Can you be a successful teenage artist?
In cinema, yes!
A couple of weekends ago, the debut film of Youtube creator-turned-filmmaker Kane Parsons—liminal space, horror movie Backrooms—opened at number one around the world and swiftly broke a bunch of records. Earning $81.4 million in just three days, it became the largest opening for an original horror in history, A24’s highest grossing for a movie on opening weekend, and one of the top 15 highest openings for an R-rated movie ever. It also made Parsons the youngest director in history to helm a number one movie at the global box office. “The new king of the box office,” Vulture pointed out earlier this week, “is 20 years old.”
Parsons turns 21 later this month, but made Backrooms when he was 19. What were you doing at 19? In a K-hole in university? Drinking in a parking lot behind the bins? Spending most of your time figuring out what you were going to do with the long life ahead of you? To hear that someone has managed to figure their shit out before you is always loaded with a sense of envy. Sometimes it’s sheer talent; other times it’s luck. But there’s no denying that squeezing the juice out of your creative fruits when you’re young, whether you’re making art by yourself or working in the indie movie studio system, can often yield memorable—sometimes legendary—results.
This feels all the more prescient because the movie that’s trailing one spot behind it is another horror from a young YouTuber-turned-auteur: Obsession, directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker. In third position? The new Star Wars movie Mandalorian & Grogu, which fell off a steep cliff after its opening weekend. (Backrooms outperformed that film three-fold this past Wednesday.)
Though this feels like an anomaly in box office history, the prodigious young director is not a new thing. Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at 26; Jaws is the work of a 27-year-old Steven Spielberg. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles— the three-hour famously uneventful domestic drama, recently voted by Sight & Sound as the greatest film of all time—was directed by a 25-year-old Chantal Akerman. Xavier Dolan earned his enfant terrible status because he debuted at Cannes, with his film I Killed My Mother, when he was 19. The difference here is that, maybe Jaws aside, it takes a lot for a young director to achieve notable box office success. He’s achieved lifelong success before the life has really begun.
Nowadays, I run into more and more artists—musicians mostly, but actors and directors too—who are convinced that they are wilting before their frontal cortex is formed. The Billie Eilish effect, I call it. When Eilish debuted at the age of 14, and fairly soon after became the biggest artist in the world, there were a glut of alt-pop musicians who tried to follow in her footsteps, and make it before they’d turned 18. Olivia Rodrigo—Driver’s License dropped when she was 17—felt like her successor in that regard. Sombr’s self-sufficient songwriter status, Grammy-nominated and lauded by Taylor Swift at barely 20, also felt sort of unique. Youth feels front and center in the pop industry especially, where appearance harbors more importance than for comparatively discreet filmmakers, to the point that the “stage age” has become a thing. I’ve heard of many artists—even guitar-toting men—substracting four or five years from their real age to appear more prodigious.
Does it matter? Sure, but there’s also the reverse—the beauty of having time. In the pop sphere, it took a decade of graft for us to pay full attention to Zara Larsson. Ryan Beatty, who started unveiling parts of his fourth album this week, had a whole first chapter as a heavily-steered Radio Disney teeny bopper that felt entirely incongruous to the genius, country and folk work he makes now. It feels like a full circle moment that, in addition to writing on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, he fed into fellow escapee Miley Cyrus’ last record. You do not have to be brilliant as a teenager to ever be brilliant.
Still, I’m on a comedown from a Cannes Film Festival where the really old heads (50+ vibes) produced some of the least interesting, or down right bad, work. Maybe we should be scheduling a moratorium on how long we can work, rather than how long we have to wait before we make our first thing? Heck, give a million dollars and a trusty support network to a 15-year-old director. Good ideas come from our untapped dreams, rather than when our wells are old and empty.
If you’re Parsons, where do you go from here? Whatever comes next is his carte blanche moment, his opportunity to make whatever the fuck he wants. Blockbuster franchise deal? An even weirder arthouse moment? Nope. He wants to go back to YouTube for a bit, where the measurement of expectation isn’t measured in dollar signs.
Bleak Week is unfolding in major moviegoing cities around the world. If you like your movies sad as hell then check it out here.
I just got back from Barcelona for Primavera Sound and survived the washout on Thursday night. Oklou’s “harvest sky” during a torrential downpour? Lowkey transcendent.
(Thank you Cupra for having me here btw <3)
New Natanya is fantastic.