Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema

by Timothy Shary, David Considine (Foreword)

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[A. Bowdoin Van Riper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hollywood has been making films about teenagers since the 1930s, and films aimed at teenagers since the mid-1950s. The genre flourished until the mid-sixties, languished during the late sixties and seventies, and then flared back to life in the early 1980s in the hands of directors like Cameron Crowe (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl, Real Genius) and especially John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Published in 2004, Timothy Shary’s Generation Multiplex is a catalog and analysis of those late-twentieth-century Hollywood teen films, overlaid with an interpretation of what, collectively, they said about American teenagers.

Shary, adapting and expanding his PhD thesis, does his job thoroughly and well. This is likely the definitive book on its subject, and – as befits such a book – it’s exhaustively comprehensive, lucidly organized, and clearly written. Anyone seriously interested in the Hollywood teen film, or in Hollywood films of the eighties and nineties, needs a copy of Generation Multiplex.

All that said, it’s not a lot of fun to read. Shary’s grouping of teen films by type, rather than year, facilitates his analysis of shared themes, but kills any sense of narrative momentum and makes it hard for him to connect the films to broader social and cultural trends. His “voice” is so measured, and his analyses so relentlessly sober, that it’s easy to forget how frequently and enthusiastically the genre he’s analyzing embraced anarchy, surrealism, and low comedy. First books by academic authors (mine included) can be like that. When your book starts as a PhD thesis, it’s hard – no matter how much you edit – to get the chill of seriousness out of its bones.

If you’re a reader of a certain age and (just) want a breezy, nostalgic tour of the movies of your youth . . . Generation Multiplex isn’t your book. If, however, you want to know what those movies were telling the world about you and your friends, it most certainly is.