The History of TEEN FILM AUDIENCE AND APPEAL

The genres history of appeal explained for target audiences from this site

The idea that teen film is an invention of the 1950s—part of the Western emergence of youth culture after the Second World War—is a popular one. Jon Savage puts the argument this way: after the War, “the spread of American-style consumerism, the rise of sociology as an academic discipline and market research as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and sheer demographics turned adolescents into Teenagers.”[1] Thomas Doherty’s Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s is a highly influential example of this argument, analysing an extensive archive of films and the media circulating around them. Doherty claims that the decline of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s, and related threats to the profitability of cinema, produced a flood of films in which teenagers were central in order to cater to a market newly identified as “teenagers”. He links this to changed economic relations between studios and theatres but also to forces more intimately connected with adolescence, such as post-war suburbanization and the rise of television, which extended the significance of the family home (Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics 18-19). Amidst these influences, the teenager appeared as both exciting film content and reliable filmgoer.
For Timothy Shary, the 1980s is a renaissance period for teen film largely produced by the multi-screen movie theatre. The multiplex clarified a returning adolescent demographic to whom more and more varied teen films should be addressed. He attributes to this some changing conventions for teen film, including the “complexity of moral choices and personal options” built into the variety of the multiplex (Shary, Teen Movies 55). For Shary’s longer study, Generation Multiplex, the multiplex represents an adolescent quest for social space that recalls the significance of early picture theatres but with more demographic coherence. The techniques by which the film industry exploited this audience also recalls the commodified youth culture Doherty identified in the 1950s but with less demographic coherence and suggests a resurgence that is also a difference at the level of both genre and audience. Despite the usefulness of these different histories I want to supplement them with a focus on earlier films, and earlier modes of distributing and understanding adolescence, and thus suggest the importance of a different kind of continuity underpinning what we now call teen film.
A critical historiography of teen film can find references to films about adolescence before the 1950s in the most influential accounts of teen film as a genre. David Considine’s The Cinema of Adolescence is an important reference point, although many of the films Considine cites are included as precursor texts in Doherty’s Teenagers and Teenpics and in Shary’s genre overviews that emphasise the ’80s.[2] I will draw most heavily on Considine’s text in this essay because he offers a more detailed and longer history. Doherty not only claims that teen film was invented in the 1950s but restricts teen film proper to 1955 – 1959. He summarizes the next forty years of films about adolescence as “a series of postclassical phases retreading, revamping, and reinventing the generic blueprints of the original teenpics of the 1950s.” (Teenagers and Teenpics 190). Shary’s Teen Movies presents a strikingly different history, locating teen film’s infancy in 1895-1948, its early adolescence in 1949-67, its later (rebellious) adolescence in 1968-79, supplemented by a rebirth in 1978-95, and a coda of new teen film speculations in 1994-2004. It is only possible to reconcile Doherty and Shary’s claims if they are talking about different types of teen film, and they centrally differ on the question of whether ’80s teen film is part of the genre or a reply to it. For Shary, teen film in the 1980s became sophisticated and self-conscious while for Doherty this is a “double vision” (Teenagers and Teenpics 196) which betrays these films’ address to adults (as well as teenagers) and makes them not teen film at all.
Although the ’80s is often convincingly represented as a high period for the genre, Considine’s The Cinema of Adolescence, published in 1985, represents the generic shape of teen film as well established before then. Beginning with the recognition that films about adolescence made in the 1930s could remain intelligibly about adolescence for adolescents of the 1970s, Considine emphasises continuity as well as development in the cinema of adolescence. And he stresses the importance of the 1940s and 50s for crystallising a cinematic image of adolescence and discusses teen film in the 1960s and ’70s unaffected by later claims that little teen film appeared in these decades. What we define as teen film depends on very particular historical vantage points, which doesn’t make it at all incoherent.

The Guardian