If you’re a parent, Lauren Greenfield’s new doc about teens and social media ‘is a horror movie’
Documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield had spent her day with a group of high school students when a startling revelation came up that compelled her to go home and ask her two sons, then about 14 and 20, a question: “Is BDSM really a trend?”
“Oh, yeah, choking is what we’re told girls want,” she recalled one of her sons saying in reference to the risky sexual practice that some teens engage in.
It was 2021 and Greenfield was in the middle of her latest creative frontier: delving into the lives of the first generation raised on social media.
She was interested in unlocking an intimate glimpse of how social media has shaped adolescent minds after seeing her own kids’ distinctive relationship with it.
“They’re different generations,” she said recently from her office in Venice. “My eldest is a reader, my youngest gets his news from TikTok. Just seeing the difference and being concerned about the younger one being on a lot was part of the inspiration for this.”
“Social Studies,” a five-part series premiering Friday at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado and arriving Sept. 27 on FX, is Greenfield’s latest foray into documenting teen life in Los Angeles.
