What the Great Teen Movies Taught Us

The Atlantic

06-06-2025

In the early spring, I caught a preview at my local Alamo Drafthouse Cinema for its forthcoming stoner-classics retrospective: snippets of Monty Python's Life of Brian; Tommy Boy; a few Dada-esque cartoons perfect for zonking out on, post-edible. The audience watched quietly until Matthew McConaughey, sporting a parted blond bowl cut and ferrying students to some end-of-year fun, delivered a signature bit of dialogue. 'Say, man, you got a joint?' he asked the kid in the back seat. 'Uhhh, no, not on me, man.' 'It'd be a lot cooler if you did,' he drawled. The crowd, including me, went wild.
Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, in which a fresh-faced McConaughey appears as Wooderson, the guy who graduated years back but still hangs with the high-school kids, is that kind of teen movie: eternally jubilance-inspiring. Set in 1976 and released in 1993, it's a paean to the let-loose ethos of a certain decade of American high school. And boy do these kids let loose.
On the final day of the school year, a group of rising seniors in small-town Texas set out with custom-made paddles to whack the bottoms of soon-to-be freshmen, and then take a couple of them to a 'beer bust' out by a soaring light tower. Along the way, they shoot some pool, cruise the town, smoke joint after joint. If the film has a point, it's that the teens want to party all night and still wake up in time to buy Aerosmith tickets in the morning. (The last frame shows them driving into the sunrise.)
What makes Dazed and Confused so pleasurable is its adherence to a devil-may-care freedom just inside the bounds of believability. You can really imagine a group of mid-'70s high-school boys throwing a bowling ball through a car window. You can really envision (especially if you went to my high school, which held on to similar hazing rituals well into the 2000s) senior girls screaming at rising ninth graders, ordering them to lie on the ground and 'fry like bacon' while being squirted with ketchup and mustard. And if you're as jealous of a '70s upbringing as I am (largely thanks to Dazed and Confused ), you can daydream about a version of adolescent life with nary an adult to correct you or even shake their head. Only the school's football coach tries to hold the line on drugs, and he's roundly mocked. Wild partying is just a rite of initiation.
As Bruce Handy—a journalist, critic, and fellow Dazed and Confused fan—writes in his new book, Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies, relaxing the strictures on kids in the throes of puberty and letting them call the shots has been the modus operandi of the teen filmscape for decades. Teenagers coalesced as a demographic group and a niche market in the 1940s and soon became box-office-boosting conveyors of cool. By the time the first batches of Baby Boomers were graduating from high school in the mid-1960s, teens had arrived as 'the prime movers of American popular culture,' Handy writes.
Over the ensuing six decades, 'teenagers and teen movies would come of age hand in hand,' stirring moral panic along the way. In Handy's astute and spirited account, grown-ups live in fear of the culture that teens have helped create—unnerved again and again by what they learn on-screen about an age cohort hell-bent on charting its own detour on the way to adulthood. 'They're just afraid that some of us might be having too good a time,' the coolest kid in Dazed and Confused concludes about his elders. As the genre has evolved, their unease has extended well beyond that.
From the start, Handy argues, the on-screen adventures in teen movies have been targeted to a double audience of rebellious teens and anxious adults. Kindly caretakers of youths in prewar times (Judge Hardy in the Hardy films helps his aw-shucks son navigate chaste first kisses, etc.) retreat from view. Early-1950s headlines such as 'Youth Delinquency Growing Rapidly Over the Country' are the backdrop to Jim Stark (James Dean) in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), roaring across the California landscape in his Mercury Coupe, morally adrift and crying out for adult guidance he never gets. Posters billed the movie as a challenging drama of today's juvenile violence, savvily marketing it to hell-raisers and handwringers alike.
Handy, who presides as a proudly pro-teen Boomer, is a clear-eyed critic who's not about to buy into the panic himself. Digging into movie backstories, budgets, ticket sales, and social trends, he is interested in how the films repeatedly glamorize adolescent acting-out in charged and timely ways.
He situates the Beach Party series of 1963–65 ('crap, but interesting crap') amid early-'60s worries that teens would take over the culture. Watch out, warned a 1963 book called Teen-Age Tyranny; they're 'permanently' imposing 'teenage standards of thought, culture, and goals.' Or lack of goals. The seven Beach Party films feature airheads enjoying sandy weekend fun, no teachers or parents in sight—though an anthropologist on the sidelines scrutinizes youthful mating habits through a telescope. The fact that no sex was in sight either (even visible navels were deemed off-limits) didn't stand in the way of ad copy that deployed titillation and terror. 'When 10,000 Bodies Hit 5,000 Blankets …' invited thousands of viewers to fill in the blank with their imagination.
In Handy's telling, teen culture rapidly became a lucrative feedback loop: Teenagers repeat the behaviors they see on-screen, Hollywood in turn tailors scripts to shifting concerns about kids, and the results both lure teens to theaters and encourage further antics—rattling adults even more in the process.
Surging late-'70s drug-use statistics dovetail with Cameron Crowe's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), based on the year Crowe spent undercover at a real California high school. Its memorable pothead character, Spicoli (a young Sean Penn), literally rolls out of a smoke-filled VW van on his first day of school—and has the last laugh, flouting the history teacher who tries to set the wasted kid straight. But the movie makes room for more sober realism too, with its teen-pregnancy subplot and kids juggling jobs. These teens aren't just hedonistic idlers; they've prematurely saddled themselves with grown-up burdens they can't always handle.
And in John Hughes's films, teens do what adults dread most: cast blame on their elders. In The Breakfast Club (1985), the kids consigned to Saturday-morning detention (a microcosm of high-school social tribes) conclude that it's their 'wintry, stone-faced' parents, as Handy puts it, who 'are the root of all their children's problems.' Hughes, who insisted on happy endings, grants the students victory: The film wraps with a freeze-frame of a freshly released detainee's defiantly raised fist—and it belongs to Bender (Judd Nelson), the disaffected, angry loner most inclined to stick it to the grown-ups.
More recently, the flavor of the moral panic has changed in a way that Handy doesn't quite latch on to. Adults were once afraid of teens: the greasers of Rebel, the boppers of Beach Party, the stoners of Fast Times, the screwups of The Breakfast Club. They were threats to the order of things, both too grown-up to control and not grown-up enough to properly wield control themselves. But since the arrival of the 21st century, teen films have taken a turn. Adults have become afraid for teens, and newly distressed about their own role (or lack thereof) in the troubles facing them. The mode of anxiety has shifted, and the culture of concern is playing catch-up.
As A ninth grader in April 1999, I came home one Tuesday to a news bulletin that showed a boy dangling from a window at Columbine High School, desperately trying to escape two schoolmates on a shooting rampage. That day, real-life teenagers entered a new era, one of victimhood. The fraught terrain has steadily expanded since, and now encompasses fears about social media's pernicious influence on teens, their growing anxiety and loneliness, their future in a polarized society on a warming planet.
Handy does not underrate the bleak fallout in teen films of 'our current wretched century.' He also rightly identifies the rise of 'girl power' as a force in teen culture, and the popularity and quality of girl-centered movies, even as old-school sex romps (the American Pie franchise) never disappear. Tina Fey's 2004 film, Mean Girls, is near the top of his list of best teen films, as it is of mine, and he embeds it in a discussion of articles and parenting guides (Fey drew on Rosalind Wiseman 's Queen Bees & Wannabes) that sounded the alarm about aggression and insecurity in the world of American girlhood. But in emphasizing bullying's links to the usual teen-film theme of high-school tribalism, Handy stops short of recognizing the portrayal of it, both comic and horrifying, as part of a larger shift toward incisive psychological probing that skewed dark: When Fey watched the movie with test audiences, she took note that girls were responding to it less as a teen movie and more 'like a reality show.' They weren't 'exactly guffawing.' Recently out of high school myself at the time, though I laughed, I also remember wincing at the no-safe-spaces aura of the cruelty.
In his choice of other 21st-century films to focus on, Handy veers away from depictions of teens whose newly stressful struggles for autonomy portend dire consequences. He omits Sofia Coppola's excellent and grim feature-length directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides (based on Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel and set in the mid-'70s), which was released with a sickening thud in 2000—a bookend of sorts to the freewheeling laxity of Dazed and Confused, set in the same era. When 13-year-old Cecilia, the youngest of five spectrally beautiful sisters whose severe parents keep them cloistered, throws herself out a second-story window in the middle of a rare party at their house, she is the first of the girls to successfully take her own life; the rest follow. With the haze of inexplicable death clouding every sequence, The Virgin Suicides reset the barometric pressure of teen movies. Who could or would protect these kids from themselves?
Instead, Handy homes in on the biggest teen blockbusters of the 21st century— The Twilight Saga (2008–12) and The Hunger Games (2012–23)—two series, one fantasy and the other science fiction, in which teens succeed in summoning rare strength not just to manage their own hormones but to deal with their elders' destructive drives. The themes are familiar: sexual initiation for Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) in Twilight and peer competition for Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) in The Hunger Games. But a vampire boyfriend for Bella and gladiatorial combat in a totalitarian dystopia for Katniss—and ultimate wind-in-the-hair domestic bliss for both—leave the current social realities of teen life behind.
The pressures of a hyper-meritocratic, social-media-saturated world surface elsewhere, with girls again in the foreground. Handy mentions the hilariously incisive Booksmart (2019) only in passing, but its two super-stressed-out, overachieving Los Angeles seniors, Molly and Amy (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever), embody a strain of contemporary, and contradictory, fears about teenagers: Have they been so intent on molding themselves into some optimized version of young adulthood that the only thing they're headed for is burnout or disappointment? If they just chill, though, what about their future productivity? On the last day of school, the two girls are busy resolving student-council-budget issues—only to be jolted into questioning their rule-following zeal. Together, they dare to let loose before it's too late. Booksmart delivers a giddy quest-for-a-party ride, while also feeling like a heady glimpse into a teen therapist's session notes.
For poignant scrutiny of the digital revolution's repercussions for teens, Handy might have explored the sweetly rendered Eighth Grade (2018), which arms a fledgling adolescent with her own camera. Kayla (Elsie Fisher), a painfully shy and insecure 13-year-old, is glued to screens, a voyeur obsessively scrolling for glimpses of lives that seem intimidatingly alien and glamorous. At the same time, she's a vlogger, posting wishfully affirmative videos online. Set during the last week of the school year, the movie deftly captures a kid caught between the digital and real worlds, trapped in her own head and stranded on the margins of an inaccessible peer scene. Finally daring to show up at a pool party, she doesn't reach for beer or pot; she has a panic attack.
I couldn't help comparing the scene of Kayla, in an all-wrong bright-green one-piece, anxiously descending into the pool, head down as if to make herself invisible, with a memorable moment in Fast Times: the sexually-savvy-beyond-her-years Linda (Phoebe Cates), clad in a fire-engine-red bikini, majestically emerging from the water, a symbol of an era freighted with such different fears.
By now, in the TikTok-teen era (vlogging Kayla was a little ahead of her time), the feedback-loop premise of Handy's history shows signs of being under strain. Teens, once Hollywood's lucrative market, no longer flock to theaters. And the place where their adventures are playing out isn't as readily accessible as it once was, even to hyper-hovering adults. If teens are still showing up at parties, they're on their phones there; if they still venture out to whatever malls they can find, they're on their phones there. When they're at school, they're mostly on their phones there, too.
And what they are consuming is content produced by other teens—stories and TikToks and straight-to-camera diatribes more real to them than any film written by adults and shot through their anxious, or nostalgic, lens. The cohort that took over mass culture more than half a century ago has now built a sprawling culture for itself, by itself. In 2025, the most potent media produced about teenagers will likely emerge on those pocket-size life changers, and most grown-ups will never get wind of what's on display. How's that for something to worry about?