Title Details

From Badlands to Napoleon Dynamite and West Side Story to Twilight, a critical reevaluation of a much maligned genre

Doing what film critics have been loathe to do since the 1950s, this book takes the entire subculture of teen movies seriously, making a constant and compelling argument that Grease and A Nightmare on Elm Street tell viewers a great deal more about modern life and human nature than Citizen Kane and The Godfather. A fundamental way of coping with adolescence, there are many teen movies that have becomes rites of passage to view, yet until now there has been no book that explores this successful movie subgenre with any depth. Arguing that Scream is the smartest meta-movie ever made and Mean Girls is a series of skits on the death of feminism, this book seeks to create a pantheon of the very finest teen movies, including The Breakfast Club, A Clockwork Orange, Donnie Darko, Fame, Heathers, National Lampoon's Animal House, Rebel Without a Cause, and more.