Introduction: Actor-Network Theory at the Movies—Watching Twenty-First Century US Teen Films with Latour

Abstract

This chapter is a survey of the American teen film and of how it has evolved in the past years in terms of mediality, heterogeneity, and complexity. The medial shift of contemporary teen film and TV series in postcinematic times is contextualized and historicized. This shift refers to the development that many recent cinematic teen narratives are no longer singular feature films, but either serial television formats, or blockbuster event films based on franchises. In between these dominant trends, a gap has opened up in which new strands of teen film proliferate. These various new modes of teen narrative necessitate in turn new analytical modes. Bruno Latour and the central ideas of his oeuvre are introduced by foregrounding his “cinematic language” as a connection between the underlying theory and the practice exercised in the subsequent analysis chapters. This Latourian perspective also helps to establish agency as an analytical category. Agency becomes central both intradiegetically and as regards teen film’s agential shift, which refers to postmodern systems of citation, strategies of appropriation, and metafictional elements that involve the audience’s familiarity with genre conventions and their media literacy, granting spectators more agency than consumption and affectation.