Rebels with a cause: how teens on screen grew up and found their voice

The dramatic fuse of Netflix’s Moxie, out this week, will be familiar to anyone with knowledge of Mean Girls, the seminal 2004 teen comedy co-starring Moxie’s director, Amy Poehler. Like Regina George (Rachel McAdams) before her, Poehler’s on-screen daughter Vivian (Hadley Robinson) surreptitiously distributes black-and-white xeroxes of anonymously produced, explosive content in the bathroom before school starts.

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But whereas Regina unleashed her Burn Book – a collage of insults, inside jokes and petty humiliations – on to Mean Girls’ suburban high school to detonate social anarchy (and thus, regain Queen Bee control), Vivian’s info drop is far less diabolical, even wholesome. Inspired by her mother’s riot grrrl past, she’s written an anonymous feminist zine, Moxie, with the aim of, if not overthrowing the patriarchy, at least inspiring the female students to reject the mundane (though certainly not benign) sexism of American high school: ranking teen girls’ “bangable-ness”, double-standard dress codes, underappreciation of objectively higher-achieving female athletes.

Mean Girls, written by Tina Fey, remains a highly rewatchable and quotable teen classic, but it’s hard not to read Moxie’s female solidarity against status quo sexism as a rejoinder to the first film’s focus on girl-on-girl crime. Poehler’s film, based on Jennifer Mathieu’s YA book of the same name, is the latest example in a seemingly crestless, streaming-led wave of content about and for teens that riff on the genre’s well-worn staples (the climactic party scene, the scrambling of clique lines, the de-masking of anonymity, missing parents) while revising its more problematic tropes. Unshackled from box office expectations and conventional wisdom, streaming services, with their near-bottomless wells of cash, have made a virtual cottage industry of the once-flatlined teen movie. These films and shows, many written and directed by women and people of color and often arising from young adult fiction’s movement to center marginalized perspectives, are queerer, raunchier, more frank regarding race, identity and sex; like Moxie, they’re less patient and self-referential with sexism, aimed for the more progressive politics of Gen Z, and designed for their personal screens.

In the past five years, teen content has centered protagonists who are neither white (Netflix’s Mindy Kaling series Never Have I Ever, its To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before franchise; Amazon’s Selah and the Spades) nor straight (Love, Simon and its spin-off series Love, Victor; Netflix’s The Half of It). They’ve taken sexual and gender fluidity as a given (HBO Max’s upcoming Generation) and made a trans teenage character half of a central romantic storyline (Emmy-winning hit Euphoria). Some, such as Sex Education and Big Mouth, used foul-mouthed raunch to wheedle into the vulnerable heart, and palpable fear, of adolescent sexuality; others tackled thornier topics – abortion (HBO Max’s Unpregnant), suicide (Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why), drug addiction (HBO’s Euphoria again – if it’s serious or shocking, it’s on Euphoria), and anti-black police brutality (The Hate U Give). Films starring white female protagonists, such as Moxie and Booksmart, have offered a more nuanced understanding of what teen girls actually care about: sex, sometimes; best friendships’ electric, irreplaceable intimacy; for a sizable but limited slice of American high schoolers, getting into a competitive college.

The “teen” genre is admittedly loose, rangy and unclassified – it can span horror (Scream) to sports (Friday Night Lights), Shakespeare (10 Things I Hate About You, O, She’s the Man) to dystopian action (Red Dawn); they can even be aimed for adults, as long as they’re rooted in the adolescent perspective – confused and insecure, yearning, unsure of who one’s about to become.

But its base unit remains the comedy set in a suburban high school. Though movies about teens or marketed to them date to the 1950s, when “teen culture” became a national fixation with films such as Rebel Without a Cause, the “teen film” as we know it originates in the 1980s, the era of John Hughes films such as The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink as well as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the violent dark comedy Heathers. These films were popular, enjoyable, and remain, for many, beloved; they also focused overwhelmingly on straight, white characters, and are laced with casual homophobia or sexism. With the exception of Ridgemont, which was written by Cameron Crowe and directed by Amy Heckerling, they were directed by white men.

While the 80s had the Brat Pack movies, the 90s saw its own teen movie boom, particularly in the second half of the decade, after Clueless, Scream and the sleeper hit The Craft demonstrated to studios the audience demand for films about teenagers, of any tone. By 1999, a watershed year for now classic teen movies, the genre was a full, overperforming commercial force. The breezy Shakespeare-but-today 10 Things I Hate About You, written by two women, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, grossed $53.5m on a $16m budget; Varsity Blues, American Pie and She’s All That were made for a collective $37m and raked in $393m. The cheerleading tentpole Bring It On, which pitted Kirsten Dunst against cheer rival Gabrielle Union, grossed $90m on a $10m budget the following year. Mean Girls, made for $17m, grossed $130m at the box office.

The conventions of studio teen fare were grooved enough to merit films which parodied (2001’s Not Another Teen Movie) or flouted (Rian Johnson’s Brick) the genre’s broadly understood tropes – stock characters such as cheerleaders and jocks, bold-font messaging, scenes at prom. Also: conveying the imagined concerns of teenagers through straight, white, cisgender, able-bodied and thin characters, predominantly written and directed by white men. This uniformity held throughout the mid-to-late 2000s, whether the films zinged (the stoner classic Superbad in 2007) or floundered in sexist jokes about, say, female hormones (John Tucker Must Die in 2006). On the mainstream 2000s teen TV soaps – One Tree Hill, Gossip Girl, 90210 and, a micro-generation before that, The OC, Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer – American teens got, consistently, in varying tones, one sliver of representation.

Meanwhile, production of teen films, as well as other related mid-budget movie genres like the romcom, basically cratered as Hollywood diverged into big-budget superhero flicks and small, quiet indies. There were outliers – the breezy Easy A in 2010, in which Emma Stone turned fixation on a teen girl’s perceived sexual availability into a riff on The Scarlet Letter, grossed $75m on an $8m budget. But given the $312m grossed domestically by Iron Man 2 that year, or the $415m by Toy Story 3, Hollywood interest lay elsewhere.

Of course, desire by actual teens for content reflecting their lived experience never wavered; destabilization by high-voltage emotions in a changing body remains one of humanity’s few truly universal experiences. By the early 2010s, several rapid changes to the content landscape – boundless streaming services, vocal online audiences and a movement within YA fiction toward more progressive, diverse characters and storylines – aligned for a full revival, and overdue revision, of the genre. Untethered from box office pressure, Netflix (and soon Amazon, HBO Max and Hulu), could afford to throw ideas at neglected genres such as the romcom or teen movie, and reasonably expect sizable audiences to tune in from their couches. Concurrently, original work representing racially diverse, queerer perspectives emerged out of the YA fiction world, which preceded television and film in taking marginalized or misrepresented characters in teen fare seriously.

The YA-to-teen movie pipeline gushed through the latest teen revival year, 2018, with the release of The Hate U Give, the adaptation of Angie Thomas’s book on a black teenage girl’s code-switching and political awakening to the Black Lives Matter movement after police kill her childhood friend, and Love, Simon, based on the YA book by Becky Albertalli about a gay teen who navigates coming out to friends and family through anonymous emails with a mystery classmate. This was also the year To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, based on the YA series by Jenny Han, a Korean-American author born in 1980, codified homegrown Netflix romcom success. Netflix is coy on viewership figures but To All the Boys, as well as the less critically beloved The Kissing Booth, but both were widely viewed and rewatched, triggering sequels, the Netflix sub-genre of Noah Centineo films (Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, The Perfect Date), and success metrics of social media followings for Netflix’s homegrown talent.

The 2020s now offer a virtual buffet for teen content playing to the progressive interests, if not always taste, of Gen Z, from original content to the streaming wars’ insatiable appetite for reboots. Mean Girls was adapted (and updated) into a Broadway musical, which itself will be adapted into a feature film for Paramount. He’s All That, a gender-flipped She’s All That, will star the TikTok phenom Addison Rae. And HBO Max’s upcoming Gossip Girl reboot will reportedly revise the original show’s limitations, with a diverse cast and, according to executive producer Joshua Safran, “a lot of queer content”.

The oft-repeated line in representation is more is better, but not all progressive-seeming updates land. The disastrous (and now cancelled) Heathers reboot on Paramount, which reimagined the school’s conventionally beautiful mean-girl bullies as a genderqueer student, a biracial girl and a fat girl, seemed to both misunderstand the original movie and disastrously misread current audiences’ appetite for content involving school violence, especially in the wake of mass shootings. Grand Army, Netflix’s Brooklyn high school answer to Euphoria, was derailed after a former writer accused the showrunner and creator of “racist exploitation and abuse”, leading to her departure. 13 Reasons Why drew intense criticism for what many experts called a romanticization of teen suicide; one study found that suicide among teenagers rose by 28.9% in the month after its Netflix launch.

Better on-paper representation doesn’t necessarily mean better shows – HBO Max’s Generation, to be released this month, written in part by 19-year-old Zelda Barnz, takes sexual and gender fluidity as a given and peppers its dialogue with “woke” catchphrases, but the tic plays like a callous shield for poor writing and paper-thin characters. Creating progressive, diverse high schoolers can appeal to under-represented audiences, but it’s not an out for treating them with total disingenuousness. Its thinness is particularly glaring when compared with Euphoria, HBO’s first teen show that, for all its stylistic flourishes and aggressive imagery (full-frontal nudity, a graphic overdose scene), handles a host of thorny, often bungled topics with care. Like an old teen soap, Euphoria, created by Sam Levinson and directed by several women, including Augustine Frizzell, Jennifer Morrison and Pippa Bianco, depicts extreme teen behavior, but with a realistic grasp on the toxic toll of stifled male anger, the destruction addiction wreaks on relationships, and the tricky power negotiations of hookup apps and sexting. The show’s central romance between Rue (Zendaya, the youngest ever Emmy winner for best drama actress) and Jules (Hunter Schafer), a trans newcomer to the school, is treated as organic and alchemic rather than a political statement, and has become the subject of intense online fandom – popularity which evinces both audience hunger for more inclusive, sensitive representation and old-guard networks’ efforts to win younger audiences away from streamers.

That wide, uneven net of the teen content wars – pick a genre, there’s probably a teen show or film – feels like a nutritive balm, no matter how much one reveres the classics. Watching Vivian’s nascent political awareness in Moxie, I was reminded how much I adored (and endlessly rewatched) the original Mean Girls, and yet how deeply I still craved something that felt even remotely close to my far less catty experience at a suburban high school, and more responsive to the sexist standards I internalized more than called out. How much a film about a girl who’s growing into activism and herself, uncomfortably but not extremely, would have meant to an insecure high school student like me even eight years ago; how much young adults crave feeling understood, seen. Given the evergreen bottomlessness of adolescent feelings, it’s unlikely we’ll reach peak teen; with streaming’s rising tide, it’s a genre in upswell, revising, for better and sometimes for worse, itself.