Generation Multiplex : The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema

Rating:
Summary: A Necessity for College & High School Libraries
Review: Because of my background interest in adolescent culture, I was very interested to read Dr. Timothy Shary's book about the image of youth in american film. I was delighted to find Shary's book not only to be well-written, but filled with insight and a pervasive gentle humor. The author successfully shows how film images of teenagers reflect pervasive social and political trends and often better depict adult fears of teenage behaviors rather than a realistic sense of actual teen culture. I found his dividing up the hundreds of films he describes into subgenres (like movies about school culture, slasher films, movies about love and sex) to be extremely helpful in placing the films in their larger context as well as to see how some concepts evolve while other archetypes appear to be repeated again and again.

As a librarian and teen educator, I felt that this work had a lot of value. With the emphasis on media literacy and critical thinking skills in education today, teachers and librarians need to be thinking about appealing ways of presenting information that will engage students into critically examining their culture. Using popular films that star teen characters and/or teen culture would be a good way to accomplish this goal, and Dr. Shary's book would be an excellent and accessible text to use as both a model and as background knowledge in this type of class. Because of the prevalence of cable television in the lives of teens, even the older movies from the 80s are likely to be relatively familiar and useful for discussions about historical trends and changes.

Dr. Shary should be complemented on this excellent, academic work on the image of youth in contemporary film. All college and high school libraries would be recommended to have a copy on hand and use it as a guide for collecting some key films of high quality for their visual collections.