Bruce Handy provides a flawed but fun survey of a social phenomenon that American pop culture essentially invented: ‘teenagerhood.’
‘G retchen, stop trying to make fetch happen. It’s not going to happen.” Eight years after Mean Girls hit theaters, kids (girls and guys) at my own high school were still quoting it. We even had a “pink day” during homecoming week, where anyone angling for popularity — preps, cheerleaders, party girls, judgy sophomores, and even the Mormons — went all in. Mean Girls defined teen culture for my generation.
That power is what Bruce Handy surveys in Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies. The concept of “teenagerhood” is a modern invention. Before the 20th century, societies universally saw adolescents as adults in the making. They had to embrace duty and take responsibility for themselves and their communities. Hollywood helped to create teenagerhoodby mythologizing kids: first as juvenile delinquents, then as free spirits, then as consumers, and finally as guardians of virtue.
Hollywood has been at this effort for a while. Handy begins his book in the 1930s, with the Andy Hardy films, which were morality tales delivered to teenagers with a dose of paternalism. He then moves to Rebel Without a Cause, which features heartthrob James Dean as the emblem of teen angst. Dean’s Jim Stark played into adult paranoia over juvenile delinquency and gave the audience “a premonition about the shifting balance of cultural power.”
Handy races through subsequent decades: the 1960s, with the voyeuristic Beach Party; the 1970s, with the nostalgic American Graffiti; and then to the 1980s, with such films as the libertine Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Handy can’t resist taking jabs at conservatives, especially when it comes to the Reagan Revolution and John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club. His snark about Hughes’s work comes across as contemptuous. “[Hughes’s] 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,” he writes. Hughes deserves better.
In charity, Handy argues The Breakfast Club created the first vision of middle-American high school composed of distinct teenage “tribes” who keep to themselves; the film blew up the concept of a teenage monoculture when it came to marketing efforts directed at teens (though we see teenage division in gang conflicts starting in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause and continuing to both film iterations of the hit musical West Side Story). Now, teenagers differentiate themselves as preps, jocks, nerds, goths, and all the cliques you can name.
We get to see the minutiae of middle American “teenagerhood” in Hughes’s other works like Sixteen Candles, where Sam Baker (Molly Ringwald) meanders through her 16th birthday, rebuffing The Geek (Anthony Michael Hall), to get a date with the attractive jock at the end of the film. Hughes may be “problematic” by today’s standards, but because he liked being around the youth, he was honest in showing the audience what teens actually cared about: status.
The 1990s provided quality over quantity. Handy chooses the socially conscious film Boyz n the Hood as one template for that decade’s teenager. He’s correct to praise director John Singleton’s vision of black teenagers in South Central Los Angeles. It is striking that a father, Furious Styles (played by Laurence Fishburne), serves as the film’s moral center. Furious is classically masculine: “disciplined, honorable, coolheaded, quietly competent, capable of justified violence when pushed . . . he’s at the opposite end from Jim Backus’s fumbling, emasculated dad in Rebel Without a Cause.” Handy labels Singleton’s vision as conservative with a “somewhat regressive view of parenting by having Tre move in with his father.” He resents the film’s conservative view of manhood, but cannot admit that strong fathers can help to heal our society’s wounds.
A rather different film becomes Handy’s other ’90s template: Amy Heckerling’s 1995 hit film Clueless, a light and effervescent romantic comedy set in sunny Beverly Hills starring Alicia Silverstone and Stacey Dash. He analyzes the opening scene, which features Cher and friends shopping, partying at a resort, and driving through picturesque Beverly Hills in Cher’s brand new white Jeep. It’s a vast difference from ordinary school life. Heckerling describes the movie as “a comedy of manners . . . translated into a much more gentrified and happy and colorful world of the ‘90s, which was not the real world.”
Handy admires Heckerling’s satire of the rich in unnecessary fashion and decorum prescriptions. The ’90s do feature escapism and consumerism as the teen trends. But they also feature “a vogue for classic plays and novels repurposed as teen comedies.” — as Clueless itself, a transposition of the plot of Jane Austen’s Emma, exemplifies. He mentions as other examples the hit films She’s All That and 10 Things I Hate About You. The box office numbers show that transposing the classics into light, consumerist fare gets teenagers into the movie theater.
By the time Handy gets to the 21st century, he must contend with the fact that big-budget blockbusters have sucked teenagers into their maw, just as they have done to most of the rest of Hollywood. For a time, thanks to the popularity of the preexisting intellectual property they were based on, that made vampirism and dystopia all the rage. 2008’s Twilight substitutes abstinence for sexual intimacy to avoid triggering the bloodlust of Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). 2012’s The Hunger Games features Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), a Joan of Arc who is fierce, chaste, and uninterested in romance.
These portrayals reflect broader trends. Gen Z is having less sex, drinking less alcohol, and living vicariously through social media. Handy is right to wonder what has prompted a return to societal prudery. But he does not have an answer. To answer that question, one would have to answer another: What in the culture is left for teenagers to rebel against?
Hollywood High is an entertaining survey of the history of teen film in America. Handy is wonderful in his film analysis, especially when he discusses character costumes. For example, he analyzes how in Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean’s sensitive antihero, dressed in a red windbreaker, white T-shirt, and blue jeans, created the trend of conflicted antiheroes “in the films of New Hollywood in the late 1960s and 1970s.” Working class clothing and mannerisms also become “cool.” (A trend that continues to this day.)
It is occasionally cringe, however. In the first chapter, the author quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville, then apologizes for doing so. It’s part of a thoroughgoing aspect of the work: Handy’s letting his politics keep him from deeper insight. This is an unfortunate characteristic of the book, because teen films are never only about teens. They cover the anxieties of American adults: whether it’s juvenile delinquents in the ’50s, consumerism in the ’90s, or chastity today.
A more politically even-handed treatment would have had more to say about these and other subjects. And about teenagers today. Because if Gen Z and younger cohorts really are retreating to a “new puritanism,” then perhaps Hollywood will discover that hashing out remakes of hit movies like Mean Girls is impossible. Would a mean girl of 2025 (see Sydney Sweeney in The White Lotus) ever get caught “slut-shaming” or “fat-shaming”? More questions than answers arise. Hollywood can keep trying to “make fetch happen.” But its vision of being a teenager is, in fact, not happening.