Beyond the Pink: (Post) Youth Iconography in Cinema is a project in cultural time travel. It cuts up linear cinematic narratives to develop a hop-scotched history of youth, Generation X and (post) youth culture. I focus upon the pleasures, pedagogies and (un)popular politics of a filmic genre that continues to be dismissed as unworthy of intellectual debate. Accelerated culture and the discourse of celebrity have blurred the crisp divisions between fine art and crude commodity, the meaningful and meaningless, and real and fictive, unsettling the binary logic that assigns importance to certain texts and not others. This research project prises open that awkward space between representation and experience. Analysts require methods and structures through which to manage historical change and textual movement. Through cinema, macro-politics of identity emerge from the micro-politics of the narrative. Prom politics and mallrat musings become imbued with social significance that speak in the literacies available to youth. It grants the ephemerality and liminality of an experience a tactile trace. I select moments of experience for Generation X youth and specific icons – Happy Harry Hardon, Molly Ringwald, the Spice Girls, the Bitch, the invisible raver, teen time travellers Marty McFly and Donnie Darko, and the slacker – to reveal the archetypes and ideologies that punctuate the cinematic landscape. The tracked figures do not configure a smooth historical arc. It is in the rifts and conflicts of diverse narratives and subjectivities where attention is focused. This research imperative necessitates the presentation of a series of essays arranged in a tripartite framework. The first section proposes theoretical paradigms for a tethered analysis of filmic texts and Generation X. The second segment explores sites of struggle in public spaces and time. The final section leaves the landscape of post-Generation X to forge the relationship between history, power and youth identity. I particularly focus on the iconography, ideologies and imaginings of young women to lead the discussion of the shifts in the experience and representations of youth. By reinserting women into studies of film, it is imperative to stress that this is not a dissertation in, and of, women’s cinema. Rather, it serves as an historical corrective to the filmic database. The existing literature on youth cinema is disappointing and narrow in its trajectories. Timothy Shary’s Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema and Jon Lewis’ The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture exemplify the difficulties of capturing the complexities of individual films when they are collated in artificial and stifling categories. At one end of the analytical spectrum is the critique that comes with the caveat of ‘it’s just another teen movie’. Jonathon Bernstein’s monograph Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies is one such example which derails into acerbic diatribes and intellectual dismissal. The Cinema of Generation X: A Critical Study by Peter Hanson is a more successful project that is interested in the influences that inform a community of filmmakers than arriving at a catalogue of generic themes and narratives. There is an emphasis on the synergy between text, producer and readership. I continue this relationship explored by Hanson, but further accent the politics of film. The original contribution to knowledge offered by this doctoral thesis is a detailed study of (post) youth popular culture, building into a model for Generation X cinema, activating the interdisciplinary perspectives from film and cultural studies. With its adaptability into diverse media forms, cultural studies paradigms allow navigation through the expansive landscape of popular culture. It traverses beyond simple textual analyses to consider a text’s cultural currency. As an important carrier of meaning and sensory memories, cinema allows for alternative accounts that are denied in authorised history. As a unique form with its own visual literacy, screen theory is needed to refine observations. This unique melding of screen and cultural studies underscores the convergent relationship between text, readership, production and politics. This doctoral thesis activates concepts and methods of generationalism, nationalism, social history and cultural practice. There is a dialogue between the chapters that crosses over text and time. The 1980s of Molly Ringwald shadows the dystopia of Donnie Darko. The celebrity status of the Spice Girls clashes with the frustrated invisibility of the female raver. Douglas Coupland’s vision of Generation X in 1991 has evolved into Richard Linklater’s documentation of post-youth in the new millenium. Leaping between decades through time travel in cinema, I argue that the nostalgic past and projections for the future evoke the preoccupations and anxieties of the present.

[pt] A presente dissertação tem como proposta trabalhar com cinema e o ensino de história: com o cinema e suas possibilidades pedagógicas para o ensino de história, frente a turmas de ensino médio. Mais especificamente com títulos comerciais e de apelo juvenil; filmes na maior parte conhecidos e apreciados pelo nosso público alvo. Trata-se, na verdade, de proposição ativa que visa a minimização de um gap pedagógico entre o mundo escolar e o mundo juvenil; entre o espaço educacional institucional e o espaço extra escolar. A ideia não é a de selecionar películas que abordem temas/períodos históricos e empregá-las como complemento, ilustração, fornecimento de ambientação temática e imagética. Isso já é feito, há algum tempo (e consiste em procedimento altamente válido, aliás). Não obstante, o que propomos são provocações interpretativas, com suporte analítico histórico, para filmes de apelo juvenil. Nesse sentido, a película Meu namorado é um zumbi (Warm bodies, EUA, Jonathan Levine, 2013) é tomada como estudo de referência/exemplo. Por intermédio de um approach analítico que leva em conta texto, contexto e as especificidades da linguagem cinematográfica, estabelecemos três possibilidades para o emprego pedagógico dessa obra. Uma relativa aos vínculos explícitos com a obra Shakespeariana (Romeu e Julieta), outra sobre o tema subjacente de uma saga humanizante e, finalmente, sobre possibilidades metafóricas que possam indicar a problematização de temas contemporâneos (marginalização social, multiculturalismo, imigração, etc.). Por fim, com a elaboração de um guia pedagógico para o trabalho com filmes comerciais de apelo juvenil, indicamos a viabilidade (e os procedimentos básicos) de emprego semelhante para outras tantas obras com potencial educativo. / [en] This text proposes to work with cinema and history s study. We focus on the pedagogical possibilities of the cinema to improve the study of History. Our propose has as its target the public of our schools: the classes of the three years of the medium teaching. We intend to demonstrate the pedagogical possibilities of commercial films produced for the youth. Those films are made, consumed and appreciated by a large public. We bet those productions can be worked with classical topics of history discipline. That could be a positive proposition in order to minimize a pedagogical gap between a school and a non-school world; between a formal educational space and an amusement space. We do not want to select and use films that approaches historical themes or historical periods as an illustration, complement or to show some ambiance of an era. This has been done (and well done) for some time. Nonetheless, we propose provocatives interpretations for films of youth appeal. In this sense, the film Warm bodies (USA, Jonathan Levine, 2013) is taken as reference/example. Through an analytical approach that takes into account text, context and the specificities of cinematographic language, we establish three links for the pedagogical use of the film. The first one is related to the explicit connection with the Shakespearean work (Romeo and Juliet). The second one, deal with the theme of a humanizing saga, and finally on metaphorical possibilities that could indicate the problematization of contemporary issues (social marginalization, multiculturalism, immigration etc.). Finally, with the elaboration of a pedagogical guide for the work with commercial films of youth appeal, we indicate the viability (and basic procedures) of similar employment for other works with similar educational potential.

Teen films from the 1980s are a part of the zeitgeist, but there is very little we actually understand about how they can be qualified and defined, and about the phenomenon of their prolific production, box office success, and cultural relevance. Gaining greater insights about these issues is essential for recognizing the significance of a specific group of films and the ways they address concerns of how teens come of age, but is also important for learning about the films’ historical and industrial contexts of production. Asking the questions why these kinds of films, why at this time, and what do they mean, leads to an awareness and identification of the phenomenon, but additionally, these lines of inquiry explore how the films and their success are tied to changing Hollywood industrial conditions, and to the shifting political, economic, social, and cultural climate of the U.S. in the 1980s. While previous scholars have studied the industrial context of production of teen films in the 1950s, and some have looked at the different types of films produced in the 1980s, the matter remains as to whether teen films actually constitute their own genre. Examining this question of genre is necessary for clarifying a number of issues: how the films relate to the culture at large; how representations of youth on screen can help us understand and reevaluate Generation X, the demographic group coming of age at the time; and how an assessment of these films contributes to a re-conceptualization of the ways films are produced, marketed, and categorized in the New Hollywood. Using primary data consisting of textual analysis and contextual analysis, and applying both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, the study builds on and adds to previous approaches to genre. The contributions of this research are multifaceted. By gaining insights about these films, we can begin to appreciate more fully a maligned generation, the changing landscape of the entertainment industry, and a cultural phenomenon. / text