The other ’70s teen horror notable was Carrie, Brian De Palma’s sub-Hitchcockian adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel, which now looks increasingly like one mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore girl taking symbolically menstrual revenge on the relentless misogyny of ’70s Hollywood. But what it certainly did was establish a place in teen movies for young women to be central protagonist and scary monster, and dramatise specifically feminine kinds of teenage angst.
Meanwhile, 1972’s American Graffiti was a giant hit on a tiny budget, identifying the perennial popularity of pre-’60s nostalgia, setting the tone for Grease and Back To The Future, and allowing its director to sell some fool his dodgy pitch about a semi-Oedipal space opera where one of the heroes is a bear and the pretty boy wants to shag his sister and kill his dad. I didn’t see it but I’m sure it wasn’t very good.
Teen movies were changed for ever by a bloke with a mullet from Michigan called John Hughes. The writer-director’s much-loved run of 1984–7 teen comedy-dramas rewrote the rules of the genre by taking teen angst seriously while making light work of contemporary slang, fashion and music, and highlighting the hierarchies, status anxieties and class conflicts that made school feel like hell for its teen viewers. It was like the teen movie equivalent of political ‘triangulation’, whereby extremes are rendered redundant by a centre party that just co-opts all their most popular ideas. From this point on, the semi-ironic teen B-movie only worked in the horror genre, and even the slightest teen drama or comedy was expected to deal with some of the issues explored in all those bleak and angry docu-dramas. The by-product was Hughes’s establishment of a set of teen archetypes – jock, mean girl, nerd, rebel, loner, outsider, bully – that continue to pervade every corner of teen fiction and strongly imply that the teenager’s only real concern in life is popularity, which is a polite word for conformity.
But one teen genre that never died or truly wavered was the juvenile delinquent drama, which became increasingly played out through exploiting our fear of teenage gangsters. The stylised gangs of The Warriors, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish in the late 1970s, early 1980s gradually mutated into the fact-based vérité threat of the protagonists in La Haine, City Of God and Kidulthood; just the kind of feral kids in hoods who have recently become Public Enemy No. 1 in Britain. These movies tell you why far more convincingly than the agenda-ridden soundbites of political talking heads from either the Left or Right.
The teen movie finally came of age at 40, rather than 21. Young, smart, film-buff directors, who had all grown up with the Hughes movies and either adored or despised them, saw that their best way into film was to make low-budget movies about teenagers – because teens are the only audience that are 100 per cent guaranteed as they always want to escape their parents, either by going to the cinema or watching DVDs in their bedroom on the TVs or computers that all kids now owned.
When Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused remixed American Graffiti for the grunge generation in 1993 it signalled the beginning of teen cinema’s Imperial Phase, as ‘indie’ directors as eclectic and accomplished as Larry Clark, Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, David O. Russell, Sophia Coppola, Kinji Fukasaku, Matthieu Kassovitz and Fernando Meirelles produced a series of complex, multi-dimensional teen dramas and comedies that treated teens – both on- and off-screen – like adults. If I knew the plural of annus mirabilis I’d apply it like gangbusters to the run of millennial teen classics in this book, beginning with 1998’s Pleasantville through to 2002’s City Of God.
But this doesn’t mean that things have sharply declined since, in a period that includes the likes of Juno, Superbad, The Class, Dogtooth and The Social Network. Simply that the classics that transcend the teensploitation genre are not coming quite as thick and fast as they were ten years ago, as disappointments like Kick Ass and Submarine prove.
Another curious and long overdue thing happens to the teen movie around the turn of the century. A genre dominated by lead protagonists in the James Dean mould suddenly becomes, through the auspices of movies like Election, The Virgin Suicides, Ginger Snaps, Bring It On and Ghost World, a far more female-friendly place, populated not just by strong presences onscreen, but increasing numbers of female writers and directors.
So – let’s get down to definitions. What, for the purposes of this book, is a ‘teen movie’? Actually, it’s pretty simple. It’s a movie made about, or from the viewpoint of, protagonist(s) aged between 13 and 19, and where the story is set in the post-1950s period after teenage became a named and shamed phenomenon.
This, sadly, forces me to leave out spectacularly creepy Swedish vampire movie Let The Right One In and Penny Marshall’s superb Big because the central male protagonists are actually supposed to be 12 years old. Guess that means that pre-pubescent sex is a pretty rich source of metaphor, too. But teen says teen, so 12-year-olds have got to go.
No place either for The Graduate, Diner or Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, because the protagonists, despite still experiencing growing pains, are in their early twenties. Rules is rules.
I’ve also left out films where the teens just happen to be the most interesting characters among a cast of all ages (there goes The Addams Family, The Brady Bunch and Apt Pupil) or where the fact that the main characters might be teenagers doesn’t really make any difference to the main thrust of the movie (bye-bye The Blair Witch Project). A teen movie concerns itself with teenage life first and foremost, and takes its plot and explores its other themes from a teen perspective. I decided to concentrate on screen fiction, so no Hoop Dreams or other teen-orientated documentaries.
After that, it’s all down to personal opinion – mine. Like my previous three books, the list presented to you here is a purely personal choice of what constitutes quality, irrespective of box-office figures or critical reputation. The wide variety of styles within teen movies reflects the equally wide variety of teen experience, and it’s perfectly fitting that a book that wants to look at heavyweight critical faves like The 400 Blows, If . . . , Rebel Without A Cause and Badlands from a fresh perspective, also attempts to unpick the subtleties and nuances in presumed trash such as Dirty Dancing, I Was A Teenage Werewolf, Bring It On and Final Destination. The teen movie, like all the great film sub-genres, is a place where the high- and lowbrow talk to each other, across generations, and against the grain of received notions of good or bad taste.
Which brings me neatly to Slumdog Millionaire, and why one of the most popular and praised films of this weird generation is not in this book. It’s a movie that seemingly depicts every adult Indian as a psycho Nazi and suggests that the only way to make that better is to escape it by winning a million pounds on the game show that helped financed the film. Oddly, the adults who celebrated Slumdog . . . as if it was some kind of feelgood political rebel movie are the very adults who love to portray teens as consumerist sheep blindly buying into the product placement culture of rap videos and The X Factor.
The excellence of the best recent teen flicks puts this kind of hypocrisy into perspective. Teen movies get better and better because each generation of kids is smarter, more culturally informed and less willing to accept being patronised than the last. Film-makers have constantly risen to that challenge and ensured that any list of great teen movies operates as a shadow list of the finest, funniest and most thought-provoking movies ever made.
Stranded At The Drive-In is an attempt to tell a part of that story, from Brando in 1953 to Pattinson in 2008, and with a couple of dozen proto-Buffys slyly emancipating young women in between. And if watching these 100 gems has told me anything, it’s that teen movies are always concerned with power: the spending power of youth in the post-war years that invented the phenomenon of the teen; and the perennial struggle of these teen movie characters to exercise adult power in a world that insists that they are still children. The horror, comedy, drama, rebellion, sexual anticipation and panic that buoys these 100 movies often leaves their characters stranded, and feeling like fools. But we love
them for it, because we felt exactly the same.
So invite the girls round, break out the pyjamas and popcorn, and let’s bitch and braid each other’s hair while we enjoy the best that screen teen fiction has to offer. But behave. ’Cos you know what they’ll say, Monday at school.
1950s
THE WILD ONE
1953
Starring: Marlon Brando, Mary Murphy, Robert Keith, Lee Marvin
Dir.: László Benedek
Plot: Just wrap your legs ’round his velvet rims and strap your hands ’cross his engines.
Key line(s): Girl: ‘Hey Johnny – what are you rebelling against?’
Johnny: ‘Whaddya got?’
The biggest cheat in this book is Entry One. There’s nothing in The Wild One, nor the literature surrounding it, to confirm or deny whether its young protagonists are teenagers, or not. It doesn’t take place in a high school or a college or a readily recognisable teen milieu. Its lead actor was 29 by the time it was released, but this doesn’t confirm things one way or the other because Hollywood was reluctant to use actual teens in teen roles until the 1980s. The actors playing the gangs and their girls all look well into their thirties, but largely act like children . . . but if that was allowed to define the parameters of the teen movie then the entire oeuvre of Adam Sandler would have to be considered.
But The Wild One is here because it has to be. Its look, attitude, storyline and target audience, coupled with its commercial success and notoriety, is plainly the beginning of the teen movie as an identifiable sub-genre.
The plot is a neat example of tight, taut and slightly nuts screenwriting, as John Paxton manages to squeeze incident after incident into 75 minutes of screen-time, a soundstage that looks like its been left over from a B-western, and the passage of one day.
Johnny Strabler (Brando) leads his band of merry bikers The Black Rebels Motorcycle Club into a small Californian town that is playing host to a motorcycle race meet. After some perfunctory attempts to cause aimless chaos, they are faced down by the local police chief who orders them out of town. They leave – but not before stealing one of the trophies. It’s only a trophy for second place, which serves as a neat metaphor throughout for Johnny’s inability to get exactly what he wants, and his potential destiny as both fake winner and eternal loser.
The BRMC (or, as one of the minor gang members calls it, the ‘Black Rebels Motor-sickle Club.’ Sickle! Like Hammer and Sickle! This truly was communist subversion the whole time!) then ride into the even smaller town called Wrightsville which largely consists of one main drag. It has one café that serves as a saloon and one tiny hotel, and a bunch of fearful busybodies as a population, reinforcing the influences The Wild One takes from traditional westerns. But here, instead of talking authentic frontier gibberish, the rough types who invade the peaceful and boring Wrightsville discourse in thrilling mutant beatnik.
Jive Talk is always a good temporary boredom buster. The bartending goober gets the full bebop era gobbledegook assault from two of Johnny’s gang, who slide gracefully into a scat-jazz rhythm that sounds suspiciously like that rock ’n’ roll music various southerners were cooking up even as the movie was being shot.
The aforementioned goober Jim, played by 80-year-old William Vedder, is occasionally our narrator, speaking almost into camera and defining the terms of all coming rebellions. ‘Where’s he going anyway? Always going someplace . . . crazy . . . excited. Taking a lot of vitamin pills, drinking . . . over-stimulated!’ Heh. Vitamin pills. ‘I listen to the radio. Music, that is. The news is no good. It excites people.’ And: ‘Everything these days is pictures. Pictures and a lotta noise.’ Yes it is . . . or soon will be. Jim is doomed, of course, for the crime of being the harbinger of doom.
Anyway, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The BRMC cause an accident. Johnny clocks pretty waitress Kathie (Murphy) and decides that there may be more interesting ways to beat the boredom. We also meet her father Harry Bleeker (Keith), the local police chief. He is one of the first and best examples of a key teen movie trope, The Weak Father, who, according to ’50s movies like Rebel Without A Cause (see here), is the cause of just as much youth carnage as an abusive or authoritarian Bad Dad.
Much art and literature of the 1950s is absorbed by a crisis of masculinity, brought about by a shortage of live and physically and mentally healthy men after the Second World War, and the need for women to enter the workplace during the war and their refusal to end their careers when men returned. So the constant theme in the first flurry of teen movies is the emasculated middle-aged father, who, being someone who probably avoided the war for one reason or another, believes in talking and being reasonable, rather than bullying his progeny into line. This – for Johnny in The Wild One and Jim Stark in Rebel Without A Cause – is an apocalyptic disaster, for these troubled but basically decent boys would have been happy and fully integrated future factory fodder if Daddy had just given ’em a swift backhander once in a while.
So, unlike the previous proper copper from the motorbike race, Harry can’t bring himself to face down Johnny and throw the gang out of town. He quibbles and quakes and pleads with everybody to be reasonable. Bad move.
The barely kept peace is finally destroyed when The Beetles (yep, this is where they got their name), a BRMC splinter gang led by Lee Marvin’s wonderfully unhinged Chino, join the fun. Is Chino, with his dirty, stripy shirt, beret-like hat, straggly beard and aviator goggles, supposed to represent the cowardly French? He even hollers, ‘Storm The Bastille!’ at one point, apropos of absolutely nothing. Director Benedek can’t go as far as dressing Johnny in white and Chino in black, so he symbolises their respective potentials for redemption – their underlying characters – with personal hygiene. You can almost smell Lee Marvin when he oozes malevolently into the picture, and it ain’t the fragrance of gardenias. Brando is, in the Miles Davis vernacular, as clean as a motherfucker – that is, he dresses well and looks like he washes regularly.
There’s a Brando–Marvin fist-fight, much brilliant booze-driven revelry and flirting, a riot caused by Chino being thrown in jail, an ad hoc lynch-mob, a false rape accusation, one of the most sado-masochistic beatings in movie history, and an inevitable death-by-motorbike. When Johnny is arrested for manslaughter by a proper State copper, Kathie, her father and a remorseful lynch-mob leader get him off scot-free by telling the truth about the accidental death. Laconic, defiant Johnny refuses to thank his benefactors or learn a valuable lesson. But he does return to the town to give a delighted Kathie his stolen trophy, before riding off into the sunset – presumably to cause sex-and-violence-induced mayhem somewhere else. Or not. Whether the basic decency inside Johnny has been brought to his brooding surface by the day’s events is left entirely up to the viewer.
But the prophecies of future teen rebellion play themselves out in iconic imagery and dialogue, rather than plot machinations. The hilarious mockumentary hypocrisy of the opening caption: ‘This is a shocking story . . . a public challenge not to ever let it happen again.’ Yeah, right. And as it fades, the delicious long-shot of motor-sickles riding right at you, one skidding skilfully inches away from camera. The even funnier, cheap-as-chips back projection of Brando heading the gang, leaning a little occasionally to try and convince us that he’s not sitting on a stationary motorbike in a studio, but so utterly beautiful in peaked cap and shades. Throughout the film his lips are as obscene and indecent as Presley’s would be two years later, a promise of freaky sex much more convincing than the graphic stuff he’d treat us to two decades on in Last Tango In Paris.
But The Wild One is a lurid, trashy melodrama; so much so that Brando appears to be laughing sourly at the whole thing from time to time. See Brando’s camp, sighing ‘Oh my’ when stopping two biker underlings from taking the piss out of his newly beloved. The tale goes that Brando didn’t want to do the movie at all, but felt he owed Stanley Kramer for making him the lead in his very first screen role as paralysed war vet Ken in The Men.
/> But back to that crazy beatnik jive, Daddio – still the only English patois that is even more entertaining than post-hip hop ebonics. And perfect for extemporising on the perennial theme of teenage boredom and adding urgency to courtship rituals, at one and the same time. Johnny: ‘If you’re gonna stay cool you’ve got to wail. You’ve got to put sumthin’ down. You’ve got to make some jive. Don’tcha know what I’m talkin’ about?’ Um . . . nope, Marlon, not really. But I’m doing exactly what Kathie’s doing – watching your mouth, fascinated, delighted. Kathie: ‘My father was going to take me on a fishing trip to Canada once . . . We didn’t go.’ A perfect, deadpan Brando pause. ‘Crazy’, he mumbles, with repressed exasperation.
This is immediately followed by possibly the best-ever way of asking a girl to dance: ‘Wanna struggle?’ one of the BRMC cats asks a chick. That – so sharp, funny and politically charged – would’ve been the key line in any other movie.
But just a few minutes later, as the bikers revel in the bar, we get THE greatest two lines in this whole damn book, a sucker-punch-to-the-yarbles humdinger that has since come to encapsulate all forms of non-politicised rebellion. The possibly apocryphal story is that real-life biker gang members were hired as extras, and that one of the film crew asked one of them the question, and got the answer, and that Paxton and Benedek just hastily stole it. A beautiful accident, for sure. But would this line be so immortal if not delivered exactly as Brando dispatches it here?
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