Teens on screen

A LOVELORN John Travolta pining for Olivia Newton-John may not, at first glance, represent film at its dazzling zenith, but film buff Garry Mulholland begs to differ.

Stranded at the Drive-In, the opening line to one of the best-loved songs from Grease (1978), is the title of the Mulholland’s latest book, which attempts to list the 100 Best Teen Movies.

“Not only do we get a cinema reference,” says Mulholland in his introduction of the song Sandy, “but a neat summing up of a few of the key elements of teen fiction: thwarted romance, peer pressure, school, the quest for night-time pleasure, fear of humiliation.”

Of course, no one takes teen movies seriously. They’re all about hormonal angst and ridiculous serial killers, bad hair-dos and the Prom. Aren’t they? Replace the word ‘school’ with ‘work’ in Mulholland’s quote, however, and the concerns of teenagers become the raw material for 90% of all films made for an adult audience. Which is why most of the movies Mulholland picks for his Best 100 have a timeless, universal appeal.

The teen movie craze began in 1953, when Marlon Brando swaggered onto the screen in The Wild One, personifying mindless juvenile delinquency with his drawled, “Whaddya got?” when he’s asked what it is he’s rebelling against. The Second World War had dramatically changed the domestic landscape in America. With men away at war, women had gone out to work in their millions, and they had no intention of giving up their freedom once the men returned.

The result, according to conservatives that feared juvenile delinquents as much as the Communist threat, was a generation that came of age with inadequate fathers and absent mothers. Rootless, drifting, left to form their own social and moral constructs, the kids went wild. The fears, doubts and burgeoning nihilism was nailed in the title of James Dean’s third and final movie, Rebel Without a Cause (1956) — even if Jim Stark, played by Dean, is essentially a boy in search of a conventional nuclear family.

Hollywood capitalised on a teen market that had never before seen itself depicted on the silver screen. Prior to the 1950s, American youths were either young boys and girls, or young men and women. But even as the apparently hopeless movies were churned out — I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), The Cool and The Crazy (1958), The Blob (1958) — an aesthetic took shape, one in which serious issues could be addressed under cover of teen angst: Blackboard Jungle (1955), The 400 Blows (1959), West Side Story (1961).

In fact, Mulholland argues that the teen movie has every right to be judged by the same criteria as any other movie, beyond and above whether it speaks directly to its audience, either to milk it as a cash-cow or empathise with its very real concerns. It’s significant that Stranded At the Drive-In concludes with the Oscar-littered The Social Network (2010), which was written and directed by two of Hollywood’s most respected talents in Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher, respectively.

It’s wise to take Mulholland’s verdicts on the teen movie with a hefty pinch of salt, especially as he is of the opinion that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest television series ever. By the same token, it’s hard to argue with his assertion that a teen movie very often transcends its target audience to achieve greatness. Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia (1979) are four movies that can hold their heads high in any company.

And then, of course, there is the Golden Age, the 1980s. In 1983 alone came Risky Business, the Brat Pack testing grounds of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, both directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and War Games. Nightmare on Elm Street arrived in 1984, as did Red Dawn and Footloose, with Back to the Future appearing in 1985. But even Back to the Future has been eclipsed, in retrospect, by the John Hughes blockbuster The Breakfast Club, which also appeared in 1985, perhaps the quintessential example of a movie made about teens, for teens and — given that Hughes was so perfectly attuned to his audience — by a teen.

The following year, Hughes offered Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Pretty in Pink, the latter as scriptwriter. River’s Edge was a dystopian antidote to Hughes’ brightly coloured teen fantasies that same year, while Dirty Dancing shimmied onto the screen in 1987. Heathers, that deliciously dark deconstruction and loving parody, topped off the decade in 1989.

In the two decades since, the teen movie has taken its cue from Heathers and grown ever more sophisticated, more knowing and self-referential. From Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), on through Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) to Juno (2007), the teen movie has played with our perceptions of what we believe teenagers to be, as refracted through the prism of their own movies.

The tone, too, has grown more serious. The mindless high-school movie so mercilessly parodied in Clueless (1995) grew increasingly vicious, via Cruel Intentions (1999), until it reached its climax in the bloody war of Battle Royale (2000).

A more serious strain of teen movie appeared with Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), its docu-drama quality mirrored by Matthieu Kassovitz’s incendiary and socially conscious French film La Haine (1995), the paedophilia threat at the heart of Hard Candy (2005), and the truth of vulnerable teenage lives in Kidulthood (2006), Precious (2009) and City of God (2011).

Meanwhile, the classic concerns of the teen movie — sex, basically, and how to get it — are mocked in the growing trend for gross-out comedies, such as American Pie (1999) and Superbad (2007). These apparently mindless examples of dumbing down, however, are mirrored by more thoughtful offerings, such as Twilight (2008), which echoes I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Edward Scissorhands as this generation’s voice for the teenager’s fear of sex — or, more accurately, the teenage girl’s fear of being pressured into sex too soon.

Incorporating 100 teen movies and stretching to almost 500 pages, Mulholland’s book is accessible, conversational in tone and very nearly comprehensive. Naturally, however, such lists lend themselves to argument, and it could be argued that the book is remiss in not including The Wanderers (1979), Saturday Night Fever (1979), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) — as an example of how often teen movies have riffed on Shakespearian sources, although Mulholland does include a more literal adaptation, Romeo + Juliet (1996) — and Brick (2005).

But who has time to pause and nit-pick? This year sees another slew of teen movies arriving, including Young Adult, which is about grown-ups reverting to teenager angst; The Hunger Games, a post-apocalyptic tale of survival; American Pie: The Reunion; and the movie version of 21 Jump Street, the high school-set TV series that launched Johnny Depp’s career.

And why not? They may well be rebels without a cause, but the kids and their movies are alright.

* Garry Mulholland’s Stranded at the Drive-In is published by Orion.