I always make fun of my husband for putting on a movie he's already seen 500 times.  It usually involves hunting for Russians in an adrenaline filled submarine, or some catastrophic weather event. I rarely repeatedly watch a movie if I can still remember the plot.  The exception to that is two John Hughes movies.  16 Candles and Pretty in Pink.  Ridiculous.  I know. 

What is it about Molly Ringwald that made her such an appealing adolescent "every woman"?  She didn't fit the 80s blond bombshell mold, the characters she played were always vulnerable but principled, and at the end of the story she always got the boy and he was a better man for it.

I was realizing that when my students see Molly Ringwald it may well be the equivalent of seeing "Gidget" when I was a kid.  What?  That middle aged lady was a teen surfer dreamgirl?  What?

This got me thinking about the 80s and the pop culture I consumed in the 80s. I can remember how important the word "individuality" was to me then.  Self expression was a crucial concept to 16 year old me, who had little else to really concern myself with. Looking back, I realize that I had a limited context within which to understand the idea of being an individual.  To me it was rebellious. It was punk rock. I had no idea how well it fit in with what it means to be an American and that long history that can easily take people down the path to libertarianism.  Punk rock.  That transition point where Anarchy and Libertarianism still coincide.

Back to John Hughes.  His movies were always set in mansions and on "the other side of the tracks".  Class was upfront and center in most of his romantic storylines. It was the barrier to true love in place of the grudges of feuding lineages. The feuds were between the popular kids and the outcasts- the kids with money whose parents appeared to be chronically out of town versus the kids whose dad was Harry Dean Stanton. And the subtheme of "being yourself" was always part of that plot line (and everybody was white too). His movies may have also paved the way for series like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, which I also consumed hungrily and with a sense of identification. Some of the resonances I see are an uncertainty about what will happen in the future, unrequited adolescent desire that seems like it will end the world, parents that don't understand, and life in the shark tank of high school.  Class issues creep in to the extent that teenagers ever really have an awareness of class at all beyond "my family doesn't have the same things that their family has".

Given the way the 2000s have gone, I'm surprised there isn't a revival of the working-class, oppressed teen, struggling against conformity theme in pop culture. I don't feel like I'm seeing it.  I wonder why that is. It strikes me that the 18-21+ year olds that I teach have a vastly different perspective on the world. The ones I interact with as a professor tend to be "joiners", but the ones that identify with me most tend to be the "change the world joiners" who participate in creating on campus recycling campaigns and who want to go on to study public health.  They are much more realistic about the world than I was at that age, but also frequently much more privileged in terms of what they feel entitled to.  They seem less alienated in the middle class way that I felt alienated as a kid.

I don't really know how all of this fits together, but I guess my question is- Is there contemporary pop culture that's as teen-angsty as those 80s movies?  The Perks of Being a Wallflower might come close. In 2014 what drives teen angst and what are contemporary teenagers rebelling against?