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Twice in the last two decades director Amy Heckerling reintroduced American audiences to what has become commonly known as the teenpic. The huge critical and commercial successes of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Clueless (1995) reminded an amnesiac and economically strapped industry that there were millions of young people in the United States with billions of dollars of disposable income. The result, much to the consternation of “mature” critics, was an inundation of comedic teen films in multiplexes across the nation, a trend that remains unabated. Although Heckerling’s features were female-based narratives, the comedic genre has evolved, or perhaps devolved, into stories about the raucous male-centered sexual exploits of white, 1 middle- to upper-class, suburban, heterosexual high school and college boys. The conventions of recent teen movies have become so formulaic and recognizable that Joel Gallen’s 2002 release Not Another Teen Movie, a parody of the teenpic, struck a chord with both popular and critical audiences. In the opening sequences we are introduced to the genre’s stock characters. Among the teens attending John Hughes High School in suburban Los Angeles are: Janey, the “pretty ugly girl” who suffers from the ugly duckling syndrome we’ve seen countless times on television and in films like Never Been Kissed (1999), She’s All That (1999), and The Princess Diaries (2001); the desperate virginal nerdy boy from Porky’s (1981) and Weird Science (1985); the seductive foreign exchange student as in Better Off Dead (1985) and American Pie (1999), who, being from Europe, is constructed with a more mature sexuality than that of her American peers. Almost without exception, the exchange student is female, for a sexually experienced boy would no doubt be competition for the American male protagonist. (The male foreign student, when present , is usually nonwhite, thus, within the context of the narrative, 157 8 in love and trouble Teenage Boys and Interracial Romance Frances Gateward frances gateward 158 undesirable and reduced to a stereotype, such as Long Duc Dong (Gedde Watanabe) in Sixteen Candles [1984].) All of the teenage characters in the parody are white, with the exception of one— Malik (Deon Richmond), “the token black guy,” whose function in the film is, as he explains, to “Stay out of the conversation and say things like ‘Damn, that is whack!’” Malik’s narrative role is to remain on the periphery, to—as Robin Wood so aptly reminds us in his examination of the teen high school film—support the white male lead. His presence “at once establishes his [the white protagonist ’s] lack of prejudice, his openness to difference, his generosity, and asserts his superiority: he has the main role, he ‘gets the girl,’ there is never any suggestion that he might fall in love with a black or Asian woman, or conversely, that the (white) woman he loves, whether ‘bitch’ or ‘nice girl,’ will be sexually interested in a male from another ethnic group” (2002, 7). Romance and sexual relationships for young people of color within the world of the racially “integrated” teen comedy films are for the most part nonexistent. Asian/Pacific American, Native American, Latino/a, and Other ethnic groups like those of Arab descent are rendered practically invisible, and because mainstream American media myopically see race as meaning black or white, if a nonwhite character appears in a romantic teenpic context, it is almost invariably a male and he is almost invariably black. In those rare instances when young black men are not neutered, their sexuality is constructed as homosexual, as in Mannequin (1987), where Hollywood Montrose (Meshach Taylor) functions as mammy-figure , offering emotional nurturance and advice; or in Revenge of the Nerds (1984) with Lamar (Larry B. Scott), who is marginalized on the college campus not because he fits the archetype of nerd, but because of his race and sexual preference. Both of these characters are extremely stereotyped by their speech, body language, mode of dress, and, in the case of Hollywood, profession (he is a window dresser in an upscale Philadelphia department store). Because mainstream teenpics are driven by heterosexual desire and remain ideologically conservative, often using gay and lesbian sexuality as the subject of jokes and treating homosexuality as the ultimate “gross-out” perversion, Lamar and characters like him can be neither desiring subjects nor objects for others. This is not to say that youth-of-color experience no romance or sexual relationships on the movie and television screens of America. They do, but...

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