If Wild Things was Bruce Handy's case for the nutritional value of kids' books for grown-up readers, then Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies argues persuasively that screen candy can sometimes be healthy.
Handy offers up an unapologetically subjective and admittedly inexhaustive look back at Hollywood films about teenagers. Proceeding chronologically across eight decades, he uses each chapter to either anatomize a specific film (Rebel Without a Cause, Boyz n the Hood) or examine a cluster of related films (beach party movies, John Hughes's greatest hits). Handy begins with the empathy-generating Andy Hardy series, which found Hollywood's first recognizably modern teen weathering "the serial mortifications of growing up," and he concludes with the existentially fraught speculative series phenomena Twilight and the Hunger Games. How did teen movies get from Andy Hardy to the hard stuff?
In pursuit of answers, Handy explores evolving attitudes toward adolescents, touching on headlines, scholarship, and literature. A Handy specialty is finding common threads in teen movies over time--e.g., the Hunger Games series is "the battlefields of The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls made literal." When the lofty statements arrive ("I would argue that teen movies have become an essential American genre, rivaling the western as a vehicle for national mythmaking"), they're earned and often leavened with humor (some Hunger Games costumes "look like they were designed by Alexander McQueen, working in fondant"). Hollywood High delivers a multiplex's worth of serious-minded fun. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer