don't play dumb. we're better at it then you. since the 1950s, the american teenager has enjoyed more affluence, mobility and freedom than any other youth group in the world. yet look at american teen movies - from james dean's anguished "you're tearing me apart!" in rebel without a cause (1955) to john hughes's the breakfast club (1985), where one troubled teenager asks, "my god, are we going to be like our parents?" - and what do you see? a colourful and cacophonous parade of alienated outsiders, suicides, depressives, killers, spoilt brats, slackers, dopers, delinquents, generation x whiners and self-aggrandising losers. that golden age, when the pursuit of unhappiness was the patriotic duty of every young american, is now gone. in the mid-1990s, american teens decided that alienation and angst were the vaudeville and burlesque of the soul, something too out of date to do, and reclaimed their right to party.

-cosmo landesman-