Abstract
The ‘teen film', ‘teen flick' or ‘teenpic' has changed since the 1950s when it started to define itself through Juvenile delinquency films. As was recently commented, ‘the teen flick has lost its shiny innocence and become a cynical brute' (Maher; 2006: 13). Over the course of 50 years, the American teen film evolved from the advent of the teen audience in the 1950s to the nostalgic depictions of youth featured in 1970s film through to the golden age of teen films in the 1980s and finally to the illustrations of Generation X in the 1990s. Films about the young are not necessarily addressed to the young and films addressing the young do not necessarily focus on young characters. But two films, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Kids (1995) stand out in their articulation of the anxieties of teenage angst, gender, and delinquency and the types of stories that are depicted. Indeed, these two films are landmarks of their genre and period. They are very different in their depictions of teenage angst and yet similar in essence to the issue. Undeniably, both were groundbreaking. One sparked a frenzy of identification amongst middle class teenagers and the other was highly controversial in its pseudo-realist and documentary style and raw depiction of teen behavior in urban areas.
