"Let the little children come unto me"

 



So perhaps the now super-sensationalist E4 series Skins has finally gone the way of all shock-TV in trading its original subtlety and humour - or at least lightness of touch - in portraying the teenage underworld of Bristol, for a more shock-and-awe/smash-and-grab approach. Still, what it has maintained throughout is an overriding preference and sympathy for the boozing, pill-popping, promiscuous wastrels - at the expense of the adults who, celebrity not withstanding, unfailing come across as dull, stupid, thoughtless, lumbering or downright evil.

While the easy condemnation of Daily Mailers, for whom Skins fits into the Ban This Filth list of programmes, corrupting the innocent, eager minds of our children,* what is really striking in this contrast is that despite the sex, drugs and foul language their authenticity and freedom returns to them a new definition of innocence. This of course sits oddly with their total eschewal of traditional forms of morality, but perhaps in our post-60s secular age it is authenticity that provides the new framework of ethics.+

Of course for the last several thousand years ethical systems have been dominated by an eschewal of self - a kenosis (emptying) of self - for the other. But while this is all very well if we’re martyring ourselves out to another world, or if we’re brashly empowered jocks who need taking down a peg, for the one who has been othered, it is conservative rather than radical, and there will always be an emperor Constantine to maximise that effect. Series 4 of Skins has a real thing about names and self identification. So we have Katie at her nadir moment screaming “I’m Katie fucking Fitch, who the fuck are you?”, and of course the climactic final moment of the series: “I don’t think you know what I am mate... I’m a fucking waste of space... Just a stupid kid... I got no sense....A criminal...I’m no fucking use...I am nothing...so please... please... get it into your...you know...into your bonce....That you killed my friend.... And... I’m Cook... I’M COOK!”

Both these scenes are about authenticated otherness, about the one whose voice has been stolen, by those in authority and the fake WAGs and wankers, screwing their courage into a ball and flinging it out in high density self-expression. This sort of “everyone’s-ok” right-on attitude is pastiched in scenes such as High School Musical’s "Stick to the Status Quo", but in Skins it achieves a properly tragic quality as the flawed characters are dragged down to their fated ends in the full glory of their realised flaws, which nevertheless preserve them ethically as authentic.

Now one might argue here that, although this might make them Enlightenment heroes, independent, free and authentically themselves, theologically they are no more to be praised than Milton’s Satan, no more justified than Macbeth. But in every series what is most remarkable, most notable, is the incredible solidarity shared amongst the teenagers, the seemingly limitless forgiveness they show one another - between Freddie and Cook fighting over Effie, Effie nearly killing Katie in series 3, but then being the person who helps pick her up when all is lost (by teaching her how to smoke!), Naomi betraying Emily, before their textbook happy-ending reconciliation. It is this “solidarity of the shaken”, as one theologian has called it,§ this self-authentication in otherness, that hopes, believes and endures all things.

They may not have taken on a Pauline eschewal of fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, the effeminate or abusers of themselves, but there is more of Christ about them than most Christians I have met. So perhaps authenticity does provide a clue to contemporary ethics in realising a counter-point to the saintly self-giving of the holy empowered. And perhaps from this other city the authentic poor provide their own tragic homage to what it is to participate in the crucified God.

*There is a suggestion of irony in these articles. Note the accompanying erotic image and what about the critique of True Blood: “More offensive than all this is the sheer distasteful nature of the content. There's oral sex, overt discussion of genitalia, graphic sex scenes bordering on the deviant, and foul language"? Apart from seeming ridiculously dated, the building up of criticism to that pinnacle of “foul language” is hard to take seriously.

+ For a great Laudamus te to authenticity,
and for its relation to secularism, see Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which I’ve spent the last year reading for review but still only got to page 400.

§ Andrew Shanks, see his The Other Calling and Faith in Honesty, among others for this pervasive theme in his work.