Teen movies have changed a lot over the decades

Hollywood High author Bruce Handy worked at Vanity Fair for 20 years. His book examines “movies about teenagers,” and breaks down into different eras: Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy films (1937–1946); teen rebellion movies such as the iconic Rebel Without a Cause (1955); the Beach Party movies of the 1960s; American Graffiti and the 1970s; Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982; the John Hughes 80s classics Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Boyz N the Hood and black filmmakers of the 1990s; Mean Girls in 2004; the Twilight saga (2008–2012); and finally The Hunger Games series (2012–2015).

Handy is great at revealing things about these well-known films you may not have thought about. He also, while not politically conservative, gives the conservative side a fair hearing. He quotes an academic who argues that 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a lament by children who missed the 1960s.

Nonsense, writes Handy: “Indeed, if teens had spent the decades since Andy Hardy pushing for more and more freedom, the late 1970s may have represented a be-careful-what-you-wish-for moment. In the words of Amy Heckerling, who would direct Fast Times from Crowe’s screenplay, ‘It was like a grown-up world but with children playing grown-up parts, and they weren’t ready . . . They were getting pregnant and they were, like, getting fired and having grown-up problems, but they were babies.’” Cameron Crowe, who wrote and directed Fast Times, put it this way: “The only time these students acted like kids was when they were around adults.”

The Twilight films can also be interpreted as the result of an oversexed culture. One of the characters is a vampire who falls in love with a young woman, but would harm her if they had sex because of his physical power. As Handy notes, Twilight was a way of driving sex underground again, of making it alluring and dangerous after decades of pornography. Mean Girls was the last pre-phone teen movie, and seems from a different century.

Handy writes beautifully and has done prodigious research. He cites reports on how parental authority has changed, and ties the rise of teen movies with the booming postwar economy of the 20th century. The book notes the rise and fall of drug use and how it affected the movies, and how different studios treated the young stars — and that Mickey Rooney was a highly sexed lothario.

Handy cites an academic report from the 1960s that argued that teem culture was pushing out more adult fare — that teens were “inflicting their preferences upon their families and the country, and those preferences, lacking the traditional guidance that would have led them to Mozart and Shakespeare, or at least Rodgers and Hammerstein and Herman Wouk, were increasingly drawn to the flashy, the vulgar, the immature, and the irredeemably popular.” This analysis, Handy writes, was not “entirely wrong.”

Handy also notes how many teen films now seem dated. “Sixteen Candles in particular hasn’t aged well,” he writes, “burdened by its appalling caricature of a horny Chinese exchange student named Long Duk Dong (har)—the only significant character of color in any Hughes teen movie—and a subplot about date rape that is played for laughs. Words like fag and retard get tossed around more than twenty-first-century audiences might prefer. Moreover, the movies sprawl tonally.”

He also observes that when Matthew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller “breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience about the coming end of high school, he’s realistic about the disruption that graduation will bring to his life and friendships. Unlike a hacky commencement speaker, he’s focusing not on possibility but on loss, and his mantra about savoring the present — ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it; — doubles as a plea to hit the brakes. Hughes apprehends a truth most makers of teen movies ignore: not everyone hates high school, and not everyone can’t wait to leave…. Ferris and his friends are like sailors on twenty-four-hour shore leave before shipping off to Guadalcanal.”

Handy sums up the outlook of 80s teen film king John Hughes well: “Though not outspoken about it, John Hughes was a political conservative; he was also socially conservative, an uxorious family man and a confirmed Midwesterner who felt out of place in Hollywood. His films, despite their feints at anarchy, pay deference to wealth, class, and social convention in a way that was very much in sync with prevailing trends in the 1980s — and which may or may not leave a bad taste in your mouth.”

INSTAGRAM RELYING ON AI TO CATCH TEENAGERS POSING AS ADULTS

One omission from Hollywood High is one of my personal teen movie favorites, 1984’s The Wild Life. The Wild Life was written and produced by Cameron Crowe, who also wrote Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The Wild Life is a shadow version of Fast Times. Most of the film takes place at night in L.A., and the characters aren’t as aspirational as the teens in Fast Times. The kids all have summer jobs, and while there’s talk of marriage, no one mentions going to college. Wrestler Tom Drake and his more mature and motivated friend Bill Conrad work in a bowling alley. Bill gets a nice new apartment in a swanky singles complex, and, needing money to make the rent, asks Tom to be his roommate.

Whereas the surfer Spicoli in Fast Times is cute and cuddly, Tom Drake, as one critic put it, is “the Spicoli you would know in real life — he’s a force of destruction who is actually dangerous and insane.” Much more so than Fast Times or Twilight, The Wild Life predicted the working class populism of the Trump years.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.