Out of Order: Non-Linear Editing and the Coming-of-Age Story

The coming-of-age narrative has always been about the gap between past and present — the adult understanding that was unavailable to the adolescent experiencing the events being recalled. Non-linear storytelling, which uses temporal displacement to create irony and resonance between scenes, is in many ways a natural structural match for this subject matter. What has changed in recent years is the sophistication with which directors have used this alignment, particularly in television, where the multi-episode form allows more complex temporal architectures than feature film typically supports.

Euphoria and the Fragmented Self

Sam Levinson's Euphoria (HBO, 2019–present) uses non-linear structure not as an organizing narrative device but as a reflection of the fractured interiority of its protagonist, Rue (Zendaya). Episodes regularly move between Rue's current experience, her remembered past, her fantasized alternatives, and extended formal sequences (the theatrical musical number in season two's third episode, for instance) that operate outside conventional narrative time entirely.

The show's visual style — cinematographer Marcell Rév's use of extreme close-ups, saturated color, and camera movements that reflect emotional rather than physical geography — combines with this temporal instability to produce a viewing experience that is deliberately disorienting. This disorientation is thematic: the show is about adolescent consciousness as it is actually experienced (nonlinear, image-saturated, emotionally overwhelming) rather than as it is organized in retrospective adult narrative.

Zendaya won back-to-back Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2022 and 2023, becoming the youngest two-time winner of the award at 26.

Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade

Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade (2018) is, structurally, more linear than Euphoria — it follows its protagonist Kayla (Elsie Fisher, in a performance that earned her a Golden Globe nomination) through a single week of eighth grade in a largely chronological progression. But the film's relationship to time is complicated by its use of Kayla's self-produced YouTube videos, which address a future self who will have resolved the problems the film depicts, and by the gap between the confidence these videos project and the reality the rest of the film shows.

This structural irony — the character speaking to her future self in language that presupposes growth while we simultaneously watch her failing to achieve that growth — is a form of temporal non-linearity that does not require cutting between time periods. The film is simultaneously inside Kayla's present and aware of the distance between her present and the future she is addressing. Burnham, whose background is in YouTube comedy and the theatrical confessional performance of his own specials, brought to the material a specific understanding of how adolescents use self-produced media to construct and project a preferred self.

Lady Bird and the Ordinary Non-Linear

Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird (2017, A24) uses a less formally radical non-linearity — the film covers roughly one academic year in Sacramento, California, with occasional jumps and compressions that are signaled by intertitles. Its relationship to time is less experimental than Euphoria but more self-aware than conventional coming-of-age drama: scenes end before their emotional conclusions, conversations are interrupted, and the film's final sequence — Lady Bird arriving at college in New York, briefly understanding Sacramento from a distance — achieves its resonance through accumulated compression rather than dramatic event.

The film received five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. Gerwig became only the fifth woman nominated for Best Director. The screenplay was nominated for Best Original Screenplay and won the Writers Guild Award for Best Original Screenplay. Its influence on subsequent coming-of-age filmmaking — in particular its approach to the ordinary family scene as emotionally sufficient dramatic material — has been substantial.

Television's Structural Advantages

The multi-episode television form allows non-linear structures that feature films cannot sustain. A film has roughly 90-120 minutes to establish a temporal architecture and navigate it coherently; a television series has seasons. Euphoria uses the episode break as a structural device — each episode can occupy a different temporal register from the previous one, and the audience can absorb the displacement over days rather than seconds. This extended canvas is one reason the most formally ambitious coming-of-age storytelling of the past decade has appeared in prestige television rather than cinema.

Sources & Further Reading