The Older Man. It’s such a cliché, it’s no wonder my first reaction to Julie Taylor sleeping with her T.A. irked me. In fact, it is one of only about three plot points that particularly bugged me about an otherwise brilliant series.
As I’ve written about recently, Julie falls into a long line of teen drama characters who have gotten involved in some sort of relationship with an Older Man. The story of a teen girl, seduced or romanced by a young teacher, or college senior, who for some reason (usually not fully explored) takes a liking to a young woman.
The Older Man is not only a cliché I’ve seen before, it’s a cliché that’s been repeated, tweaked, and played for various angles and effects, a lot. So it doesn’t seem surprising that spotting an Older Man in my beloved Friday Night Lights would make me roll my eyes. Why fall back on a tired old trope, when your series has been so unique and original, guys?
It was a gut reaction, a cringe in response to a common cliché that I don’t particularly like. Usually it’s the believability thing, I mean seriously, what T.A. is sleeping with a first year student?! (I’ve been a T.A. I can say from experience, we don’t think about our students like that, or at least not most of us, or at least not often.) Which is exactly what I was thinking when Julie ends up sleeping with her (married) T.A. shortly into her first semester of university.
But after thinking about this more, and getting prepared to rant about it here (some of which ended up in my previous post on the subject) I decided my reaction was just that: a gut glitch against a cliché. In actuality, on Friday Night Lights, the story is told in a dramatic and moving (if not totally believable) way. Despite the contrived circumstances, and the implausibility of the older man actually initiating a sexual relationship with a student, from our perspective as an audience who has gotten to know Julie for the past three years of her life, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she would fall for this man.
Julie is attracted to older men. It has been built into her character since season 2, when she began seriously flirting with another lifeguard, an Older Man whom she worked with in the summer. Pressing for something more, her flirting is met with missed cues, and results in embarrassment and hurt feelings. Following that episode, she initiates a friendship with a teacher at her school, a relationship that is hard to say for sure was not an attempt at something romantic. Her mom definitely suspected that it crossed the lines of appropriate teacher-student relations. Once again Julie is subject to the teen horror of embarrassment when her mother interferes, scolding the Older Man for his part in their unconventional friendship. So by the time she reaches college, this attraction to older men manifests in an affair with her T.A. who turns out to be married. Why not?
In retrospect, I should have expected her to crush on the first interesting Older Man she came across after leaving home. But I was so wrapped up in the frustration of clichés and ridiculous reasoning for why a 30 year old grad student would jeopardize his marriage, reputation, and career for an 18 year old girl he just met, that I couldn’t concentrate on Julie, or what she was going through, at all. And while that narrative finagling perhaps didn’t fully pan out, I have to concede that in terms of characterization, thinking about it with Julie at the centre, this cliché was pretty appropriate and narratively consistent.
