Richard Ayoade’s coming-of-age comedy Submarine amplifies the feeling of having everything you want to control in your life slip away. I come back to it every few years with new perspectives, understanding, and a faint sympathy for my younger self.
To be an adolescent is to have a viscous uncertainty sit atop all your other emotions. You’re completely unaware of who you are yet, therefore, you’re more likely to be cruel—not an excuse, but an undeniable reason for unsavoury teenage conduct. Unhatched, you just stew in your doubt until it sputters out of you uncontrollably.
The innately human desperation to be cared for, to be liked, is of the highest priority. I remember the second I had a crush, the cache of people I told, grasping desperately at potential closeness, intimacy more sacred than secrecy.
In Submarine, Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) is an unpopular 15-year-old boy who is infatuated with Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige). Still, like many maladaptive and antisocial coming-of-age protagonists before him (if you described Submarine as Rushmore in Wales, I wouldn’t blink), he is more in love with a particular world within her that he’s convinced himself, through various observations, exists than Jordana herself.
Despite being so very distant from the white male insecure teen depicted in these types of films, I remember finding myself consistently understanding and identifying with them. Was this due to how cruel I also was as a teenager? You didn’t get to see young black girls leading aesthetically pleasing coming-of-age films with a picturesque seaside background to match the story’s emotionality when Submarine was released. There was no sign of girls that looked like me making mistakes or learning, so I found comfort in this off-with-the-fairies, sometimes-too-cruel white boy.
What attracted me to Submarine may have been its Tumblr popularity, gif-sets of Jordana in her red heart-shaped sunglasses and the glittering waters lapping up on Swansea beach during a lilac sunset. Potentially it was the Alex Turner soundtrack, someone I was besotted with since I was ten years old and watching Arctic Monkeys performances on the television, sitting cross-legged and close enough to the screen to bump my nose against it. It also presented a version of adolescence that I wanted to emulate. I wanted to be a thoughtful teenager that pondered on people’s behaviours and tried to make sense of the world around them the way Oliver does, yet there wasn’t even time for that, as I was trying to get everyone to like me as much as possible. Being the strange kid on the side with a notebook didn’t gel with everything else I was trying to be, and the teenage experience isn’t something that allows space for multiplicity.
Oliver’s love for the written word is used throughout the film to depict his disconnect from people outside of his mind. Both in his relationship with Jordana and amid his parents’ marital problems, he resists direct communication; instead we see his incessant note taking, letter writing, and voice-over narration. Ayoade presents not only Oliver’s lack of social skills here but also his self-importance; he won’t allow himself to say things directly because everything must be a scheme under his reign.
I adored anything handwritten as a teenager: passing notes in class, writing in my locked(!) diary, creating narratives of what conversations and occurrences would happen between me and others at school, even planning my ideal future adult life. The reality is that life doesn’t work in such a way. You cannot plan things to the point where you have control over them, you cannot fix things at fifteen years old just because you’ve made all the observations and done all the research—something Oliver comes to learn.
Once Oliver discovers from Jordana that her mother has cancer, it instantly becomes an item on his ‘to fix’ list, not realising that all that is asked from him is to be with her. The preoccupation of his parents’ marital problems, which aren’t his to fix, take the front seat as he fails to support Jordana, in some ways punishing her for not existing within the image he created. The vividness of her wholeness and vulnerability, especially once she shares the information about her mother, leaves Oliver jarred and lost within the sea of his mind and resolution-oriented brain. Failing to realise that the only clear resolution would be true companionship. Jordana’s heart breaks, and his follows when she writes him a breakup letter. The only language he understands and that will shatter him right back is the written word.
I lack the charming lilt of a Welsh accent, or the pass that’s given to boys like Oliver, or even the mystification that gets pushed upon a Jordana. Regardless, I find myself running back to these characters every few years. The nostalgia and scenic views are important and specific ingredients to the meal of this film, but what I return for is the lesson. I don’t imagine Jordana and Oliver spending a lifetime together, after the film’s ambiguous but positive final shots, but I can imagine them existing importantly and sharply within each other’s minds during whatever their futures may hold. It ends a film that was full of words with action.
Words by Jasmin Barré