Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies may itself seem like yet another exercise in 80’s nostalgia, and author Bruce Handy indulges his probable Generation X readership by attending to the biggest hits of the genre: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), The Breakfast Club (1985), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), and the like. But Handy not only widens his focus to films as early as the Andy Hardy series (1937-58) and as recent as the Hunger Games franchise (2012-), but he also by and large restrains himself from excessive expressions of wistfulness. This is an entertaining book, but it’s an evenhanded study, too.

Handy retains fondness for these movies, but he remains aware of their limitations. For instance, why is it that seemingly every popular teen movie from the last half-century presents grown-ups as not only at odds with their offspring but as alien creatures who are callous, uncaring, and way, way out of it? “One thing these movies had in common, aside from poor production values: parents and other authority figures were routinely portrayed as villainous and/or cretinous, if not simply ignored,” Handy writes. Or, in the more succinct words of Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy) in The Breakfast Club, “When you grow up, your heart dies.” And while it is reasonable to give such a line to her sullen, Goth-lite character, there is no evidence that Breakfast Club writer-director John Hughes, talented though he was, necessarily disagrees. For his part, Handy retains a healthy perspective on this myopic worldview.

The book makes clear that the very development of the teen movie is something of a fluke of history. Teenagers, as such, were not recognized as a special class of humans until fairly recently. In the opening chapter, Handy offers a helpful primer on how young people once occupied their time, and it was not by feeling sorry for themselves. In the colonial era, for example, children as young as 7 were enlisted to help in the home or on the farm. By the Industrial Revolution, child labor was the norm in factories and other grueling workplaces, such as mines. Only with the advent of near-universal high-school education were teenagers exempted from the workforce and permitted to adopt their own culture.

The key decade in which teenage culture broke off as something distinct seems best pinpointed to the 1950s. In 1958, Dwight Macdonald considered teenagers to represent a special interest group, “like the farm bloc or organized labor … Psychologically, they are as baffling to the lay adult as if they were in the grip of a severe neurosis,” he wrote. 

Like most things, movies aimed at a teenage audience began benignly enough. Handy opens his discussion with the Andy Hardy series, which was hardly an advertisement for adolescent discontent. Mickey Rooney starred as the title teenager, a plucky, endearing fellow who has no troubles or worries that cannot be settled by his father, Judge James Hardy (Lewis Stone). “His greatest act of filial rebellion isn’t racing cars over a cliff or bedding a friend’s mother but asking Judge Hardy not to accompany him when he finally sets off for college, lest his new classmates deem him a ‘pantywaist’ still clinging to his father’s shirttails,” Handy writes. The Hardy movies may seem like so much corn, but they represent one of Hollywood’s last attempts to portray middle-class family life as salutary. 

Quickly, though, teen movies became a vessel for their constituency’s perceived discontent. Upon its release in 1955, Rebel Without a Cause was this new genre’s opening salvo. The film, in its valorization of the out-of-control lead character, Jim Stark (James Dean), and its denunciation of his doltish father James Stark (Jim Backus, later of Gilligan’s Island), provided ample material to support teenagers’ sense of themselves as aggrieved and misapprehended. Studio boss Jack Warner conceded that the film aimed to show that, in the matter of juvenile delinquency, “the parents are at fault.” “Most reviews were mixed,” Handy writes. “Critics, being adults, tended to call out the film’s simplistic treatment of the ‘howling idiot’ parents, as The Nation described Backus et al.” 

At least the parents were present in Rebel Without a Cause. By contrast, in the 1960s-era “beach party” movies starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello — among them Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965) — Mom and Dad seem but a distant memory. Admittedly, these movies are generally winsome, but in their near-complete exclusion of adults worthy of respect, they represented something faintly ominous. “We started looking for our audience by removing the element of authority in our films,” said producer Samuel Z. Arkoff. “We saw the rebellion coming, but we couldn’t predict the extent of it, so we made a rule: no parents, no church or authorities in our films.” It’s a small comfort that the movies did feature “clownish adult roles” inhabited by the likes of Don Rickles or, piteously, Buster Keaton.

Because of their mandate to flatter their audience, teen movies that offered a more complicated picture of growing up were few and far between. One notable exception is George Lucas’s much-loved 1973 film American Graffiti, depicting college-bound, pop-music besotted pals, which Handy rightly calls “a gentle satire of teenage self-absorption.” Although it seems to be unspeakably dewy-eyed about its epoch, Handy notes that the film is attuned to the way that even good things, such as Buddy Holly songs, must come to an end. As the character Steve (Ron Howard) says at one point, “You can’t stay 17 forever.”

Alas, the balance of the book is largely taken up with the dregs of the genre, including the popular but depressing Fast Times at Ridgemont High, scripted by Cameron Crowe but with nowhere the subtlety or sensitivity of his later films. The movie gets credit in the book for being less crude than the contemporaneous Porky’s (1981) and for presenting the decision of one of the lead characters to have an abortion as a proud inevitability — not only a tendentious moral position but one that runs counter to the more intriguing natalist tradition in subsequent popular comedies, including Juno (2007) and Knocked Up (2007).

Naturally, John Hughes is given his own chapter, and without denying the appeal of The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Handy is not afraid to take him to task for clinging to adolescence in his first wave of hits. “[The 1980s were] the decade when baby boomers began to reach middle age — no fun for most of us, but an extra-rough transition for a generation that was encouraged to see its youth as a cardinal virtue,” Handy writes. At the same time, Hughes sounds nearly as calculated as the producer of the “beach party” pictures when describing his devotion to the teen movie. “I think the movie business is in a real serious transition right now,” Hughes said in a 1985 interview. “First there was sound, then color, then television, then cable. Now it’s demographics.” In other words, teenage moviegoing was on the uptick; By the mid-80s, over 50% of movie tickets were being sold to those 25 and under, Handy reports. Hughes was there to churn out products for that demographic. Notably, his work became richer once he started attending to people over the age of 16, such as in his best movie, 1987’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles. 

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Of course, Boomers no longer bear responsibility for the successive wave of teen movies. As the book winds down, Handy makes his way through Clueless (1995), Mean Girls (2004), the Twilight series (2008-2012), and the Hunger Games franchise. This makes for rather glum reading, and Handy himself ends on an ambiguous note that befits his evenhanded treatment of the movies under discussion here. “I have no unified theory of American adolescent cinema, and it’s probably not a subject that warrants one,” he writes. 

If there is a theme, perhaps it’s this: Kids still love being told they are all right.

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.