Teen Movies NOTES

Question 1

Reaganomics

Answer 1

Reagan’s economic policies systematically served the 
interests of the upper class while nonetheless appearing to tame the lingering recession 
through massive deficit spending

Question 2

Hollywood did not wait long to address

Answer 2

the ever-evident class divide endorsed by 
Reaganomics in the early 1980s

Question 3

Malls & Multiplexes brought

Answer 3

The shift of movie theaters to shopping malls and 
multiplexes in the 1980s brought with it a deluge of films made for and marketed to teen 
moviegoers, the majority of whom were statistically middle class, and likely harboring fantasies 
of class ascension not through hard work

Question 4

Class Clash movies offered ________ as solution, distracting __________

Answer 4

-offered love as a delirious solution to working-class limitations and upper-class
ignorance
-distracting young audiences from seeing that the poorer member of a
teen couple always benefited from his or her association with the richer

Question 5

what happened to parental roles in these movies?

Answer 5

parental characters

were frequently pushed into background roles

Question 6

After the recessions of the 1970s and the manic excesses that grew out of them, the American
social attitude toward wealth in the 1980s became strikingly ambivalent or cavalier at best,
leaving young people with a mixed message to pursue their financial ambitions and develop
contempt for them. T

Answer 6

thats it

Question 7

poverty shown as

Answer 7

, poverty is shown as humble and endearing,

Question 8

wealth shown as

Answer 8

wealth is pompous

and oppressive, and thus must be criticized if it is to be tolerated at all.

Question 9

the irony of class

Answer 9

the irony of class 
in these films is that while all youth are shown to be similar on the inside, upper-class youth 
still retain their privilege on the outside

Question 10

changes in teen romance movies

Answer 10

The etiology for this change in teens’ romantic pairings could lie in the 
dissolution (or disillusion) of the Reagan ethos, with films geared to adults in the late 1980s 
taking more hard-line stances on the corruption of class differences

Question 11

The dismissing of class as a factor in teen movie romances has remained rather consistent 
ever since \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

Answer 11

the 80s, 90s movies mostly kept it (characters) in same class

Question 12

Though Pretty in Pink Preserves a treacherous mythology, it was attempt to

Answer 12

The film may have been an attempt to critique the

cultural celebration of wealth in the 1980s