The Undercurrents of Adolescence

Imagine a great movie about adolescence like Rebel Without a Cause or The Breakfast Club with a written commentary rather than a DVD audio one. For years I have used movies about teens to learn and grow from. As a movie fan, and as I became more entrenched in the world of teenagers, I found myself looking at teen movies in a couple different ways. With each new teen film, I would just turn off my brain and enjoy the movie. But then I found myself watching the same movie again with my 'adolescent filters' on and a legal pad & pen for keeping notes. I saw countless useful pieces in almost every movie, from hedonistic party-driven films like Dazed and Confused to true-life tearjerkers like Freedom Writers. Classics like West Side Story and American Graffiti or musicals like Footloose, all gave me great material to use in helping parents and other adults involved with teens a venue to learn from. While researching for my first book, From Boys to Men: Spiritual Rites of Passage in an Indulgent Age, I learned of a somewhat unknown spike of delinquent and adolescent discontent in the 1950s. Beginning with Catcher in the Rye in 1951, through James Dean's brilliance and into West Side Story, the undercurrent of teen problems was coming to the surface. The youth of the 50s were children of two wars, and not buying into the post-WWII I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best vision of suburban America. The idea for tracking the adolescent undercurrents through the past 100 years or so originally came to me from a teen, which seems appropriate. Almost 30 years of working with adolescents has taught me a great deal, much of which I hope to share in this book. My nephew created a PowerPoint slide show in lieu of a boring book report on Catcher in the Rye. He began the report with a quick look at what was happening in 1951 when Catcher in the Rye was published and quickly became one of the most banned books in American history. In his first few slides, he pointed out that "It's 1951 and the US is celebrating....the war is over....I Love Lucy started its first season....rock & roll was about to top the charts" Next, my nephew explained that "The US was happy...not realizing problems that were right under their nose. That's why J.D. Salinger decided to publish a wakeup call." While writing my first book I started thinking about movies that might have come out around the same time as Catcher or that also showed a different side of the teen story. While most 50's teen movies were wholesome and positive, I recalled a few that fit the "undercurrents" profile. A couple of classics and a couple of not-so-famous movies came to mind. In 1953 we first saw Marlon Brando as The Wild One, a reenactment of an actual motorcycle gang that had taken over a small southern California town. The wholesome town residents are completely lost in how to deal with a new form of trouble: delinquent and violent young people. The section in my book about this period and films became one of the most popular components of my workshops. When on-line streaming and rentals, as well as inexpensive movie sales arrived, I realized I could finally write a book where readers could watch the film and read my comments on adolescence. By deeply paraphrasing each movie, even people who could not view each of the ten classic films I use in Undercurrents could learn a lot about teens and adolescence. And because I have strongly paraphrased the movie plots and scripts, you can learn a lot even without the movies at hand.
About the Author: Bret Stephenson M.A. is the author of From Boys to Men: Spiritual Rites of Passage in an Indulgent Age and The Undercurrents of Adolescence: Tracking the Evolution of Modern Adolescence and Delinquency Through Classic Cinema. He has been a counselor of at-risk and high-risk adolescents for almost 30 years. Bret has worked in residential treatment, clinical counseling agencies, group homes, private counseling, foster parent training, Independent Living Program, and has managed mentoring and tutoring programs. He has been a presenter and speaker at numerous national and international conferences and workshops, including being the teen coordinator at the International Transpersonal Association's Youth Conferences in America and Ireland, the United Nations World Peace Festival, Institute of Noetic Sciences, the World Children's Summit and private workshops in Switzerland. Bret has worked with teens from more than 100 countries. Bret is owner of the Adolescent Mind, a teen consulting business. He has trained and designed programs for numerous organizations including the Girl Scouts of America, Adirondack Leadership Expeditions and CASA. Bret is currently interested in creating youth employment and youth entrepreneurial models. Since the translation of From Boys to Men into Czech, he has been visiting Prague yearly to provide youth training to professionals.