DIVERGENT and conformist

I slipped into my seat, the darkened room concealing my embarrassed attempts to merge into the shadowy forms of Birmingham’s spotty youth. An old dear, clad in colourful leggings and Dr Marten boots, wishing she were eighteen years old and not a product of the jowls of middle-age. The film began and the audience and I disappeared.
I confess…I have never read best selling dystopian, YA novel, Divergent. Thus, watching the film on Wednesday I entered this particular post-apocalyptic realm for the first time. Seduced by the propaganda surrounding the novel and the film, were my expectations fulfilled?
Divergent is a masterpiece of formulaic invention. A perfect crafting and unison of the conventions of two of the most popular literary genres. It works…and it appeals to something within many of us. To the young, it reflects a desire for self-expression, to be recognised as the individuals they truly are. To those, slightly older (like me!), it constitutes a hymn to a time when being oneself was more important than escaping from oneself.
The ideological subtext of the film (and presumably the novel) equates divergence with freedom from labels and strata, but warns the audience that divergence/difference is punished and that those who dare to embrace it will be cast out of mainstream society. This idea is about as revolutionary as using a cassette recorder in the digital age. However, it appeals to the unsullied mind. The attraction of outsider status is as conformist as the mechanics of Divergent. At eighteen years of age, only the genuinely different do not long to be.
I left the cinema, clicking my pink boot laces and rustling a carrier bag, flanked by an ocean of fresh-faced hoodies, who all go to university and all look the same.