Actor-Network Theory at the Movies

Reassembling the Contemporary American Teen Film With Latour

Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030312862
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030312879
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

This book is one of the first to apply the theoretical tools proposed by French philosopher Bruno Latour to film studies. Through the example of the Hollywood Teen Film and with a particular focus on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the book delineates how Teen Film has established itself as one of Hollywood's most consistent and dynamic genres. While many productions may recycle formulaic patterns, there is also a proliferation of cinematic coming-of-age narratives that are aesthetically and politically progressive, experimental, and complex. The case studies develop a Latourian film semiotics as a flexible analytical approach which raises new questions, not only about the history, types and tropes of teen films, but also about their aesthetics, mediality, and composition. Through an exploration of a wide and diverse range of examples from the past decade, including films by female and African-American directors, urban and rural perspectives, and non-heteronormative sexualities,Actor-Network Theory at the Movies demonstrates how the classic Teen Film canon has been regurgitated, expanded, and renewed.

© The Author(s) 2020

B. Sonnenberg-SchrankActor-Network Theory at the Movieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31287-9_1

Begin Abstract

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

Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank¹

(1)

University of Cologne, Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Medial shift/changes in media ecologiesAgential shift/changes in modes of spectatorshipAgency and TeenAgencyRemediationConvergence cultureSeriality studiesPostmodernismGenreReality and representationRethinking material-semiotic relationsReshuffling of agencyPost-cinemaPost-continuityPost-irony(Self-) referentialityActor-Network Theory (ANT)RhizomeDispositifCinematographic objectsDistributed agencyAuteur(Re-)assemblingProduction studiesApparatus theoryActors|actantsHuman and non-human actantsCollectives of human and non-human actantsTranslation and transformation“Follow the actors,” scripts and programs of actionHermeneutis and materialismEmpiricist film philosophy

End Abstract

Leaving the Cinema: Contemporary Teen Narratives’ Medial and Agential Shift

American teen films have been reliable cinematic companions for US teenagers since their inception after the end of World War II, when both the teenager as a term with its current meaning and as a distinct societal group came into being.¹ As a body of film, they are traditionally both consistent and dynamic to a high degree: On the one hand, they are by definition organized around the coming-of-age experience and revisit similar and recurring tropes, settings, rites, and types; on the other hand, they narrate them in a multitude of ever-changing ways and media. As Hollywood’s take on the bildungsroman , the literary roots of the teen film can be traced back to the gradual acknowledging that took in since the Enlightenment that the subdivisions of human development need more gradation than the distinction into children and adults . In different fields, the in-between stage of adolescence was addressed, from Rousseau’s educational philosophy to G. Stanley Hall’s groundbreaking work on Adolescence (1904), to literature, and law and instigated the process from which eventually “the teenager” emerged.

While the cinematic roots of the modern teen film go back as far as the first quarter of the twentieth century and representations of then-burgeoning youth cultures (e.g., in the flapper film), the first wave of teen films is a postwar phenomenon, coinciding with the discovery of the teenager as a new market that demands new product. Industries in this thriving postwar economy reacted quickly to the awakening consumerist desires of the new marketplace, catering to a hungry teenage demographic with tailored-to-fit products. At the frontline was Hollywood with an increased output of narratives that can now be acknowledged as the starting point of the modern teen film and cinema’s counterpart to young adult fiction. Driscoll observes that historically “film and modern adolescence emerged at the same time and have consistently influenced each other” (2011, 5). Now a massive and heterogeneous body of films, subgenres, and cycles, teen films have since those early days targeted and depicted adolescent audiences with quite specific protagonists, settings, themes, rites, and institutions that are connected to the coming-of-age experience.

The dominant modes in which youths on screen were represented in the first big teen film waves from the mid-1940s to the 1950s shifted from “clean teens” to “juvenile delinquents ,” indicating how America’s youth has been the canvas for manifold, quickly changing, and often contradicting projections ever since. The teen film’s heyday, when its form (both in terms of narrative and mediality) was firmly established, was the prolific 1980s and 1990s, the era when the genre arguably peaked through a slew of constitutive, genre-defining, commercially successful, and culturally influential texts. In the last decade, however a medial shift can be observed, away from the cinema as a space and the feature film as its predominant form, and a shift away from the enclosed diegetic worlds of teen films toward a different involvement of the audience, which can be usefully termed agential shift. Both the medial and agential shift can be illustrated by a recent example: In 2017, the TV series Riverdale, started airing as an adaptation (or rather re-interpretation or remediation [Bolter and Grusin 1999]) of the famous Archie Comics , a comic book universe organized around and geared to adolescents, which takes place in the fictional All-American small town of Riverdale. Established in 1939 and branching out into a multitude of franchises and different media, Archie Comics and their characters have become ingrained in the collective memory of American pop and youth culture, famous for their saccharine wholesomeness, embodied by Archie Comics ’ own The Archies, arguably the first virtual pop group, and their aptly titled 1969 #1 hit “Sugar Sugar.”² Besides the surprisingly—surprising in comparison with other teen series and the reputation of the Archieverse—dark tone, themes, and the excessive visual style of the show, Riverdale is characterized by its vast number of explicit and implicit references, both visually, in content, in the screenwriting that is rife with witty in-jokes and allusions to literature or films, and even in the casting, featuring some of the biggest stars of 1980s and 1990s teen films and television, such as Molly Ringwald from the John Hughes cycle, and Beverly Hills 90210’s late Luke Perry, who in the show play Archie Andrews’ conflicted parents—a meta-casting almost that posits the show as the offspring of the “parent” texts. Such postmodern referentiality is common fare in popular culture, yet the textual interplay in this example goes beyond mere (self-)reflexivity. What I will argue here is that the techniques of citation and appropriation are not a play on, but a part of our reality. We see characters talking about a world (ours and theirs) that is both in the process of being made and making itself, intertwining intra- and extradiegetic fictions and realities and making such distinctions no longer possible. The following dialogue between Riverdale’s main characters exemplifies how the show constantly makes its position in the corpus of cinematic teen narratives visible and self-awarely reflects it:

Jughead:

The drive-in closing, it’s just one more nail in the coffin that is Riverdale. No. Forget Riverdale. In the coffin of the American dream … The Twilight Drive-In should mean something to us. People should be trying to save it.

Veronica:

In this age of Netflix and VOD, do people really want to watch a movie in a car? I mean, who even goes there?

Jason:

People who want to buy crack.

Jughead:

And cinephiles and car enthusiasts, right, Bets? … Also, you guys should come to closing night. I’m thinking American Graffiti. Or is that too obvious?

Betty:

Maybe Rebel Without a Cause?

(from Riverdale, season 1, episode 4, 2017)

Their conversation is a more general commentary on the development of cinematic production and consumption, but it is particularly concerned with the status of the American teen film. In its traditional form, the teen film has lost its arena and perhaps even become a thing of the past, relegated to nostalgia while it is simultaneously reinvented in new forms and new media. While Rebel Without a Cause (1955) can be seen as an urtext for teen films, American Graffiti (1973) is already a nostalgic look back on a bygone era in which teenagers move through a car-centered postwar California of drive-in cinemas and drive-in restaurants, accompanied by the ever-present score provided by car radios. Both films address the importance of the moviegoing experience as part of the transitional coming-of-age experience: In American Graffiti, the drive-in cinema functions as an allegorical place of desire for the past (as it does in Riverdale ); in Rebel Without a Cause, the teens’ reaction to the power of the big screen is played out in the planetarium scene where the protagonists’ feeling of being overwhelmed metaphorically by their difficult adolescence is literalized by showing them overwhelmed by the weight of the entire cosmos as well as by the cinematic apparatus which projects it onto the screen in unison. Like the scene from Riverdale , both films are concerned with the relation of teenagers and (teen) films...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Actor-Network Theory at the Movies—Watching Twenty-First Century US Teen Films with Latour
• 2. Circulating Reference: Making Over the Makeover
• 3. Actants | Objects | Participation: Teen Film Ecologies
• 4. Quasi-Object | Quasi-Subject: Technology, Drugs, Language, Ethnicity
• 5. Visualization, Images and Inscriptions
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter