ABSTRACT
One of the 1963 fi lm Beach Party’s opening scenes fi nds a caricatured “famed anthropologist” surreptitiously observing a group of teenage surfers on the southern California coast. The academic, Robert Sutwell, can’t hold back a prurient giggle as he observes the scantily clad teens surf, rub lotion on one another, and speak a foreign lingo. “It’s fascinating,” Sutwell tells his assistant, “how similar these people are to the other primitive tribes we’ve studied.” To the assistant’s protest that they’re just “normal American teenagers,” the professor replies, “teenagers, yes; normal, no. They’re a true subculture. They live in a society as primitive as the aborigine of New Guinea.”
