Teen Film

What makes a film a teen film? And why, when it represents such powerful and enduring ideas about youth and adolescence, is teen film usually viewed as culturally insignificant? Teen film is usually discussed as a representation of the changing American teenager, highlighting the institutions of high school and the nuclear family, and experiments in sexual development and identity formation. But not every film featuring these components is a teen film and not every teen film is American. Arguing that teen film is always a story about becoming a citizen and a subject, Teen Film presents a new history of the genre, surveys the existing body of scholarship, and introduces key critical tools for discussing teen film. Surveying a wide range of films including The Wild One, Heathers, Akira and Donnie Darko, the book's central focus is on what kind of adolescence teen film represents, and on teen film's capacity to produce new and influential images of adolescence.

Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen is a detailed look at the depiction of teens on film and its impact throughout film's history. Timothy Shary looks at the development of the teen movie - the rebellion, the romance, the sex and the horror - up to contemporary portrayals of ever-changing youth. Films studied include Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Splendor in the Grass (1961), Carrie (1976), The Breakfast Club (1985), and American Pie (1999).

What is 'fun' about the Hollywood version of girlhood? Through re-evaluating notions of pleasure and fun, The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film forms a study of Hollywood girl teen films between 2000-2010. By tracing the aesthetic connections between films such as Mean Girls (Waters, 2004), Hairspray (Shankman, 2007), and Easy A (Gluck, 2010), the book articulates the specific types of pleasure these films offer as a means to understand how Hollywood creates gendered ideas of fun. Rather than condemn these films as 'guilty pleasures' this book sets out to understand how they are designed to create experiences that feel as though they express desires, memories, or fantasies that girls supposedly share in common. Providing a practical model for a new approach to cinematic pleasures The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film proposes that these films offer a limited version of girlhood that feels like potential and promise but is restricted within prescribed parameters.

Teen films of the 1980s were notorious for treating consent as irrelevant, with scenes of boys spying in girls' locker rooms and tricking girls into sex. While contemporary movies now routinely prioritize consent, ensure date rape is no longer a joke, and celebrate girls' desires, sexual consent remains a problematic and often elusive ideal in teen films. In Consent Culture and Teen Films, Michele Meek traces the history of adolescent sexuality in US cinema and examines how several films from the 2000s, including Blockers, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, The Kissing Booth, and Alex Strangelove, take consent into account. Yet, at the same time, Meek reveals that teen films expose how affirmative consent ("yes means yes") fails to protect youth from unwanted and unpleasant sexual encounters. By highlighting ambiguous sexual interactions in teen films—such as girls' failure to obtain consent from boys, queer teens subjected to conversion therapy camps, and youth manipulated into sexual relationships with adults—Meek unravels some of consent's intricacies rather than relying on oversimplification. By exposing affirmative consent in teen films as gendered, heteronormative, and cis-centered, Consent Culture and Teen Films suggests we must continue building a more inclusive consent framework that normalizes youth sexual desire and agency with all its complexities and ambivalences.

An analysis of novelistic explorations of modernism in mathematics and its cultural interrelations.

A fascinating account of the evolution of the "teen movie" analyzes more than one hundred films for and about teenagers, discusses the relationship between teen movies and the youth movement, and offers a comprehensive filmography of teen flicks. Original.

Born in the drive-in theatre backseats of the 1970s, the demonic fun of Teen Movie Hell ignited the 1980s VCR, cable TV, and multiplex booms that burned well into the 1990s. Author Mike 'McBeardo' McPadden passes righteous judgment, one boobs-and-boner opus at a time, plus penetrating insight from Eddie Deezen (Grease, Zapped!), Samm Deighan, Kat Ellinger, Wendy McClure, Katie Rife, Heather Drain, Lisa Carver, Rachel McPadden, Liz Mason, Christina Ward, and Kier-La Janisse.

Acclaimed writer of This is Uncool and Popcorn turns his attention to the (first ever) look at the teen movie Everyone undergoes some kind of teenage trauma, and a fundamental way of coping, or rite of passage, is the teen movie. Yet until now there has been no book that explores this successful movie sub-genre with any depth. Step forward Garry Mulholland, who, taking his cue from his previous, hugely acclaimed pop culture list books (This is Uncool and Fear of Music), seeks to create a pantheon of the very finest teen movies, or in Garry Mulholland's words: 'I'll be doing what film critics have been loathe to do since the 1950s, and taking the entire subculture of teen movies seriously, making a constant and compelling argument that Grease and A Nightmare on Elm Street tell us a great deal more about modern life and human nature than Citizen Kane and The Godfather.' From Kes to Fame, Badlands to the Breakfast Club, and National Lampoon's Animal House to Twilight, Garry Mulholland re-evaluates a much maligned genre, and brings it all back again: the good, the bad and the traumatic.