Abstract
Teen movies are fundamentally concerned with reversing age-defined privileges. The nostalgic teen film is distinctive in the genre because it augments the ostensible themes of rebellion and anti-authoritarianism with an adult perspective. Whereas most teen films emphasize an adolescent point of view, the nostalgic teen movie reveals tensions between youth and adulthood at the level of narration, which can be seen as the site of a quest to contain adolescence. The containment of youth's affinities with excess, transition, and immediacy in critically acclaimed films such as Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986) and American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1974) is evident in the foregrounding of a writerly voice, a sense of narrative inevitability, and the subsequent concealment of ideology. An exception to this nostalgic paradigm is Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993).
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