Timothy Shary

Hollywood has been making films about teenagers since the 1930s, and films aimed at teenagers since the mid-1950s. The genre flourished until the mid-sixties, languished during the late sixties and seventies, and then flared back to life in the early 1980s in the hands of directors like Cameron Crowe (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl, Real Genius) and especially John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Published in 2002, Timothy Shary’s Generation Multiplex is a catalog and analysis of those late-twentieth-century Hollywood teen films, overlaid with an interpretation of what, collectively, they said about American teenagers.

Shary, adapting and expanding his PhD thesis, does his job thoroughly and well. This is likely the definitive book on its subject, and – as befits such a book – it’s exhaustively comprehensive, lucidly organized, and clearly written. Anyone seriously interested in the Hollywood teen film, or in Hollywood films of the eighties and nineties, needs a copy of Generation Multiplex.

All that said, it’s not a lot of fun to read. Shary’s grouping of teen films by type, rather than year, facilitates his analysis of shared themes, but kills any sense of narrative momentum and makes it hard for him to connect the films to broader social and cultural trends. His “voice” is so measured, and his analyses so relentlessly sober, that it’s easy to forget how frequently and enthusiastically the genre he’s analyzing embraced anarchy, surrealism, and low comedy. First books by academic authors (mine included) can be like that. When your book starts as a PhD thesis, it’s hard – no matter how much you edit – to get the chill of seriousness out of its bones.

If you’re a reader of a certain age and (just) want a breezy, nostalgic tour of the movies of your youth . . . Generation Multiplex isn’t your book. If, however, you want to know what those movies were telling the world about you and your friends, it most certainly is.… (altro)