Movie Analysis
...nts are having an argument with his mom at the top of the stairs, his dad at the bottom, and Jim in the middle of the stairs between them. It’s clear that this conflict has a traumatizing effect on Jim. After getting drunk, Jim is at the police station, and the policeman, Ray, takes him into his office to talk about the incident. Distraught, Jim ends up telling Ray all about his ineffectual father, looking to Ray to be the parental role model that his father can’t be, because he so desperately needs a paternal figure in his life. Jim’s frustration is seen when he, confiding in Ray, states, “Boy--if I had one day when I didn't have to be all confused and ashamed of everything—or I felt like I belonged some place”. Another key scene at the police station occurs when Jim’s parents arrive to pick him up and bring him home, they get into an argument and Jim, again stuck in the middle, yells hysterically, “You’re tearing me apart!”. Based on this, it’s visible that underneath his “rebel” exterior, Jim has, as Lewis states, “a desperate need for family” (19). By the 1980’s, the shift in parental conflict in teen movies was becoming clearly visible. Unlike Rebel, where Jim needed his father to show him how to be an adult, growing up was no longer the main issue for teens in 80s films. Therefore, they didn’t long for adult guidance nearly as much as 50s movie teens. In The World According to Teenpix, Thomas Leicht states that many 80s movies “reverse the fears of Rebel Without a Cause--instead of being afraid that teenagers will never grow up, [the] audience is afraid that they will” (3). For example, in the 80’s John Hughes movie Pretty in Pink, Andie’s mother has left her daughter and husband, and her father is weak and unemployed, but there is only one scene that portrays any parental conflict in the movie. In it, Andie confronts her father about not getting a job, which leads into an argument about Andie’s mom, and Andie, in her frustration, yells, “Why can’t you just forget her? Why can’t you just realize she’s gone and she’s never coming back!”. Andie’s father, crying, says that he still loves and misses Andie’s mom, and Andie agrees, saying that she misses her, too, but tells her dad, “You can’t go on living every day in the past”. Andie, unlike Jim, copes well with parental issues. Like any teenager, Andie is upset by the absence of a mother, but this doesn’t affect her everyday life, and she is able to stay strong. For example, in the aforementioned scene in which her father breaks down, Andie, though upset, is able comfort her father and can accept the fact that her mother won’t be coming back, which is clear when she says, “She left us, daddy, we didn’t leave her. There was nothing we could do about it”, and tells her father that he has to move on. Her father’s income, or lack thereof, affects Andie a little, because she worries about her clothes, and finding the right dress for Prom, since her father can’t afford to buy her expensive clothes like those of the popular girls. However, Andie handles this situation well by designing her own clothes, which she is generally happy with. In order to cope with the absence of a mother, Andie turns to Iona, an older friend who works at the record shop with her, for advice. Iona is always there when Andie needs her, and cheers Andie up in a scene in which she comes to Iona crying about Blane. Thus, Andie ends up not needing her mother and is just fine without her because she finds someone to fill the role of the maternal figure, and, as Lewis states, is able to “transcend [her] circumstances” at home (20). By the time the ‘90’s flick She’s All That came out, parents were barely appearing in teen movies. The role of parents, since the ‘80’s, when they often had supporting roles and at least some significance to the plot, like Andie’s father in Pretty in Pink, had dwindled to almost complete insignificance. For example, in She’s All That, the dad of one of the two main characters, Zach Siler, appears only twice, supporting Thomas Doherty’s point in Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950’s that recent teen movies rarely feature parents (237). Zach, a popular, high-achieving high-school student, receives pressure from his dad regarding which college to go to. His father is constantly telling Zach to go to Dartmouth because he went to college there, and it was the “best four years of [his] life”. The problem arises when Zach gets accepted to other prestigious schools that he’s interested in, but cannot tell his fat...