ABSTRACT
The rise of the teen movie can be related to the emergence of consumer
culture, and particularly of the expanding post-Second World War middle-
class culture of the suburbs of the American cities creating an audience of
baby boomer teenage consumers interested in movies about themselves. In
Indonesia, we see the beginning of teen movies also paralleling the rise of
consuming classes throughout the Suharto period, and in Indonesia the teen
movie became a cult with the Si Boy series of five films made in Indonesia
between 1987 and 1991. Discussing the rise of the Thai teen movie, Chaiworaporn also sees teen movies as a new phenomenon for Thai cinema.
Such teen movies appeared in the 1980s when there was a shift in audiences
for Thai cinema from a predominantly lower and middle-class urban and
rural mass audience comprising all age groups, dominant in the 1960s and
1970s, to an audience largely of young people including those from the
newly affluent classes (Chaiworaporn 2001: 153-56). The emergence of the
Thai teen movie corresponds with the building of large entertainment
complexes particularly in Bangkok and other urban centres at the end of the 1980s.
