In his new book, Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies, Bruce Handy highlights Pauline Kael’s pan of American Graffiti, one of the few critical voices to stand athwart the tide of teen movies yelling, “Grow up, dinguses!”
“I think she diagnosed something real,” Handy allows. “But my hunch is that what she found so rankling was less the picture itself than the naïve seriousness of teenagers themselves, the narcissism of adolescence, the mythologizing that goes on inside the closed circuits of modern high schools.” Born in 1919, Kael had missed the rise of the teenager as a cultural force in America—the Boomer cohort of which comprised a consumer class nonpareil—and was forced to watch with bafflement from the outside as we were all supposed to take seriously folks whose biggest problems were cars and girls.
Handy’s book is a capable pop history, guiding us from early iterations of the teen movies brought to life by Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy in the late 1930s, to the modern action heroine embodied by Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and its sequels, and the modern symbol of chaste sexuality represented by Edward Cullen and Bella Swan in the Twilight series. In between, there would be movies both silly (like the beach pictures of Frankie and Annette) and self-serious (best represented by Rebel Without a Cause), but they all represented something real: the cohort’s power of the purse.
“The historian Joseph F. Kett distinguishes modern teenagers from earlier iterations in a single pithy sentence: ‘They are essentially consumers rather than producers,’” Handy writes. The rise of high schools and the decline of child labor led to a new, idle class of spenders, one that folks in the world of business quickly realized had potential as customers. Grace and Fred Hechinger, authors of the 1963 teen-panic book Teenage Tyranny, worried that marketers and producers, over-awed by the newfound spending power of the teenage set, meant that “American civilization … is in danger of becoming a teenage society, with permanently teenage standards of thought, culture, and goals.”
It was certainly something to chew on as I read the book in between screenings of The Fantastic Four: First Steps (a movie based on a comic book that debuted in 1961) and Superman, the latest (though certainly not last) gasps of the comic book-movie-industrial complex that has served as the dominant box office force for the last quarter-century or so. Between that and the Young Adult section’s odd dominance at Barnes & Noble, one doesn’t have to speculate too hard what it would be like to live in a teenaged tyranny: tastes seem to have arrested, globally, at around 15 or so.
At least we used to get movies about teens and for teens that still appealed to adults. Fast Times at Ridgemont High, writer Cameron Crowe’s adaptation of his own book about going undercover as a high school student, “was a movie made to speak directly to the generation watching it, but with an honesty and good humor that welcomes an adult audience as well—and which, four decades on, leaves the film feeling much less dated than most of its contemporaries.” Director Amy Heckerling pushed back against the studio’s desire for more adult supervision of the kids, and the results speak for themselves: This is a movie about a generation fending for itself both on the clock and in the bedroom.
And in the bathroom, of course; the film’s most famous scene may still be Judge Reinhold’s vision of Phoebe Cates. One gets the sense that Handy does not approve of this bit of titillation, highlighting an interview between Heckerling and Olivia Wilde, the director of critical darling Booksmart. “Wilde remarks that Cates’s topless scene was shot on the second day of production, and asks Heckerling what it was like directing a young actress in such a sensitive scene so early in Heckerling’s first feature,” noting that Wilde says to Heckerling, “You know you’re there to protect her.” Not so fast. “‘Actually, I wasn’t there protecting her,’ Heckerling responds, with admirable (I guess?) forthrightness. ‘She didn’t want to do it. And I was being the, like, cigar-chomping studio guy going, ‘You know, we’ve got to see your tits. … Boys are gonna wanna see that and I want them in the audience.’” Snide parenthetical in the original.
Heckerling was, of course, correct—there’s a reason Fast Times is a stone-cold classic while no one has thought about Booksmart since its release six years ago; one of the reasons was her willingness to titillate—and you can feel Handy’s discomfort with this fact in his avoidance of virtually any serious discussion about the subgenre of teen movie we might call the teen sex romp. American Pie, Meatballs, Porky’s: These films have largely been written out of his teen movie canon for being too problematic. It feels as though Handy would happily do the same to John Hughes—the greatest writer-director of teen comedies in movie history, and one who just happened to be a political conservative and good friends with P. J. O’Rourke—if he could get away with it. Alas, we are stuck with classics like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science even if the movies occasionally deployed a now-forbidden stereotype for comic effect, used words that would give modern audiences the vapors, or dared to, uh, create the perfect woman via computer program.
“The Teen Movie” is both a genre unto itself—one that conjures visions of shopping malls and car rides—and almost infinitely malleable, encompassing not only the work of Hughes, but also Rian Johnson’s high school noir, Brick, and Wes Anderson’s hyper-stylized coming of age flicks Rushmore and Moonrise Kingdom. There’s the goofy comedy of Napoleon Dynamite, the existential dread of Donnie Darko, and Scream’s expert encapsulation of the terror of teendom’s self-awareness of its own fate as cannon fodder for the gibbering masses.
This is, of course, the text (not even the subtext) of The Hunger Games—a film about teenage “tributes” from the hinterlands brought together to die for the crowds of Panem’s Capitol—and it’s probably fitting that the teen movie’s final (or at least most recent) form is that of youths battling to the death against each other under the panopticon’s watchful eye for the cheering masses. Besides, teens have been going off to die for our entertainment for generations, from war films like All Quiet on the Western Front to Halloween and Carrie. “In that context, The Hunger Games is merely a refinement, a conceptual tweak,” Handy writes. The sex romp is out; the heartfelt slaughter is in. Progress, folks! You have to love it.
Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies
by Bruce Handy
Simon & Schuster, 384 pp., $30
Sonny Bunch is culture editor of the Bulwark, where he hosts the podcasts Across the Movie Aisle and The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood.
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