all. But TV shows traditionally are not cut out for internal ponderings such as these. There's a limit to what you can show, especially considering YA's target audience.
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Among
YA's protagonists, most of whom seem strong characters, only Jake Pratt seems anywhere near existential despair or angst. Indeed, where Shakespeare could offer a soliloqy about whether to be or not, a teen-market commercial television show must rely in large part on inherently ambiguous wordless images, like: "
Cut to Jake, lying on her bed, crying in the dark." Nevertheless, Antin seems well able to convey that Jake suffers from the "
sickness unto death" described by Kierkegaard in 1849, namely "despair at not willing to be oneself or ... at willing to be oneself."
To be sure, Antin does this in part by means of Finn's and Krudsky's commentary on Matthew Arnold's "Self-Dependence" at the close of episode 4: "'He who finds himself loses his misery' ... Be yourself." But the recurring theme of Krudsky's voiceovers is that moral truth can be learned only by undertaking the hard task of trying to live it; what's moving and memorable is how the "Be yourself" moral is expressed dramatically in the Jake-Hamilton interaction. Isn't Jake Pratt an archetypical "damsel in distress," although menaced not with physical death by some monster but with emotional death by inner demons of existential despair? Isn't her desperate emotional neediness a large part of what makes her sexuality so compelling both to viewers and to Hamilton, seducing him to respond to it despite successive daunting obstacles?
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But I do wonder how much it is the WB's lite-pseudo-teenage babble and how much it is genuine philosophy. ... It's like Will's voiceovers in each episode: you can interpret it as shallowly or as deeply as you'd like ... It's all in your attitude.
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Finn's summation of Hobbes's moral philosophy, and Krudsky's interpretations of Browning's "Love Among the Ruins" and Arnold's "Self-Dependence," are objectively questionable: but they draw from these works what the characters in
YA need for their lives at the moment. Art is life's servant, not its master. One takes what one needs, leaves the rest ... and returns when one needs more.