When Teenage Angst Went Mainstream [Video]

As a concept, the “teenager” only really came into being after the Second World War, when child labor laws and compulsory education helped to define the gap between early childhood and adulthood. But by the 1980s, wide swaths of popular culture revolved around teens, as movies like The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Heathers, and The Outsiders (based on S.E. Hinton’s 1967 book, which helped to launch the YA genre) explored the big feelings—discontent with the banality of life, the sense that your parents didn’t, couldn’t, understand you—ushered in by adolescence.

Yet with the 1990s and early 2000s came something slightly different: a deluge of media that pushed into the darker corners of those feelings, and rendered teenagers drowning in something more like anguish. The shift began with The Virgin Suicides and Girl, Interrupted (both books from 1993 that were adapted into movies that premiered in 1999), as well as 1995’s Kids. Post-Y2K …