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I’ve never once been on Instagram. It’s a bizarre ecosystem that doesn’t make much sense to me, but I guess I’m at That Age where the trends and styles of youth start to sound strange and foreign to my ears. Let the kids do their thing, and I’ll do mine. That’s my motto. And yet, like so many adults my age, I get almost irrationally annoyed when I hear things like “Insta-famous” or see kids obsessing about the latest social media trends. Call it the modern “get off my lawn.”
Having watched Social Animals, however, I’m willing to concede that I might have been wrong. The new film from director Jonathan Ignatius Green, which is his first feature, peels back the layers of this social media phenomenon, revealing an exciting potential, and some terrifying side effects, of an internet ecosystem that is decidedly more complex and less vapid than my aging mind ever imagined.
It’s easy to be an adult and scoff at the fascinations of youth, no matter how much you may have promised to never be that guy when you got older, without taking a deeper look at the ins and outs of what they’re participating in. We see headlines about Tide Pod Challenges and use that to paint a stark picture of idiotic youth (conveniently forgetting how dumb we were, but that’s another story) without seeing the real potential for good their new platform provides.
And, to be sure, Instagram is providing some wild potential for the new generation of budding young adults. Social Animals specifically follows three users, Kaylyn, Hamza, and Emma, and their wild and varied experiences on the social media platform. These three youths represent a microcosm of the Instagram experience, and what kind of potential it enables them to reach.
The three main subjects of Social Animals could not come from more diverse backgrounds. Kaylyn is the rich and privileged daughter of a car dealership tycoon. Hamza comes from the New York City projects. Emma is a middle class Midwesterner just trying to navigate life in high school. Instagram is about the only thing that these three kids have in common, and the way they use it is stunning.
Watching these kids, it quickly becomes apparent that, through Instagram, they’re all almost just intuiting the rules of business and marketing that people from my generation and prior paid tens of thousands of dollars to obtain. Kaylyn, a budding young girl with dreams of becoming a model and fashion designer, carefully crafts a well-maintained image that gives her the kind of clout needed to launch a solid career in a competitive world. Hamza, meanwhile, has created an entire artistic brand for himself that has led to paying jobs with the likes of Kanye West.
The outsider here is Emma, is more of a casual user than one trying to use the platform to kickstart a career. She represents the voice of normalcy, giving us an even deeper insight into the potential pitfalls of not just Instagram, but social media in general. She is just a young girl trying to live a normal life, but, thanks to Instagram, has felt the brunt of unjustified online rage that pushed her to a breaking point.
Through these three kids, we are allowed to see a new form of social interaction that might feel foreign to us olds, but isn’t entirely different from the experiences we had growing up. In a way, our teenage and young adult years were also spent trying to create our own personal brands, even though we didn’t look at them as such. All forms of social interaction, be they online or in real life, are subtle forms of marketing. We’re each attempting to sell ourselves to others, to ingratiate ourselves to people through what we have to offer.
Granted, the scale at which these kids are doing it is far larger than anything we might have had, but it’s not that much different. What you post on Instagram becomes a piece of who you are and what you have to offer. We can call it vapid or shallow all we want, but realistically it’s not too different from making friends with someone in high school because of the band shirt they’re wearing. Scoff all you like at that assertion, but the reality is that kids on Instagram aren’t navigating new waters so much as they are navigating old waters in new ways and learning important lessons in the process.
This demystification of Instagram (and social media generally) does help the older and lamer among us see things for what they really are, but it also helps guide the conversation into new directions. We like to focus on strictly the negative (and, indeed, Social Animals does spend a good amount of time dissecting the negative ramifications and effects of the platform) without looking at the potential for positive. The kids making it big thanks to Instagram are the kids actually doing something with the platform. Hamza didn’t get to work with Kanye just because of his follower count. He got the follower count thanks to his work, and it was his work that got him the job with Kanye.
True, most kids aren’t going to be getting jobs with Kanye because of their interesting selfies, but there are also deeper lessons these kids are learning. How to socialize and interact, how to present themselves, how to exist in a rapidly changing world. Even without massive jobs or endorsement deals, even without going to amazing lengths for Instagram notoriety, these are important lessons that all of us need to have given to us.
Social Animals is not only an excellent and engaging primer on what Instagram is and how it works, it’s also a deep and insightful deconstruction of modern youth culture that goes behind the reactionary headlines to look at what the daily existence of a modern teen is like. It’s an amazing portrait of three amazing kids, who each in their own way represent so many millions of other kids out there right now, just waiting for their time to come up. It’s an important film, one that expertly dissects a social phenomenon and presents it in a new, fascinating light.
