Defining the TEEN FILM

There are certainly narrative conventions that help define teen film: the youthfulness of central characters; content usually centred on young heterosexuality, frequently with a romance plot; intense age-based peer relationships and conflict either within those relationships or with an older generation; the institutional management of adolescence by families, schools, and other institutions; and coming-of-age plots focused on motifs like virginity, graduation, and the makeover. Engaging with teen film as a genre means thinking about the certainties and questions concerning adolescence represented in these conventions, including the role of teen film in producing and disseminating them. As Adrian Martin argues, “the teen in teen movie is itself a very elastic, bill-of-fare word; it refers not to biological age, but a type, a mode of behaviour, a way of being . . . The teen in teen movie means something more like youth.”[3] Both “youth” and “adolescence” might be more appropriate names for what centres teen film than “teen”. While “teen” names a set of tendencies and expectations rather than an identity mapping onto the years thirteen to nineteen, the concept “teenager” is too narrow to define a genre that is preoccupied with what Martin as well as many scholarly discussions of adolescence call liminality. The fact that we label this genre of films “teen film” is nevertheless significant. “Teen” describes an historical extension of, and limit on, a period of social dependence after puberty. The contradiction between maturity and immaturity that “teen” thus describes is central to teen film, and if the conventional content of teen film can be seen emerging in the decades before the 1950s it is importantly shaped by cinema’s own relation to this contradiction.