37^ /Vo. Wox" REBELLION and RECONCILIATION: SOCIAL
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37^ A8/J /Vo. WoX" REBELLION AND RECONCILIATION: SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, GENRE, AND THE TEEN FILM 1980-1989 DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Christine Karen Reeves Hubbard, B.A., M.A. Denton, Texas December, 1996 37^ A8/J /Vo. WoX" REBELLION AND RECONCILIATION: SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, GENRE, AND THE TEEN FILM 1980-1989 DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Christine Karen Reeves Hubbard, B.A., M.A. Denton, Texas December, 1996 Hubbard, Christine Karen Reeves, Rebellion and Reconciliation: Social Psychology. Genre, and the Teen Film 1980-1989. Doctor of Philosophy (English), December, 1996,164 pp., filmography, references, 139 titles. In this dissertation, I bring together film theory, literary criticism, anthropology and psychology to develop a paradigm for the study of teen films that can also be effectively applied to other areas of pop culture studies as well as literary genres. Expanding on Thomas Doherty's discussion of 1950s teen films and Ian Jarvie's study of films as social criticism, I argue that teen films are a discrete genre that appeals to adolescents to the exclusion of other groups. Teen films subvert social mores of the adult world and validate adolescent subculture by reflecting that subculture's values and viewpoints. The locus of this subversion is the means by which teenagers, through the teen films, vicariously experience anxiety-provoking adult subjects such as sexual experimentation and physical violence, particularly the extreme expressions of sex and violence that society labels taboo. Through analyzing the rhetoric of teen lifestyle films, specifically the teen romance and sex farce, I explore how the films offer teens vicarious experience of many adolescent "firsts." In addition, I claim that teen films can effectively appropriate other genres while remaining identifiable as teen films. I discuss hybrid films which combine the teen film with the science fiction genre, specifically Back to the Future and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and the musical genre, specifically Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Dirty Dancing. In my discussion of the slasher film, specifically the Halloween. Friday the 13th. and A Nightmare on Elm Street cycles, I highlight how teen films function as a safe place to explore the taboo. Finally, I discuss the way in which the teen film genre has evolved in the 1990s due in part to shifts in social and economic interests. The teen films of the 1990s include the viewpoints of women, minorities, the handicapped, and homosexuals and question the materialistic ethos of the 1980s films. Copyright by Christine Karen Reeves Hubbard 1996 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter 1. GENRE AND THE TEEN FILM 1 Film Language The Genre Film Genre and the Teen Film The Teen Film Genre 2. THE TEEN LIFESTYLE FILM 19 The Emergence of the Teen Film Anatomy of the Teen Lifestyle Film Teen Films and Social Learning The John Hughes Films Topicality in the Teen Film The Sex Farce Teen Film Parodies 3. TEEN FILM HYBRIDS 75 The Teen Musical The Teen Science Fiction Film 4. THE TEEN HORROR FILM 97 Emergence of the Teen Horror Hybrid Halloween Friday the 13 th A Nightmare on Elm Street Teen Horror Film Parodies IV 5. CONCLUSION 113 Problems of Difference in Teen Films of the 1980s Teen Films in the 1990s APPENDIX 123 WORKS CONSULTED 156 CHAPTER 1 GENRE AND THE TEEN FILM Film Language James Monaco states in How to Read a Film that films are different from spoken and written languages which can be used for intercommunication because film is a one- way communication (132). Language systems deal well with abstractions and ideas while film language gives an extremely close approximation of reality and presents us with "short circuit signs in which the signifier nearly equals the signified" and a "continuous, non-discrete system in which we can't identify a basic unit and which, therefore, we can't describe quantitatively" (Monaco 130). If this is the case, how then does a viewer make sense of a film text? Monaco states that "we all know well that we must learn to read before we can attempt to enjoy or understand literature, but we tend to believe, mistakenly, that anyone can 'read' a film" (125). Film uses cultural codes, shared artistic codes (mise en scene), and codes unique to the cinema (montage), and these codes are the "medium" through which the "message" of the scene is transmitted; the specifically cinematic codes together with the shared codes make up the syntax of the film (Monaco 148). I.C. Jarvie, in Movies as Social Criticism, relates an experiment that illustrates that film literacy is learned. African tribespeople were shown a health education film and then asked what 1 2 interested them. The tribespeople began to discuss a chicken that was in the background of the film's narrative action. The tribespeople didn't know which things within the frame of the film to pay attention to and which to ignore. When characters left the screen, they wanted to know where they went; if the camera panned, the audience assumed the ground was moving. If there were closeups, they thought the people were getting bigger. According to Jarvie, it took the experimenters years to teach the audience film literacy (16). Although this story is likely exaggerated, it does make two major points: film literacy is learned and audiences will take what is useful for them from the information presented within a film text. Christian Metz has discussed the visual image and the conventions used in presentation of it in film. He states that the visual image can be divided through looking at the way it is manipulated. The modification of time between the visual images is called montage, the juxtaposition of shots; the modification of space within the the visual image is called mise-en-scene, the placement of objects and characters within the frame of the film (Monaco 142). Within montage, there are two kinds of connotations which are created— syntagmatic and paradigmatic. When the significance of a shot depends on comparison with preceding or following shots, it may be called syntagmatic connotation (Monaco 131). An example of this is the shot-reverse shot convention used in filming conversation. The shot of the person speaking makes sense when juxtaposed with a shot of another person responding to the speech. When the connotation of a shot depends on the audience's awareness that it was chosen from a variety of possible shots, this is a 3 paradigmatic connotation (Monaco 132). An example of this is audience awareness that a scene is being shot from a particular point of view or using particular lighting and understanding the connotation that that choice makes in perception of the scene. Perhaps the most famous use of paradigmatic connotation occurs in Citizen Kane where high angle shots correspond to Kane's dominant position and low angle shots are utilized for the other characters in the film who are subservient to him. Mise-en-scene refers to the information contained within the individual film shot. Using Citizen Kane as our example again, mise-en-scene creates a tableau of information in screen space. For example, when Kane's wife has overdosed, the deep-focus shot features the bedside table with pills in the foreground and the unconscious woman in the background. This shot utilizes mise-en-scene to further the plot without use of dialogue. In Chapter 4,1 discuss the way that teen horror films use mise-en-scene to create tension in the viewer. Films make use of literary techniques as well, including metonymy, substitute naming, and synecdochy, where a part stands for the whole or a whole for the part (Monaco 135). If we see a closeup of a hand, we assume that it is part of a whole person, just as a closeup of a character's face is not mistaken for a head separate from a body. Point of view is another technique used in film as well as literature. Usually there is an omniscient point of view used in establishing shots which is later replaced with a particular point of view evidenced in over the shoulder shots. For the film literate audience, comprehension of these techniques becomes almost intuitive. Jarvie discusses additional ways the filmmaker and audience interact. He focuses on two activities: selection and interpretation. He states that selection occurs when "from the flux of experience" the filmmaker chooses an experience to relate (141). This selection is then interpreted through understanding of the conventions the viewer must have both mastered and compensated for. Thus movies, according to Jarvie, "are read by an active and interpreting mind, not just passively viewed or absorbed" (141). Jarvie uses this idea of selection and interpretation to refute the direct influence theory1, which describes film viewers as passive ingesters of information, as simplistic and unrealistic, and promotes instead the selective perception theory2, which describes the process of communication in terms of an active viewer who may accept, reject, or negotiate a relationship with film material. In my reading of the selective perception theory, I have found that social factors are the most important component in the interpretation of film texts. The viewer will identify with a text through shared social factors and will tend to believe as true that which appears in a in a film text which is beyond their personal experience. These social factors explain what Herbert J.