The film is the second in quick succession to be based on a novel by teenage-fiction doyen, John Green. While last year’s The fault in our stars was a stark, honest tale of a pair of teenage cancer sufferers, Paper towns is a bit of a flight of fancy.
Despite knowing each other since childhood, Q and Margo’s relationship sparks into life one night when Q acts as Margo’s driver, ferrying her around town as she enacts revenge on high schools friends and flames who have wronged her. As the night ends, they look out across Orlando, slow dance to a ‘muzak’ version of ‘Lady in red,’ and discuss ‘paper towns’: Margo’s imagery for the shallow lives and fakery she sees around her.
The next morning, Margo disappears. What follows is a search for Margo from a desperate Q and his ragtag bunch of friends, following clues Margo has left behind and travelling all over America.
A moment of critique: Paper towns isn’t very good. All the heart and honesty that made The fault in our stars so achingly beautiful is absent, and while the fact that the story is obviously less ‘real’ than TFIOS makes a straight comparison unfair, this kooky story is told unimaginatively with a pretty straight face. Despite this, my screening was full of teenage girls; something about these stories, whether they’re about love in the face of death, or disappearing weirdos, strikes a chord with young people.
Young people won’t find their identity in sexual escapades
The interesting thing about the film is that as the film progresses, Margo’s role and presence becomes more and more marginalised; while her wild spirit still hangs over the piece, the story and journey is Q’s. Margo’s questions, during their early adventures, provoke Q into action: ‘You spend so much time worrying about future happiness; isn’t there something that can make you happy now?’ ‘The way you feel tonight, shouldn’t you feel that way your entire life?’
Margo’s life and her challenge is one of adventure, echoing that teenage cry of ‘there must be more than this.’ But it’s deeper and more subtle than mere roadtrips or latenight escapades; what Margo sees in Q is a guy constantly finding his identity in other people: in his relationships with others and the way he is perceived by them. It takes the conclusion of the film for Q to see that and to break free of it – he’s not going to ‘find’ himself in Margo, he’s not going to ‘discover’ himself in his relationship with others; his identity is his own.
This is perhaps the greatest truism in the film; as we work with young people we see them scrabbling around in the mess of teenage existence to discover their identity, placing it in short-term relationships, sexual escapades and friendships; as we’ve all seen, that never ends well. It’s not only a teenage problem: those problems we have with ourselves, that aching, that sense of ‘ennui’ is never going to be fixed by a marriage, a job or a better church. We know the trite answer to all of this is to find our identity in Christ, but figuring out who we are, what we’re good at and how we function with others is more complicated than that: of course we want to point them towards a heavenly identity, but we also need to allow space for them to discover who they are, to lose themselves in their own identity for a while and allow God to accompany them on that.
The danger is that we, and young people, overcomplicate this; the film ends with the reminder that often the key things, the important things, were in front of us all along, and that in the hunt for our big, over-arching identity, we miss the defining moments of humanity around us. As Q heads north in search of his mysterious, undefinable love interest, he runs the risk of abandoning his friends, dreams and responsibilities at home. In the midst of teenage uncertainty, it’s important that young people are able to concentre and live in the moment, and that we don’t heap so much pressure and so many decisions on top of them, that they’re unable to enjoy the life and excitement of adolescence.
Paper towns reminds us of the complexity of adolescent development. It reminds us that teenagers are far from the finished article, but that in the midst of that exploration does just lie challenges, but life, hope and opportunity.
