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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...