Through the looking glass
Winslet stars as a mother who deals with social media's effect on teenagers
“I know one mother who has a child who's doing OK: not interested in social media, super active, very creative and is coping with this chapter in her life,” says Kate Winslet. “That is literally one. And I know so many mothers with teenagers.”
Winslet is speaking about the issues raised by I Am Ruth, a feature-length episode of the British anthology series I Am... (The show isn't available in Canada.) Winslet plays the title character, a mother struggling to help her teenage daughter with depression brought on by her relationship with social media.
In Dominic Savage's film, Ruth's daughter Freya is played by Winslet's real-life daughter Mia Threapleton. Savage and Winslet developed the story, which explores body image, social media and self-harm. It also zeros in on mobile phone addiction as one of the factors in Freya's crisis. At one point, Ruth says she wants to take Freya's phone and smash it “into a thousand pieces and s--t on it and flush it down the f-----g loo.” Has Winslet felt that frustration?
“Yeah, definitely,” she says. “But I want to smash my own phone and s--t on it and flush it down the loo! This was completely improvised, this film. Everything was made up in the moment. So many of these words are words I have said, or that Mia has said, or that our friends' daughters or my friends have said.”
Today's teenagers, Winslet says, “are growing up in a much more sexualized society. It's horrifying what children can access online these days. What upsets me most are the ideas that are being fed to young boys and young men about what women's bodies look like. Because so much of that is inaccurate. So women are automatically feeling judged or insecure, or scrutinized.”
In response, she says young women are digitally altering their bodies. “And that is enormously sad,” she says. “Because when that person then looks in the mirror and sees what they really look like, half the time they don't like what they see.”
Winslet, 47, has previously talked about being bullied because of her body at school and at the start of her film career, when Titanic director James Cameron mocked her as “Kate Weighs-a-lot.”
“Because of what I had experienced, it was really important to me that we looked at that,” she says. “It resonates with so many people, so many parents, who just watch their children refusing to eat (saying) `I'm fat. I hate myself. I'm not gonna go out. I'm not gonna wear this.' These are sentences that come out of teenagers' mouths all the time, that parents hear all the time.”
Winslet has three children — Threapleton, who's 22, 18-yearold Joe Mendes (who also appears in the drama) and eight-year-old Bear Winslet. She hasn't let her own children on social media.
“You just say, `No, you can't have it.' And that's what I was able to say to mine,” she says. “We do not have social media, and my children are very grateful that they've not had it.”