Conclusion: Not Another Teen Movie?

Released in 2001, Not Another Teen Movie was released to a public that had become familiar to the point of exhaustion with the genre’s conventions. Along with other similarly-titled spoof films, including Scary Movie, Date Movie and Dance Flick, Not Another Teen Movie was intended as disposable fare that would capitalise on the vitality of teen movies in the 1990s whose popularity reached well beyond their intended youth audience. Not Another Teen Movie is a pastiche – both in the sense of a knowing imitation, and as an indiscriminate mish-mash of the teen movie’s typical attributes. Thus, the film is set at John Hughes High, in tribute to the veteran director, and the plot is loosely modelled on the makeover narrative of She’s All That while also incorporating elements from other recent teen movies.

Making Over: Gender and Class at the High School Prom

The high school is one of the most recognisable features of the Hollywood teen movie, one whose setting itself usually guarantees a focus on its teenage inhabitants rather than on the adults that attend to them. However, prior to the mid- 1980s, the genre largely focused on its protagonists’ activities outside of the school, in youth-oriented spaces such as the drive-in cinema and, latterly, the mall. Even Grease, ostensibly set at Rydell High, has one of its narrative’s key junctures – the final reunion between Danny and Sandy – occur at the carnival, an event staged to celebrate the conclusion of the characters’ schooling. That teenagers are now more often portrayed within high school can largely be attributed to the work of John Hughes, who wrote, directed and produced a significant number of teen movies in the 1980s. Chief among these was The Breakfast Club, which established a set of archetypal figures that have remained largely intact to this day.

Acting Up: Performing Masculine Delinquency in the Teen Movie

James Dean’s fatal car crash on 30 September 1955 ensured the actor’s swift canonisation as an icon of youth rebellion. This chapter examines Dean’s performance in Rebel Without a Cause, in addition to those of John Travolta in Grease and Christian Slater in Heathers. James Dean, to be sure, was a star. Will Scheibel observes the quasi-idolatry in which he was held even among his fellow performers, Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood, not to speak of the legions of fans whose acres of correspondence required Warner Brothers to create a dedicated mail service. Fascinated by the intense identifications that such magnetic performers cultivate with their audiences, Richard Dyer identifies the star as a complex nexus of texts, ideologies and desires. His seminal work continues to provide a touchstone for scholars working in star studies, and testifies to the enduring ideological and textual basis for stardom. Since then, a new and related field of celebrity studies has taken account of the extraneous labour in which film stars are now routinely obliged to engage (as well, of course, as those for whom fame itself is a vocation).

Becoming Other: The Posthuman and the Teen Movie

In 1999, N. Katherine Hayles argued that ‘we are all posthuman now’ owing to our daily interactions with intelligent machines. If moral panics about the time teenagers spend with screen media are to be believed, then present-day adolescents may have evolved into another life form entirely.1 Hayles’s conception of the posthuman is tinged with concern for the future; the very notion of human consciousness merged with computers calls up an association with the monstrous. As will become apparent, the question of the monstrous is a significant one for the analysis of the teen movie, particularly given the history of teenagers themselves as liminal figures removed from the more clearly defined identities of child or adult. However, William Brown observes that, like many a ‘post’, the posthuman should not be conceived as an identity that is wholly removed from the human, but rather a viewpoint that offers a perspective on the contingent position of humans in the world. The posthuman, then, offers a critical distance from human subjectivity, which allows us to perceive the white, male, Eurocentric assumptions that continue to underpin not only the conception of the human, but the tenets of liberal humanism.

Rethinking the Teen Movie

There have always been teenagers. But it was only in 1904 that American psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s ground-breaking publication, Adolescence: its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sex, Crime and Education, established the existence of a hitherto undocumented period of ‘storm and stress’ between childhood and adulthood (Hall 1904: 2). As the case studies in later chapters will demonstrate, it is this sense of liminality that motivates my interest in the construction of identity found in the Hollywood teen movie. Here, I address both the evolution of the on-screen teenager in Hollywood cinema and, in tandem, the various ways in which film scholars have conceived the teen movie as a genre. With this understanding of how the field has developed over time, I explain how this book aims to rethink the Hollywood teen movie.

Looking Back: Nostalgia, Postfeminism and the Teen Movie

Throughout this book, it has been clear that the Hollywood teen movie has close links with the youth culture of its time. Yet as this chapter will demonstrate, this equation between contemporary youth culture and the Hollywood films that claim to represent it is not nearly as clear-cut as one might expect. For Timothy Shary, the genre is trapped in a peculiar double bind that determines its relationship with the past: while film-makers aggressively target a youth audience, young people themselves lack the experience or means to produce amass-market feature film, as a result of which, these representations of youth are ‘filtered through an adult lens’. An oblique refraction of the youth culture of the past – often that of the director themselves – can therefore be regarded as a central feature of the genre as a whole.

Introduction

A telling incident occurs near the beginning of She’s All That (Robert Iscove, 1999), a reworking of Pygmalion that was typical of the highly allusive cycle of teen movies in the late 1990s. The film introduces us to Zack Siler (Freddie Prinze Jr), who is not only the class president and captain of the football team, but also an A-grade student with a probable Ivy League future. To no great surprise, he later adds Prom King to these accolades. It is in this context that we view the character walking into school and spotting a photo portrait of himself which bears the caption, ‘Zack Siler: Student Body President 1999’. Seemingly instinctively, he quickly moves his features into the smile and pose seen in the photograph. Although Zack is characterised by confidence and success, this brief moment reveals that this is an identity that has not emerged by chance, but is the result of continuous, repeated labour.