Fading American Teen Dream
The Sweet 16, the first car, the first job. The American Teen began with James Dean as Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. But today, the vision seems to be fading as the economic and cultural factors shift to nonexistent.
Courtesy of HBO
The holy land of the American Teenager, the Mall, is no more. It was once the typical hangout spot for off-duty students and where weekends were spent. The source of youth culture and youth economics, malls sported "about 3 million retail jobs for 16- to 19-year-olds in 1990, but today, it's closer to 1 million," reports NPR. Now, the mall either crumbles, abandoned, or bans those who would flock to its food court. Just this February, a mall in Brooklyn, New York, banned teens unless accompanied by an adult or chaperone. This is the canary in the coal mine for the American teen. Teen culture has slowly eroded under the weight of stagnating wages and media influence.
When teens rose to prominence in the 1950s, the post-war economy allowed them to keep a pretty penny for themselves. Their spending power meant they were a valid and powerful consumer demographic, and so companies began catering to them. High schoolers could buy their own cars; musicians like Elvis and the Beatles had predominantly teen audiences; places like soda shops, the mall, and the movie theater became social hubs because of this spending power. Rebel Without a Cause, one of the first teen dramas, spoke to a growing, in-between generation that felt at odds with the strict child-adult delineation of their parents. It’s a tale as old as time that teens feel ignored or misunderstood by their parents, but it seems to be the only thing that connects today’s youth with the teenager of old. Today, teen spending power has dwindled significantly. US wages are slowly picking up the pace, but roughly half of the states still have a minimum wage at $7.25/hour, or about €6.69/hour. The teens who do have jobs aren’t exactly going to buy their first car when their sixteenth birthday rolls around. That spending power means companies are going to cater to the parents and adults over the teenagers, and this extends into media as well.
Photo by Mario Sorrenti
While the teenager has always wanted to be treated as an adult, a code for “with respect”, media executives seem to take that sentiment at face value. Where once the teen was defined in shows like Boy Meets World, now Riverdale and Euphoria adultify and sexualize teenagers to appease and appeal to adult audiences. These are not teen dramas but dramas about teens. To clarify, this is not me clutching my pearls. As Dr. Danielle Roeske puts it, “I think there’s a difference between ‘glamorizing’ and ‘causing.’” Shows like Euphoria aren’t some moral deprivations of teenagerhood. Rebel depicted violence and era-appropriate queerness, and Euphoria could be viewed as its modern equivalent. Though, the issue is that Rebel was specifically targeted to teens of the times, whereas Euphoria is for adults, and the teenagerhood is just the hook. When companies do hire age-appropriate actors, the shows they’re in typically skew younger. Disney and Nickelodeon have long abandoned their older audiences, focusing more on pre-teen content. This leaves teens in a wasteland of content and culture. They no longer have anything just for them, with many social spaces disappearing outside of school hours. In a way, it is just as in the 1950s. A time when teens first emerged, struggling to find an identity in a world that does not serve them.
