September 17, 2000

AMERICAN GRAFFITI

Behind the Wheel and Driving the Nation's Culture

By TODD S. PURDUM

LOS ANGELES -- America is obsessed with youth, awash in the largest generation of young people since the baby boomers themselves passed through. More than 70 million strong and growing, young people today constitute both an irresistible market and a powerful marketing tool. Teenage tastes set the tone for mass culture from hip-hop to South Park, and teenage bodies are used to sell cars, clothes and the promise of perpetual youth to people old enough to be the models' parents.

On the other hand, for at least 50 years — since icons like James Dean and Elvis helped to define those between the ages of 12 and 20 as ticking time-bombs of sexual desire, irresponsible risk-taking and anti- social violence — the adult world has looked upon the teenager as a blend of barbarian and incipient delinquent. Naturally, then, every four years or so the politicians pop up to bemoan something about the lives of the young and the restless.

The Federal Trade Commission's finding last week that entertainment companies regularly market violent movies and video games to people too young to buy them legally, and the efforts of Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush to outdo each other in expressing outrage, is just the latest example of this sort of soul-searching and moralizing.

"It's obviously very confusing to teenagers," said the author Thomas Hine, whose sociological survey, "The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager" (Bard/Avon), was published last year. "On the one hand, there's this long tradition of criticisms of youth culture by people who haven't the slightest idea about it. At the turn of the 20th century, ragtime was seen as great evil. By the 1920's, The Ladies Home Journal was crusading against jazz. It went out of its way to say that ragtime was wonderful. There's always a new evil. But that's the funny thing, because we count on young people for that, to be the ones who are finding the new."

Pity the poor teenager, caught in the cultural crossfire.

"We market to them, and then we stigmatize our teens as being so much involved in risky behavior," said Dr. Lynn Ponton, an adolescent psychiatrist at the University of California at San Francisco and the author of "The Sex Lives of Teenagers" (Dutton 2000). "We want to look like them, like James Dean driving through the desert, but we really don't understand them."

There are two easy explanations for society's current glorification of youth: money and sex.

The money part is straightforward. "Teenagers are going to spend $160 billion this year, a 60 percent increase over three years ago," Mr. Hine said. That's a lot of money, and everyone wants a share.

The sexual part is more complex.

In "Rebel Without a Cause," Jim Backus as Dean's father didn't understand his son, but in his tie and (in one memorable scene) frilly apron, he didn't try to look like him, either. Today, however, baby boomers are loath to cede center stage to the coming generations — along with the status that comes with hipness and desirability. So adults have begun sedulously aping teens.

"There's a trend we call generational blur, something that's been growing over the last 20 years," said Irma Zandl, a marketing expert in Manhattan whose Zandl Group tracks tastes and trends among the under-30 set. "There used to be a certain set of behaviors and ways of dress that if you were an adult you left behind. But as society's become much more casual, those rules are really blurred. There isn't that much distinction between how teenagers and adults dress; they're all wearing khakis and jeans and sneakers."

This year, for the first time, Ms. Zandl said, she has spotted even pregnant women in their 30's and 40's wearing low-waisted pants and baring their midriffs, as if they were Britney Spears onstage. Using teenage sexuality to maintain desirability in this way is a dicey thing, all but putting parents in a disquieting sexual competition with their children. And it points up how complicit adults are in encouraging some of the very ills they condemn in teenage society.

The popular-culture industry has been aimed at teenagers since the 1950's, when the movie and recording industries, threatened by the rise of television, began selling them angst and sex. Those were the subjects, whether in "Rebel Without a Cause," or in pop hits like Nat King Cole's "They Try to Tell Us We're Too Young (Too Young to Really Be in Love)."

Since then, the concentration on youth has waxed and waned with the size of the adolescent population at any particular moment. Sean Daniel, who as a studio executive or producer has had a hand in movies including "Animal House," "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "The Breakfast Club" and "Dazed and Confused," said simply, "I can tell you we are in yet another cycle where youth rules."

The corollary is not, however, that Hollywood can successfully sell teens anything. Teenagers will "unstoppably seek out the culture they want," Mr. Daniel said. They will sneak into theaters to see films they aren't supposed to (or sneak into music stores to buy CDs they aren't supposed to hear).

Cultural critics, however, usually look for a villain and make the easy assertion that kids seek out entertainment disapproved of by adults because of exploitative corporate marketing.

"Who's kidding who?" Mr. Daniel asks. `'The reality of teenage life is R-rated."

That said, like many of his colleagues in Hollywood, Mr. Daniel acknowledges concern about a "measurably greater intensity" in the images that bombard the culture, from the big screen to the Internet, and he draws a distinction between the widespread use of violence and sexual imagery and themes, which troubles him less.

"I suspect," he said, "that no good comes from America's essential prudishness," and he praises movies like "Something About Mary" for their "hilarious embrace of the awkwardness of life and the power of romance in it." Moreover, Mr. Daniels said that a culture in which teenagers cannot find their lives portrayed on their own terms is not a healthy one.

Of course, a great many parents may take precisely the opposite view. And there is ample evidence that the gulf between parents and their teenagers remains as large as ever. A new survey sponsored by Students Against Drunk Driving and Liberty Mutual Insurance found that teenagers were more concerned with problems like drinking and driving and teenage suicide, while their parents were more worried about car accidents or casual sex. Only 5 percent of parents surveyed thought their children would drink and drive; 21 percent of teenagers said they already had.

But Ms. Zandl, the marketing expert, notes that more young people than ever say their parents are their role models. So when adults express concern about the cultural influences affecting their children, the first place to look may not be Hollywood, but much closer to home.