Henry A. Giroux

In the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood produced a host of films about the plight of young people in postmodern American culture. Henry A. Giroux examines five of these films in the article below, which is excerpted from his book Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth. The films River's Edge (1986), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Slacker (1991), and Kids (1995) all focus on white middle— and working—class teenagers. Director Ernest Dickerson's Juice (1992), on the other hand, depicts poor black youth in the tradition of films such as Boys 'N the Hood (1991), Clockers (1995), and New Jersey Drive (1995). In each of these, the overriding message about urban teenagers is that life at the end of the twentieth century delivers senseless violence, alienation, and despair. However, important differences between the representations...