Abstract
Coming of Age transclasse. Reflections on Netflix’ teen series Outer Banks (2020–): Scenes involving work are rather rare in coming-of-age series on tv. Instead, the focus is on everyday life at school, family and peer groups or, as in the Netflix series Outer Banks (2020–), on the long summer vacation as an adventure space. In the Outer Banks of North Carolina, an amphibious, hybrid landscape, everyone has the same goal: to find the gold treasure of the sunken Royal Merchant. Everyone shares the belief that wealth can free them from their personal problems, but also from their burdensome heritage. And yet, as the off-screen voice of the teenage narrator and protagonist John B. makes clear right at the beginning, there are two seemingly radically opposed ways of living: “It’s a sort of place where you either have two jobs or two houses.” Society is divided: the Pogues, people who work – mainly in the houses, gardens and yachts of the rich – and the Kooks, wealthy members of the leisure class. The characters all insist on their class identity and celebrate their separation from the other group. But over the course of the first season, it becomes apparent that class in Outer Banks is not necessarily reproduced in the way Bourdieu described it. Many characters are class transgressors (transclasse, cf. Jacquet 2018) and suffer from the constraints of their social roles. By linking the pursuit of quick money with the breaking open of past guilt, the series negotiates the question of reproduction and the possibilities of breaking out of it.
Lötscher, Christine