Abstract
Since at least the 1950s, Hollywood cinema has been exploiting youth as a consumer society developed during the postwar epoch first in the United States and then globally, with youth positioned and constructed as key forces of consumption. Using youth culture and the resources of youthful bodies to produce popular films for young audiences, Hollywood naturally exploited youth, its bodies, lifestyles, culture, and personalities, as well as its hopes and dreams and fantasies and fears. Further, many postwar Hollywood films have presented very negative representations and pointed to youth as a social problem, associated with promiscuity, crime, violence, and destructive tendencies. The Hollywood juvenile delinquency films in the postwar period began this trend, and youth of color, and working-class youth in particular, have been increasingly stigmatized in the past decades.1
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Notes
For an overview of the war on youth in Hollywood film, see Henry Giroux Breaking in to the movies. Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002.
On media culture and Hollywood film as contested terrains, see Douglas Kellner, Media culture. Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern. London and New York: Routledge, 1995, and Cinema wars: Hollywood film and politics in the Bush/Cheney era. Maiden, Mass. and UK: Blackwell, 2010.
See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels reader. New York: Norton, 1978.
On the exploitation film, see Brett Wood and Felicia Feaster, Forbidden fruit: The golden age of the exploitation film. New York: Midnight Marquee Press, 1999.
On the social construction of youth and stages and forms of contemporary youth culture, see Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, “Contemporary youth and the postmodern adventure,” The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (April-June 2003): 75–93.
On Hollywood and youth culture films, see Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, Camera política: The politics and ideology of contemporary Hollywood film. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988, and
Peter Biskind, Easy rider, raging bulls. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
On the return of the Hollywood studio system and rise of blockbuster cinema, see Thomas Schatz, The genius of the system. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 (revised edition).
Independent cinema is explored in Peter Biskind, Down and dirty pictures. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004 and Yannis Tzioumakis, American independent cinema: An introduction. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
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© 2010 Benjamin Frymer, Tony Kashani, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Rich Van Heertum
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Kellner, D. (2010). Modes of Youth Exploitation in the Cinema of Larry Clark. In: Frymer, B., Kashani, T., Nocella, A.J., Van Heertum, R. (eds) Hollywood’s Exploited. Education, Politics, and Public Life. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117426_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117426_10
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