The Genre Don't Know Where It Came From: African American Neo-Noir since the 1960s
2003; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
ResumoGENERATION MULTIPLEX: THE IMAGE OF YOUTH IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CINEMA Timothy Shary. University of Texas Press, 2002,352 pp. In Generation Multiplex, Timothy Shary examines American films of the 1980s and 1990s and discovers a resonant genre. This significant and insightful study demonstrates that there is going on the films of the past two decades than the simple good kid/bad kid depictions that dominated teen films before 1980. Analyzing hundreds of titles, Shary clarifies a generation of films that place more responsibility on their protagonists to deal with their ascent through adolescence, an ascent that can take any number of directions en route to maturity (262). A revision of Shary's doctoral dissertation, Generation Multiplex is academic and impressively complete. Shary's introduction includes a brief historical overview and an explanation for limiting his study to the 1980s and 1990s. He explicates his use of genre analysis to study the social representation of youth. The qualifications of genre theory are particularly strong because it ties together the hybrid nature of films and the genre's audience. He concludes with a literature review that emphasizes the lack of substantive work on this genre. The major strength of Generation Multiplex is its accessible organization. Five of its seven chapters focus on the major subgenres of the film genre: school, delinquent youth, horror film, and science, and love and having sex. Each subgenre chapter looks at general trends (moving through the 1980s and into the 1990s), character definitions, and categories. It is easy to find what you need the book. After the introduction, these chapters read fairly independently and you need not start with the first one. Shary starts with school. He suggests that the sexual and narcotic hijinks of the early-80s films may have been an initial reaction to the Reagan era's puritan ethic for youth (29). Additionally, the appearance of the Brat Pack in the teen market was built upon wistful, tormented, and ultimately clean images of mid-80s who proffered occasionally sincere questions about sex and drugs as they engaged less these practices (on screen, at least) than their previous counterparts (29). In the 1990s, he explains, feature films avoided high school, but the late 1990s found a lowbudget resurgence and new marketing synergy with television. The use of a social perspective allows Shary to effectively treat important ideas about gender and class, and their affect on character types. The delinquency chapter examines the different styles of delinquency. Not having the space to cover all of them, Shary chooses categories based on developed patterns and (85). The first category is deviant dancing and includes films such as Dirty Dancing (1987), Footloose (1984), and the Lambada films. The second category (Natural Encounter) consistently relies on deviant, rebellious behavior. Shary subdivides this category: and animals (e.g., Free Willy [1993] and Fly Away Home [1996]) and nature (e.g., Lord of the Flies [1990] and Gold Diggers: The secret of Bear Mountain [1995]). The third (Patriotic Purpose) considers the Reagan cold war era, focusing on films such as Red Dawn (1984) and Iron Eagle (1986). The next category (Tough Girls) focuses on the Angel trilogy (1984-1988), The Legend of Billy lean (1986), Mi Vida Loca (1994), and others. (I doubt the Angel films have ever received such serious consideration.) The patterns and cycles of the final category of delinquent films (African American Crime Drama) indicate many levels of social concern. As Shary explains, More diverse and less ghettoized representations of African Americans began reaching the screen by the mid-90s, and the repetitive themes-and problematics-of the crime film had become apparent (124). The horror film chapter contains the most research and the most insight. …
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