Page 101 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CHAPTER 4

should not. Among the films that fall within the genre, several emerge as
archetypal: Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Blackboard Jungle (1955), The
Young Stranger (1957), The Graduate (1967), Alice’s Restaurant (1969),
Easy Rider (1969), Saturday Night Fever (1978), Breaking Away (1979),
The Breakfast Club (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986). We focus our dis-
cussion of youth culture films on Rebel Without a Cause, Alice’s Restau-
rant, Saturday Night Fever, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day
Off. These are among the most commercially successful and artistically
interesting contemporary youth films, and they span the entire postwar
period. They reflect and to some extent help to define important aspects
of (and changes in) the youth culture of the past forty years.
The third condition establishes a film as worthy of serious analysis,
thereby including Alice’s Restaurant and Rebel Without a Cause, perhaps
even High School Confidential (1958), but excluding, for example, High
School Big Shot (1959), High School Caesar (1960; “He had more rackets
than Al Capone!”), and College Confidential (1960), as well as the popular
Porky’s series of the early 1980s. These movies fall into a larger category of
“teen exploitation films.” Like the youth culture film, teen exploitation films
are also directed at youthful popular audiences, many are commercially
successful (although most are not), and they typically feature youth and
adults in conflict. However, these films exploit their surface similarity to the
more serious youth films on which they are often modeled simply to boost
ticket sales, or more recently, the rental market. Most do not even pretend,
in artistic treatment or social vision, to take young people seriously.
The youth culture film, in contrast, recognizes and affirms the youthful
vantage point from which the adult world is critiqued. The genre thereby
expresses in the symbols, myths, and media of contemporary popular
culture the classic emphasis of Western Romanticism on youthful purity
and the moral corruption of age. The differences in the way the films tell
this Western morality tale of the cult of adolescence constitute the basic
thematic change in serious popular films about young people released
after World War II. 36
Juxtaposing the youth culture film with the genre’s prehistory in the
Andy Hardy series clarifies its distinctive thematic perspective.

Adolescence as Apprenticeship: Prewar Youth Film

I won’t be any trouble to anybody.
—Andy Hardy

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