By the same author
This is Uncool: The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk and Disco Fear of Music: The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk and Disco Popcorn: Fifty Years of Rock ’n’ Roll Movies
To Matt
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1950s
The Wild One • The Blackboard Jungle • Rebel Without A Cause • I Was A Teenage Werewolf • The Cool and the Crazy • The Blob • The 400 Blows
1960s
Where The Boys Are • Beat Girl • A Taste Of Honey • West Side Story • The Young Savages • The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner • To Sir, With Love • If . . . • Kes
1970s
A Clockwork Orange • The Last Picture Show • Le Souffle Au Coeur • Harold And Maude • That’ll Be The Day • American Graffiti • Badlands • Black Christmas • A Boy And His Dog • Carrie • Martin • National Lampoon’s Animal House • Grease • Halloween • The Warriors • Quadrophenia • Over The Edge
1980s
Little Darlings • Taps • Class Of 1984 • Made In Britain • Risky Business • Meantime • The Outsiders • Rumble Fish • WarGames • A Nightmare On Elm Street • Night Of The Comet • Red Dawn • Footloose • Back To The Future • The Breakfast Club • Ferris Bueller’s Day Off • Pretty In Pink • Lucas • River’s Edge • Dirty Dancing • Heathers • Society
1990s
Edward Scissorhands • Dazed And Confused • Totally Fucked Up • Heavenly Creatures • Spanking The Monkey • Before Sunrise • Kids • Clueless • La Haine • Scream • William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet • Starship Troopers • The Faculty • Pleasantville • Rushmore • Cruel Intentions • But I’m A Cheerleader • American Pie • Election • The Virgin Suicides
2000s
Final Destination • Battle Royale • Bring It On • Ginger Snaps • Ghost World • Donnie Darko • Bully • City Of God • Elephant • Thirteen • Mean Girls • Mysterious Skin • Napoleon Dynamite • Hard Candy • Kidulthood • Hairspray • Juno • Superbad • Teeth • The Class • Twilight • Dogtooth • Precious • Fish Tank • The Social Network
Movies that Didn’t Make It
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The main source of information for Stranded At The Drive-In – as well as the original source book from which I made my list of movies to watch and write about – is The Radio Times Guide To Films, published by BBC Worldwide. Updated annually, it’s the epitome of the comprehensive and informed movie reference book.
As constant fact-check sources, the online resources at Wikipedia (wikipedia.org), All Movie Guide (allrovi.com), Entertainment Weekly: The 50 All-Time Best High School Movies (www.ew.com) and the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) were invaluable.
Other books used for background on specific films, historical context or examples of how to interpret film were:
Seeing Is Believing – Peter Biskind (Bloomsbury)
Easy Riders Raging Bulls – Peter Biskind (Bloomsbury)
Down And Dirty Pictures – Peter Biskind (Bloomsbury)
Yipee Ki-Yay Moviegoer: Writings On Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema and Other Important Topics – Vern (Titan)
Scenes From A Revolution – Mark Harris (Canongate)
Rebels & Chicks: A History Of The Hollywood Teen Movie – Stephen Tropiano (Back Stage)
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die – Edited by Steven Jay Schneider
Where The Girls Are – Susan J. Douglas (Times Books)
From Reverence To Rape: The Treatment Of Women In The Movies – Molly Haskell (Penguin)
The New Biographical Dictionary Of Film – David Thomson (Little Brown)
Thanks as always to Ian Preece. Ian has been the editor for all four of my books and deserves some kind of medal for patience and calm, as well as my heartfelt gratitude for keeping my writing on track and believing in me. Similar could be said of Julie Burchill, with the addition of friendship way above and beyond the call of duty.
As always, the biggest shout-out goes to my wife and best friend Linsay McCulloch. Still a young savage after all these years. Finally . . . I’ve dedicated this book to my son Matthew Stevens who, apart from helping me write the Footloose entry, got me back in touch with my adolescent self when he was being the coolest teenage son a guy could hope for. Love ya, Kid.
If you have any comments or observations on, or corrections or criticisms of Stranded At The Drive-In, you can reach the author at [email protected] and at Twitter on @GarryMulholland.
INTRODUCTION
Stranded at the drive-in
Branded a fool
What will they say
Monday at school?
The above lyric, taken from the song ‘Sandy’ as sung by John Travolta in the film version of Grease, lends this book an appropriate title. Not only do we get a cinema reference, but a neat summing-up of a few of the key elements of teen fiction: thwarted romance, peer pressure, school, the quest for night-time pleasure, fear of humiliation.
Grease’s perennial popularity lies in its inter-generational understanding of the pain of being a teenager, and its ability to see those growing pains from both sides of the gender divide. The fact that the songs are catchy and the jokes are dirty and sweet doesn’t hurt either. But Grease is just one of many films about being a teenager that resonate with future generations of movie audiences long after their initial release. So I figured it was high time someone took a long, hard look at the reasons why. Ergo Stranded At The Drive-In, an attempt to choose the 100 best teen movies since the 1950s and search out the meanings and messages that have made the teen movie the most vibrant sub-genre in modern film.
An outrageous claim? I don’t think so. Here’s a quick list of great movies of the last few years: Juno, Twilight, Napoleon Dynamite, The Class, Superbad, Kidulthood, Donnie Darko, Teeth, Hard Candy . . . yep – all teen movies. Now let me have it with a list of recent non-teen movies that are as good as that bunch. The Lives Of Others? OK, I’ll definitely give you that one. Wal-E and Toy Story 3 and Waltz With Bashir? You’re right . . . works of genius. Anything else that isn’t a cartoon? Slumdog Millionaire? Well, actually . . . that would be a teen film and a cartoon to all intents and purposes. And not included in this book. But we’ll get back to that later . . .
The point I’m trying to make is that film – and especially Hollywood film – is going through a moribund phase. The thrillers, dramas, action movies and adult comedies that make up the central seam of mainstream film seem to have been in perennial decline since the Golden Age of the ’30s and ’40s . . . with a brief pick-up in the New Hollywood late ’60s/early ’70s. Horror and sci-fi have lost their souls to cynical gore and comic book CGI flash respectively. And while I obviously admire the sophisticated wit of, say, Sideways . . . it’s neither as funny, nor as universally relevant, nor as ‘real’ as American Pie.
The one topic that continues to provoke screenwriters and directors into their best work and persuades studios to fund innovation and substance over piledriver special effects overload is the infinite well of deep and difficult emotions that is Teenage. Sadly, the piece of classic screen fiction that forced me to really sit up and take notice of this phenomenon is something I can’t write about in Stranded At The Drive-In. And that is, of course, the greatest television series ever made: Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Joss Whedon’s massively influential horror-comedy-soap about a 15-year-old girl (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) who is forced to protect the world from a constantly encroaching horde of evil demons was given a total of 144 43-minute episodes to explore every dimension of its real subject – the agonies of a young girl’s journey from 15-y
ear-old ingénue to parentified 21-year-old woman. Every vampire, demon, beast, God and monster evoked over the series’ six-year run was a metaphor for another facet of the nightmare of adolescence. Hell – the girl even died (twice!) to save the world, yet still endured her worst moments at the hands of three dashing but emotionally stunted boyfriends who either tried to kill her (Angel), smother her (Riley) or rape her (Spike) in their efforts to take away the power she acquires, not just as The Slayer, but as a woman. In the mythical Californian suburb of Sunnydale, the high school is literally built on top of the mouth of hell, and Whedon and his ridiculously talented cast and crew make merry with that universally understood metaphor until you understand that there is no possibility of freedom for Buffy and her equally charming and funny pals except razing the school to the ground. Again . . . twice.
Some readers, at this point, will be doing the equivalent of thrusting one hand in the air and hissing, ‘Miss! Miss!’ under their breaths at the back of the class in their impatient attempts to point out that there is a Buffy The Vampire Slayer feature film. But, lest we forget, Stranded At The Drive-In is an attempt to locate the 100 best teen movies – and the movie version of Buffy is an almost unwatchable dog. Indeed, it was the mess made of a brilliant idea that forced Joss Whedon to take it to television where he could keep tighter overall control of the project.
But enough about Buffy . . . for now, at least. The point is that my love of the show led me to look at teen fiction in a completely different way, and to notice how many teen movies are based on very adult metaphors for very adult themes. The monster as male sexual predator. The school as symbol of repression and psychic imprisonment. The quest for sexual satisfaction as arm-wrestle between innocence and experience. The teen obsession with popularity as vacuous desire to conform. And, most powerfully perhaps, the adult’s mourning of teenage friendships, when bonding with one’s peers meant everything, before career, marriage, mortgage, kids and the very adult fear of appearing needy get in the way and reduce the intensity of our youthful friendships to dinner parties planned months in advance and cards swapped at Christmas. We all miss the spontaneity and passion of our teen friendships, but have no idea how to regain those bonds as adults. Many of the best teen films are driven by that sense of loss.
Yet, when most adults are asked whether they would go through their teenage years again if given the chance, we shudder involuntarily at the torments and embarrassments that never entirely leave us, and say never again. Another reason, perhaps, why good teen movies resonate far beyond the youth demographic they are generally aimed at. Adults get to relive both the infinite possibilities of youth, and the humiliations and terrors that come with those infinite possibilities, at something like a safe distance.
But one thing that I do think unites all good teen movies is that they make you remember what it was like to be young without leaving you too full of disappointment and regret at the dreams that you didn’t follow. That’s best left to talky adult dramas, Radiohead records and the whole middle-youth culture of resigned disappointment. And you’re welcome to it, frankly.
Once Orion had very generously agreed to publish the latest indulgence of my cultural passions, I still found myself in need of another inspiration, aside from the movies themselves, concerning exactly how to write about things that are theoretically designed for people a third of my age. This is where I want to pause to thank a man called Vern.
My wife bought me one of Vern’s books. It’s called Yipee Ki-Yay Moviegoer: Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema and Other Important Topics. Vern has no surname and writes for the Ain’t It Cool News website at www.aintitcool.com. He is an American fan of action movies and writes about them in a conversational, iconoclastic, wildly digressive and bloomin’ hilarious style. Just as I was embarking upon Stranded and feeling a little intimidated and lost for words, reading Yipee Ki-Yay . . . reminded me what kind of anti-academic cultural criticism I love, and helped me relocate my own voice and stop feeling self-conscious about trying to match up to all those learned film critics that have gone before. So I feel I at least owe him a big-up and a book plug. Yipee Ki-Yay Moviegoer: Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema and Other Important Topics is published by Titan Books and it is very, very good indeed. Back to the matter in hand.
Before Marlon Brando wrapped himself in leather and mounted his boss hog in 1953, teenagers in films were children who just happened to be 13 or over, or adults that just happened to be under 20. The Wild One exists because 1950s America was more frightened of the juvenile delinquent – the enemy within – than it was of The Bomb, race riots, or reds under the bed. At exactly the same time as sensational headlines and learned studies about criminal kids became an American obsession, big business was identifying the newly affluent post-pubescent as the most significant new market to be exploited. Wild youth had money, and it needed its own dress codes, its own music . . . and its own movies. Every peer group wants to see itself and its preoccupations onscreen. And now that the labour of school-leavers was needed to help rebuild post-war economies, and middle-class college-goers were getting bigger allowances from their newly affluent and more indulgent parents, Hollywood had to respond to their spending power – and could do so while also exploiting the older generation’s fear of spoiled and rampant youth. Producer Stanley Kramer, who had already made himself the new king of ‘message movies’ with the post-war angst of The Men (also starring Brando) and the thinly veiled anti-McCarthy western allegory High Noon, saw his cake-and-eat-it opportunity when he happened upon a short story called The Cyclist’s Raid in a 1951 magazine. The tale of a takeover of a small town by a violent biker gang was based loosely on a real-life incident in 1947, when a Fourth Of July holiday in Holister, California was invaded by rioting leather boys. Perfect. For the kids, sexy rebels doing naughty stuff to petrified fuddy-duddies. For the adults, a salutary tale about what might happen if we don’t give our kids the tough love and discipline they all secretly crave. All you needed to add was the hottest young actor of his generation, a leather jumpsuit, a jaunty peaked cap and a whole bunch of roaring motorbikes.
The Wild One is a film about the one thing that concerns a teenager more than anything. Nope, not sex. Nor ‘rites of passage’ nor ‘coming of age’ . . . none of us know that that’s what we’re experiencing until long after the fact. Not money, nor love, nor school, nor bad parents, nor rebellion against authority. Not even freedom. The one thing that defines teenage life more than any other one thing is . . . boredom. The fear of it. The battle against it. The drive to do anything, no matter how stupid or ill-advised, that will keep the hideous monster at bay. When a young person is bored, they have only two choices: get into trouble or give in and have nothing to do except think; about sex, coming of age, school, parents, money, rebellion, authority and the terrifying prospect of being an adult, and working for a living, and accepting responsibility. Add the ‘too adult for toys, too childish to be trusted with beer’ thing that defines tweenage, and every moment that a teenage head and body isn’t fully occupied brings terror of the dark unknown that is our future, and of all the appalling things that have already happened to us but we refuse to acknowledge and deal with until we’re ready for our midlife crisis. Boredom is the shadowy nemesis of all teenagers, no matter how good or easy their life appears on the surface. And The Wild One is about the sort of thing that post-war youth were increasingly driven to do to beat that shadowy nemesis down, at least for a short while.
So the teen movie began as an exploitation genre with two specific strands: the message movie made by esteemed directors on moderately large budgets and exemplified by The Wild One, Rebel Without A Cause and The Blackboard Jungle; and semi-ironic poverty row B-movie ‘trash’ in the shape of teen sci-fi (The Blob), horror (I Was A Teenage Werewolf), frothy romance with music (a hundred largely forgotten beach party movies and cutie-pie cautionary tales for girls like the Sandra Dee vehicle Gidget) and hysterical satirical sideswipes at adult fears of
juvenile delinquency like The Cool And The Crazy, made by fly-by-night independent production companies like the legendary American International Pictures.
But the teenage phenomenon also came along at roughly the same time as film-making’s equivalent of rock ’n’ roll. The iconoclasts of the French and British versions of the ‘New Wave’ made movies that looked like real life and took teen angst seriously. Inspired by François Truffaut’s accusatory borstal boy masterpiece The 400 Blows, a trail of Angry Young British Directors including Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke set about inventing and establishing the anti-establishment teen docu-drama, a tradition which has continued and inspired a host of directors from around the globe.
But teen movies are inclined to reflect the mood of the times. So, while even the most bleak ’60s teen movies seethed with the possibility of youth revolution, images of ’70s adolescence reflected the disillusion and more hardened stances of failed revolutionaries and post-Watergate/Vietnam despair. Teen sci-fi movies like A Clockwork Orange and A Boy And His Dog didn’t just present ultra-violent dystopias caused by nuclear war or totalitarian regimes, but seemed determined to take their anger out on women with almost manic levels of misogyny.
Which is probably why few noticed a modest but profitable game-changer from Canada, in which a gaggle of girls of various levels of sexual awareness are trapped in a house, stalked and murdered by an irrational psycho, leaving one Final Girl to survive against all the odds, which also featured a devilishly sequel-friendly open ending. Black Christmas 2 never did get made, but the 1974 original invented the setting, style and rules of the teen slasher genre, which were further established by John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and went on to such universal popularity that the most commercially successful teen slasher movie of all-time was essentially one long, self-referential piss-take of its endlessly repeated formulas (that would be 1996’s Scream, of course).
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