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Belinda Brown, "Principal Janus & Schoolyards & Malls" Progress is a monitor not only of change itself, but also of its representations. In this way, progress need not be considered as discriminate assemblages of events; but rather as participation in and/or recollection of events, the representations of which cannot help but draw as much attention to what they omit as they do to their implied subject matter. Progress is Janus-faced, retrospective and prospective, inclusive and exclusive, simultaneously. Because it is arguably at all times the nexus of "what was", "what is becoming" and "what might have been", I wish to extrapolate, from such a definition of progress, espousal of the pertinence of juxtaposing carnivalesque notions of threshold and World Upside Down, with existential coming-of-age dilemmas of characters portrayed by contemporary American Teen Cinema. Whilst at first glance it might appear somewhat of a conceptual leap to trace a path from a definition of progress as a record of change, to carnivalesque world views, and then on to manifestations of them in contemporary American Teen Cinema, what I hope to have emerge from my own discussion of this path is cinema's oft-neglected close association with "the novel", and its American Teen sub-genre's preoccupation with carnivalesque remythologising of the "adventure novel", in the context of rite-of-passage experiences being a personal threshold, as progress itself is always on the threshold of its alternative routes. These sub-generic peculiarities may be said to date from approximately 1982, with the release of Grease 2, Fast Times at Ridgmont High and The Outsiders, and production of them has continued intermittently until the present day. It is essential, then, to recognise the value of American Teen Cinema's self-reflexive participation in the evolution of its own, and literary, history; and to derive from this its interdisciplinary contribution to cultural history's responsible representation of both trivial and monumental socio-political change. Biography: Belinda Brown is a Masters graduate and prospective Doctoral candidate in Art History & Theory at the University of Sydney. She specialises in Contemporary American Teen Cinema, hopes to write a definitive history on the subject, and daily bears her family believing that she is the oldest fourteen-year-old that they know. Her dream job is to be a consultant in, and publicist of, American Teen-oriented Cinema for a major film studio. |
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