Teenage Subculture
•Affluent Society
•Time before marriage
•‘Live fast, die young’ mentality
•Rebels without a cause
•Boredom and Dissatisfaction
A Teenage Market
‘These days, merchants eye teenagers the way
stockmen eye cattle’
- Dwight Macdonald 1956
• Wealthy parents
• Advertising
• Cars
-1 million TVs
-13 million cameras
-10 million photographs
Rock and Roll
‘If rock n roll is here to stay I might commit suicide’
-Sammy Davis Jr.
•In 1956 “more money
was spent on records than at
any time in history”
•‘Cannibalistic and
Tribalistic form of music’
– Francis Braceland
•‘Black culture, through music, was the dialectical
accompaniment, the alter ego, to white, middle class teenage
life’ – George Lipsitz
•Categorically separated young people from their parents
The Teenpic
‘Films have been made for the majority and the majority in
the United States are teenagers’
– Joan Collins 1957
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Danger
Cars
Sex
Rock ‘n’ Roll
-Blackboard Jungle (1955)
Richard Brooks
-Rock around the Clock (1956)
Sam Katzman
Rebels and Juvenile Delinquents
“Why do we do this?”...“You’ve gotta do something. Don’t you?”
-Jim Stark and Buzz Gunderson, Rebel Without a Cause
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The teenage ‘problem’
Growing gap between adults and teenagers
‘Tension behind tranquillity’
Threat to social order
White middle class vs. ‘other’
Personified on screen
Blackboard Jungle- Vic Morrow
The Wild One- Marlon Brando
Rebel without a cause- James Dean
‘The First American Teenager’
The Young and the Restless
‘Everyone was doing it..But it was the big lie that nobody was’
-Constructing a sexual identity was a means to construct a personal identity
-Conflicting images and messages to teenage girls regarding sexual freedom
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Kinsey- unmarried youth
Magazines- sex advice
Books- The Bell Jar
Films- female AND male sex icons
Advertising
- ‘Girls were encouraged to pursue the
sexual cues that assailed them but were
threatened with the loss of respectability
(and acceptable futures) if they did so’ – Wini Breines
Vanishing
Adolescence
‘Fewer youngsters really dare
to go through with it; they
merely undergo puberty
and simulate maturity’
- Edgar Z. Friedenberg, 1962
• Vanishing Adolescence‘We treat our silent, alienated or apathetic youth as problems, as
psychological or social aberrations from the normal course of
adolescence’
• Conflict between individual identity and society
• Adults concerned that young people would be incapable of
preserving essential American ways and values
Middle class Problems
• Middle class youths had the resources to
‘begin experimenting with cultural forms that
challenged sexual repression, racial
oppression, and class oppression. At the same
time, the cultures and subcultures of
seemingly marginalized outsiders held a
fascinating attraction for privileged youths
looking for alternatives to the secure but
stifling and limited sexual roles and identities
of middle class life’
-George Lipsitz
‘Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today’
- James Dean