HOLLYWOOD HIGH: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies, by Bruce Handy
The veteran cultural journalist Bruce Handy introduces “Hollywood High” with a pop quiz: Which came first, the teen movie or the teenager?
That’s a trick question. The answer Handy is after, and the thesis of this marathon run through the catalog of some 80 years of American movies about teens, is, duh, both. Which is to say, of course teen movies reflect the times in which they are made and society’s contemporaneous understanding of what Kids Today are like (wholesome or delinquent, risk-taking or anxious, horny or … horny). But movies also have the power to shape those images until they become a vivid reality — in the eyes of the general audience moviegoer, yes, but especially in the eyes of impressionable, media-gulping teens themselves. Like, which came first, mean girls or “Mean Girls”?
Handy begins with the apple-pie exploits of Mickey Rooney as the teachable scamp in the Andy Hardy movies of the 1930s and ’40s and closes out somewhere around the dystopian life-or-death choices of Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in the 21st-century “Hunger Games” movies. Moving through the decades, he devotes many energetic pages to the 1950s teens of “Rebel Without a Cause.” He has fun with the airheadedness of the “Beach Blanket Bingo” 1960s, particularly charmed by the unlikely career of the producer Sam Arkoff, whose American International Pictures was undisputed king of jolly teen crap. He sets his 1970s meditation on “American Graffiti” (although he faintly sniffs at the later work of its director, George Lucas). “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” ushers in his 1980s, and the oeuvre of John Hughes caps it. There’s also a good chunk of a chapter devoted to the power of John Singleton’s 1991 “Boyz n the Hood,” with its revelatory depiction of Black teen life recognizable to actual Black teens.
Handy’s organizational challenges in this rambling survey (magnified by his eagerness to include every statistic and Googled factoid unearthed in the course of his research) are more daunting than the book’s snappy title might suggest. “Teen movies have become an essential American genre, rivaling the western as a vehicle for national mythmaking,” he writes. But at least the “west” of American westerns is anchored by unchanging geological bedrock. Those buttes and mesas don’t move or morph. Live teenagers, on the other hand, do nothing but move and morph, requiring the author to cross-reference a timeline of movie-release dates while simultaneously keeping up with a welter of published sociological findings over the decades about the changing ways of a particular subset of young humans whose modern American brand has always been a ricochet between conformity and rebellion.
How to pack it all in? And how to do it as a boomer-age writer (same here) who, inevitably, had only a limited amount of time on earth during which he and the teens depicted onscreen shared the same zeitgeist? The “Hollywood High” solution is to tack on “A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies” as a goofy, self-mocking subtitle and for Handy to hit the ground riffing. Schmoozing. (With whom? His contemporaries like me, or the generations who call us “the olds”?) He stretches a friendly conversational writing style to the breaking point with his digressions and “to my way of thinking” throwaway observations in his sprint to lay down facts and those way-opinionated opinions. He is, for instance, lovely when talking about the presence (or absence) of parents and adult figures of authority in teens’ lives and teen movies. (In this, his maturity is his friend; he references his own children.) But he is cringe when, after prefacing a useful chapter about the historical evolution of modern American adolescence with a quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville, he immediately says, “Don’t worry. That will be the last mention of de Tocqueville in these pages, I promise.”
This reader, of this age, who has an active interest in the stuff Handy covers so assuredly in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, found herself stepping around a lot of tee-hee droppings in a commitment to hang on for more interesting thoughts. And really, this topic is rich. Important, even.
Indeed, there may be no more effective selling point for the timeliness of “Hollywood High” than “Adolescence,” now streaming on Netflix. The four-part British drama (not technically a movie, but let’s count it as one) — about a young teen, accused of murdering a classmate, whose self-worth is warped, emoji by emoji, by the insinuating, darker forces of social media — is a global sensation for many reasons, not least because of its unflinching fictional depiction of something very real going on in the lives of teens. Something today’s teens, umbilically connected to their smartphones, know all about, while so many adults are just now getting a clue.
It is, yes, totally epic. And seriously disturbing. And we’re talking about a teen movie.
HOLLYWOOD HIGH: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies | By Bruce Handy | Avid Reader Press | 372 pp. | $30
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