Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema - Softcover

Timothy Shary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 029277771X ISBN 13: 9780292777712

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2002

Synopsis

When teenagers began hanging out at the mall in the early 1980s, the movies followed. Multiplex theaters offered teens a wide array of perspectives on the coming-of-age experience, as well as an escape into the alternative worlds of science fiction and horror. Youth films remained a popular and profitable genre through the 1990s, offering teens a place to reflect on their evolving identities from adolescence to adulthood while simultaneously shaping and maintaining those identities.

Drawing examples from hundreds of popular and lesser-known youth-themed films, Timothy Shary here offers a comprehensive examination of the representation of teenagers in American cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. He focuses on five subgenres—school, delinquency, horror, science, and romance/sexuality—to explore how they represent teens and their concerns, how these representations change over time, and how youth movies both mirror and shape societal expectations and fears about teen identities and roles. He concludes that while some teen films continue to exploit various notions of youth sexuality and violence, most teen films of the past generation have shown an increasing diversity of adolescent experiences and have been sympathetic to the particular challenges that teens face.

About this title

About the Author

TIMOTHY SHARY is Assistant Professor of Screen Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Reviews

Shary (screen studies, Clark Univ.) takes an engaging and thorough look at American teen movies of the last 20 years. Instead of discussing celluloid and popular culture as corrupting influences on youth or providing a guide to them, Shary treats them as reflections of adolescent culture. But this is a book about films (e.g., John Hughes's The Breakfast Club and Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse), not the psychology of teenagers. He posits that the emergence of the multiplex cinemas in shopping malls led to a diversification of the teen/youth film, with a number of distinctive subgenres developing in response to the newly identifiable audience in the malls. He names five major subgenres-"Youth in School," "Delinquent Youth," "The Youth Horror Film," "Youth and Science," and "Youth in Love and Having Sex"-and devotes a chapter to each, referring to more than 900 films released between 1980 and 2001 to illustrate his points. Any film buff who grew up in the 1980s or 1990s will find this book fascinating, filled as it is with films we've either forgotten or are ashamed to discuss in our cinema studies classes. The book is aimed at an adult audience, though the language and diction are clear and not too weighted with jargon. YA librarians in particular may find the filmography and appended lists of best/worst films useful and the film analysis enlightening. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.
Andrea Slonosky, Long Island Univ. Lib., Brooklyn, NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 029277771X
• ISBN 13: 9780292777712
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 338