ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the notion of teenage nostalgia in two contemporary Hollywood movies, Little Children and Young Adult. It responds to Marie-Luise Kohlke's concept of perverse nostalgia and Joshua Garrison's criminal teenagers and points out how teenage nostalgia, that is, the desire to relive one's days as a teenager, is not only part of a larger trend in Hollywood's entertainment industry. Perpetual adolescence has been studied profusely and from very different angles. Developmental psychologists, sociologists, cultural historians, and public health experts have tried to understand why young adults hesitate to grow up. Despite the suggested conflation and deconstruction of age stages, the notions of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood still exist, and, as Nancy Lesko argues in her analysis of the politics of contemporary representations of adolescence, they represent dominant terminologies in the distribution of power in Western societies. The Hummel figurines have an international reputation for representing idealizations of simple childhood pleasures.
