The World According to Teenpix

Abstract

Over and above the usual explanations-the breaking of taboos, the exposure to vicarious threats from which the end of the film provides rescue, the appeal of sensationalism (Happy Birthday to Me was billed as offering "six of the most unusual murders you will ever see"), the daredevil pleasures of suspense beyond the limits of any earlier suspense, the reassuring sense of ritual as audiences try to guess who will be killed next and how-I'd offer one additional suggestion: slasher films affirm the members of the adolescent audience's sense of themselves as embattled and disempowered by virtue of their very adolescence, ascribing their troubles to sources outside the adolescent community-parental neglect, generational curses, murderously childlike adults-while confirming their sense of themselves as ageless and ripe, like the figures on Keats's Grecian Um.

No film teachers who go to the movies regularly-and even in these days of VCRs and TNT, there must be a few such people-can fail to observe that most members of the audience are a lot younger than they are. Ever since the rise of television made audio-visual narrative available within the home of anyone with the price of a set, movies have shifted from family entertainment to teen-age pastime, as producers in New York and Hollywood have released fewer, bigger films targeted at more narrowly defined audiences. Thomas Doherty has recently argued that the American movie industry has been "juvenilized" since the mid-1950s, and the creation of the PG-13 rating in 1983 encouraged filmmakers to market an even greater number of films for a specifically teen-age audience.

What kinds of movies do teen-agers go to see? The Hollywood genres which have most successfully targeted teen-agers in the past ten years include: comedy or adventure films featuring teen-age stars-Fast Times at Ridgemont High, WarCames, Short Circuit, Maid to Order; the teen-angst movies based on S.E. Hinton's novels-Tex, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish; the teen-bonding movies written and usually directed by John Hughes-Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off; and the psycho-slasher movies which typically decimate a closed community of teen-agers-Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and their eponymous progeny. The first of these genres isn't really a genre, since featuring teen-age stars (or older stars like Michael J. Fox who go on playing teen-agers) is merely an attempt to entice a teen-age audience into the theater for the same old fare, as in the advertising campaign for The Color of Money as starring, in big block letters, "Newman/Cruise." Nor does the teen-angst genre, as I hope to show in just a minute, represent a new attitude on the part of either producers or their adolescent audiences. But the other two kinds of films-Hughes's teen-bonding films and the psycho-slasher cycle initiated by Halloween in 1978-really do mark an important departure in the history of relations between commercial American cinema and its audience; they reflect and foster a specifically teen-age sensibility quite without precedent in earlier American films.

The most economical way to define this sensibility is by contrast with one of the pivotal teenpix of the 1950s, Rebel Without a Cause, the obvious prototype for the troubled-teen movies based on Hinton's novels. Despite its minatory title, Rebel Without a Cause presents a deeply sympathetic portrait of the teen-age heroes played by James Dean and Natalie Wood. The film takes Jim, Judy, and Plato (Sal Mineo) largely at their own evaluation, and is careful to ascribe their problems to their parents' failures: Jim's ineffectual father, played by Jim Backus in an apron; William Hopper as Judy's sexually unnerved and suddenly unloving father; and Plato's selfish, absent, and bitterly divided parents. In one sense. Rebel Without a Cause is an apology for adolescence, an attempt to show that the alienated teen-agers who wore such menacing faces in The Wild One could be understood as the painfully vulnerable products of a defective system of parenthood and social support. But although individual parents may fail in Rebel Without a Cause, adult values are affirmed throughout the film. The teens' puzzled misbehavior is represented as pointless and dead-ended, as Buzz Gunderson indicates when Jim, on the verge of a chickie race to the edge of a cliff, asks him why they do things like this, and Buzz replies, "We gotta do somethin'." Jim's obsessive determination to be a man despite the poor example of his father valorizes the ideal of adulthood in the face of inadequate adults; and by the end of the film, Jim has established his manhood by forming his own nuclear family including Judy and Plato, winning his father's explicit approval-"You did everything a man could," his father consoles him after Plato is killed-and serving as a model and measure of his father's own emerging maturity-a model confirmed by his father's replacing the jacket Jim gave Plato with his own jacket and telling him, "I'll try to be as strong as you want me to be."

There is, of course, nothing unusual about the pattern of newly mature children setting the standards for their parents' adulthood; it is common not only to earlier movies about teen-agers like Babes in Arms but to romantic comedy on the model of Roman New Comedy, from A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Miser to // Happened One Night and Moonstruck. In each of these stories, social standards of maturity are renewed through generational development, as children grow up to become the legitimate avatars of the social order. What is unusual about Rebel Without a Cause is its emphasis on the fatal consequences of failure to grow into the adult community, represented throughout the film by apocalyptic images of tragic isolation, from the planetarium show which terrifies Plato, who tells Jim, "What does he know about man alone?" to Buzz's death, shown in a correlative point-of-view shot as the apocalyptic consequence of aimless thrill seeking, and finally to the long shot of the planetarium that ends the film, reminding us that Plato's world has ended, like Jim's adolescence, at dawn. The film's conclusion, recognizing that teen-agers as deeply scarred as Plato by adult abuse and neglect may never grow up, adopts an elegiac tone toward the costs of maturity while maintaining maturity or adulthood as a social ideal. The attitude the film encourages its audience to adopt is therefore sympathetic to the pains of adolescence, thoughtfully critical about the failures of particular adults, and cautiously affirmative about the ideals of adulthood toward which Jim and Judy are struggling. In summary, Rebel Without a Cause, which shows teen-agers growing up despite the failures of their own parents, is aimed at an audience of self-critical adults and future adults.

John Hughes's teen films also dramatize the problems of adolescence sympathetically by ascribing responsibility for teen-age traumas to inadequate parents and parent figures, from Anthony Michael Hall's troglodyte older brother in Weird Science to Molly Ringwald's self-absorbed mother and older sister in Sixteen Candles to Ringwald's irresponsible father in Pretty in Pink to the obsessively vindictive teacher in The Breakfast Club and the like-minded principal in Ferns Bueller's Day Off. But unlike Rebel Without a Cause, which is sharply critical toward particular adults and adult behavior, Hughes's films are more generally critical toward the whole ideal of adulthood. The ultimate problem the teen-age heroes of Rebel Without a Cause face is that alienation from the social order of adults and adult institutions can lead to a personal apocalypse, the end of the world. In Hughes's films the terms of judgment are inverted. The problem for Hughes's teens is not merely that particular adults offer inadequate role models; the whole system they represent is so hypocritical, alienating, and meaningless that growing up would mean the end of the world. Hughes's teens rise to this challenge by valorizing adolescence as an unchanging, self-justifying system of values which does not reaffirm or renew standards of maturity but simply marginalizes the adult world by ignoring any possible continuities it might have with the world of adolescence and setting goals which can be reached without growth or change. Hence The Breakfast Club ends with the heroes' discovery of the common humanity that adult categories have sought to suppress-each of them is a brain, a jock, a deb, a flake and a criminal-while excluding their dismissive parents or the hostile, bullying teacher who has been keeping them in detention from any participation in that humanity. Unlike Rebel Without a Cause, whose leading concern is the question of how Jim Stark can grow up to be a man, The Breakfast Club never considers whether its heroes and heroines will grow up to be the same as the tormenting adults they are rebelling against or how they will escape the dehumanizing traps of adulthood, because the possibility of their growing up never arises.

Unlike Jim Stark, Hughes's teens don't need to grow up because they're doing fine as teens. Their resistance to change as a metaphor for growth is again brought into relief by contrast with the model of romantic comedy from Much Ado About Nothing to When Harry Met Sally. The Beatrices and Benedicks of romantic comedy typically find themselves at odds with their destined romantic partners because of their own pride or prejudice-the limitations of their own identities from which romance can liberate them, typically by a comic experience of madness, which destroys their faith in their own individuality in order to enable their faith in a romantic partnership as an image of the social identity conferred by the larger community. In Hughes's films, by contrast, the obstacles to romance are always external, never a function of the heroes' or heroines' limited perception or sensitivity. Since romantic problems can be solved by removing these external obstacles, there is no challenge to social development, merely the satisfaction of successful wish fulfillment. Weird Science begins with its two nerdy heroes ineffectually fantasizing about their prowess with girls; when they turn their typically nerdy skill, computer programming, to the creation of a sexy genie, she literally makes all their wishes come true. In Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful, the obstacles to be overcome are social or financial, and Molly Ringwald and Eric Stoltz need only stand up to the "richies," either by apprising them of their existence or by facing down their threats, to win their hearts' desire. Ringwald and Stoltz don't need to grow because they're already complete when .the credits roll; all they need is the break they've been denied. Their romance plots lead not to the promise of permanent commitment and social renewal but to the timeless apotheosis of teen love, as in the fade-out of Sixteen Candles-the perfect ending for an audience whose fears and fantasies are structured by the systematic exclusion of growth or change.

This doesn't mean that Hughes's teen-age audience doesn't worry about growing up, but rather that the movies deal with that fear by denying it, reassuring the audience that it will never happen to them at the same time they valorize adolescent values-directness, outspokenness, independence, self-idealization, the will to success-by arranging their triumph over the discredited adult values they oppose. Hughes's films not only reverse the fears of Rebel Without a Cause-instead of being afraid that teen-agers will never grow up, Hughes's audience is afraid that they will-but deals with this fear by repressing it, turning adult values and adult authority into the Other which it is the films' function to keep at bay. It is no wonder that the fear of growing up is the defining fear that distinguishes contemporary teenpix from their forebears, for unlike Rebel Without a Cause, they are directed to an audience of present and former adolescents. But not all teenpix of the eighties treat this fear in the same way. Tobe Hooper's 1986 remake of William Cameron Menzies's Invaders from Mars (19S3) turns the earlier film's parable of salvation through social institutions-when your parents are taken over by aliens, you know you can trust your local neighborhood social worker and the U. S. Army-into a model of the therapeutic powers of childhood, as the young hero outfoxes Louise Fletcher, mothers whimpering Karen Black, and supplies the crucial copper penny needed to turn back the alien invasion. Hooper's film thus manages to be both suspicious of adult authority and nostalgic for the good old days when you could trust grown-ups and pennies were made of copper. Back to the Future combines criticism and nostalgia even more economically in its fantasy of generational time travel, which levels parents and children by recasting Marty McFly's parents as teen-agers, and allowing Marty to rescue them from themselves by being a better adolescent than they could have been.

All these films valorize the adolescent perspective by restricting adults to one of two roles: either ineffectual figures incapable of protecting their children (and often in need of protection themselves) or threatening figures to be avoided or destroyed. Teen-agers are on their own, and responsible only to themselves, because their parents have let them down, as in Rebel Without a Cause; at the same time, adults like Ferris Bueller's self-appointed nemesis and Louise Fletcher's frog-eating biology teacher are out to get them. Combining these two beliefs-that adults are simultaneously ineffectual and hostile-produces the enabling myth behind teen-age slasher films, in which adolescent victims who have been misled or abandoned by adults are threatened or destroyed by shadowy figures whose powers to corrupt such institutions as police stations and hospitals, punish sexual transgressions, and invade dreams are clearly extensions of the normal powers of adults seen from an adolescent perspective. Like the tyrannical teacher of The Breakfast Club and the comically demented principal of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, supematurally powerful killers like Michael Meyer, Mrs.Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger are out to get teen-agers-characters over twenty are rarely menaced-either because of the crimes of their parents (as in A Nightmare on Elm Street) or in retaliation for their sexual experience (as in Halloween and Friday the 13th). In other words, they become targets precisely because they are teen-agers-a fact made clear by the child-man status of Michael Meyers, the man who was never a teen-ager (we see him at six and then, mentally unchanged, at twenty-one), and by Mrs. Voorhees's dialogues with herself in two voices ("Kill her, mommy!"/"Don't worry, I will").

Slasher films most often rationalize their victims' vulnerability by calling attention to their sexuality. But although even the youngest viewers of these films perceive a correlation between sex and death ("you last longer if you don't mess around," my eleven-year-old son explained to me), that correlation is not precise, since sexually innocent characters die in all these films, and the identification figure who is most suspensefully threatened is always innocent. It seems fairer to say that the heroes and (especially) heroines are being punished for the fact of their sexuality, a more general legacy reminiscent of original sin. Slasher films' profound ambivalence toward sexuality-the characters, like the audience, find sexual experience forbiddingly attractive but are made to associate it with guilt and terror-reveals a frantic desire for community, a need to make physical and emotional connections to other alienated teen-agers coupled with a deep-seated fear of adult sexuality or sexual maturity. It is not only particular sexual couplings that make them vulnerable to Michael or Jason; it is their dangerously sexual potential which isolates them not only from adults and childrenthink of Jason and his mother-but from their own sexual partners, who may turn out to be the killer in disguise, and from themselves. Sex in these film expresses not only a sense of isolation from one's disapproving parents but a familiar fear of maturity. As in Hughes's films, becoming an adult-in this case, through a sexual relationshipwould mean the end of the world.

Why do teen-agers enjoy slasher films? Over and above the usual explanations-the breaking of taboos, the exposure to vicarious threats from which the end of the film provides rescue, the appeal of sensationalism (Happy Birthday to Me was billed as offering "six of the most unusual murders you will ever see"), the daredevil pleasures of suspense beyond the limits of any earlier suspense, the reassuring sense of ritual as audiences try to guess who will be killed next and how-I'd offer one additional suggestion: slasher films affirm the members of the adolescent audience's sense of themselves as embattled and disempowered by virtue of their very adolescence, ascribing their troubles to sources outside the adolescent community-parental neglect, generational curses, murderously childlike adults-while confirming their sense of themselves as ageless and ripe, like the figures on Keats's Grecian Um. If Hughes's films fulfill their principals' fantasies by insulating them from the possibility of growth or change, slasher films provide a negative version of the same fantasies by providing a cautionary parable of adulthood, either through experience with adults (who will either abandon you or kill you) or through adult experience (which leads to a horrifying death for the less fortunate and, for the lucky, to endless nightmares).

Commercial cinema always aims to please the members of its audience by making them feel good about themselves and the prevailing ideology, and in one sense the movement from Rebel Without a Cause to The Breakfast Club and Halloween, in which the film industry merely substitutes an adolescent ideology for the ideology of adulthood and valorizes it through substantially the same tactics, is an example of Hollywood business as usual. But teenpix, even if they are designed to appeal exclusively to an adolescent audience, are still produced and marketed by the very adults whose values the films so directly impugn. This remarkable fact deserves closer consideration by someone who has more knowledge of the field, and more time, than I do today.