Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema

Shary, Timothy

ISBN 10: 029277771X / ISBN 13: 9780292777712

Published by University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, U.S.A., 2002

About this Item

Trade paperback, second printing, xvi + 330 pages including black-and-white illustrations.

Seller Inventory # 020223

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema
• Publisher: University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, U.S.A.
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 029277771X
• ISBN 13: 9780292777712
• Binding: Soft Cover
• Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Film and Television
  • Science - Sociology and Anthropology
  • Culture

About this title

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 the Author

Timothy Shary received a B.A. from Hampshire College in 1991, an M.A. from Ohio University in 1993, and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in 1998. He has been teaching in the Screen Studies program at Clark University (Worcester, MA) since 1997, in such areas as film history, theory, and criticism, television analysis, and broadcasting history. In addition to his work on contemporary American cinema and media, particularly the representation of teenagers, he is now doing research on the portrayal of masculinity in the films of Michael Mann. He has published a number of articles on cinema in books and journals.