Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema - Hardcover

Shary, Timothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292777523 ISBN 13: 9780292777521

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2002

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 this title

Review

"Generation Multiplex represents an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between youth and the mass media, in this case movies. From both a personal and a professional perspective, I welcome this work which builds on themes and issues I addressed in The Cinema of Adolescence in 1985." - David Considine, from the Foreword

About the Author

Timothy Shary is the author or editor of several books on the representational politics of age and gender, including Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in American Cinema Since 1980 and Youth Culture in Global Cinema.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0292777523
• ISBN 13: 9780292777521
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352