Necktie Youth and the desire to float above sedimented histories: Middle-class young adult disaffection and the struggle to reimagine the South African good life

This article analyses how Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s Necktie Youth (2015) explores representations of young adult, suburban South African fantasies of the post-apartheid ‘good life’. In conversation with popular film theorists, it argues that Necktie Youth interrogates a post-apartheid iteration of the current capitalist realist sensorium that produces divergent feelings of disaffection and/or vulnerability – two modes of affective adjudication that structure the psychosocial possibilities for imagining South Africa’s apartheid hauntings today. It further examines how the characters embody a disaffection towards their realities, at times pursuing an urge to disorganise their subjectivities through recreational drugs, which is aestheticised through motifs of floating . This motif of floating is read as an unarticulated, middle-class, young adult yearning to re-augment the predictability of post-apartheid space–time. It is through the film’s floating poetics that elements of racial capitalism, class inequality and neglected infrastructure are shown to produce counter-moods in contemporary South Africa. The film, it is argued, dramatises how neo-liberal urban South Africa compels these characters to find ways to bear their existential crises through forms of hypermediation and depressive hedonism.