Anyone who grew up thinking of themselves as an outcast, outsider, or overall oddball would likely have noticed that, far from being exiles from popular culture, they were the beneficiary of a cottage industry of books and movies made just for them.
From James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye to S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, many modern novels seem to have been written with the sole objective of reflecting back their readers’ feelings of adolescent estrangement. This was even more true in Hollywood, where substantial sums of money were to be made by assuring the rebels in the audience that their rebelliousness was shared by famous movie stars—which would seem to defeat the entire point of being a rebel, but since when were teenagers troubled by contradictions?
Read Full Article »