There are few genres that know their way around the suburb as well as the teen film. From the ‘youthpix’ of the 1950s and 1960s to John Hughes's oeuvre, from Larry Clark's films to the American Pie cycle, the teen film navigates its way around the whole spectrum of suburban locales: by car or by bike, skateboard or trainers, from highway to gas station, shopping mall to parking lot, high school to front lawn, picture window to cellar. In this chapter I examine the ways in which three teen films – Alpha Dog (2007), Chumscrubber (2006) and Brick (2005) – present the suburb. The chapter is divided into three overlapping and accumulative parts. In the first part, I discuss the ways in which these films use style to distinguish the adult experience of everyday life (the experience central, also, to the previous four chapters) from the teenage experience of the quotidian, looking in particular at how adults are made to look like children while teenagers are rendered as adults. In the second part, I discuss the ways in which the films employ editing and mise-en-scène to distinguish the adult experience of space from that of the teenagers; and in the third, concluding part, I suggest that the films turn the so-called non-place of the suburb into a lived space. Indeed, if I am issuing a discreet defence of the suburban narrative somewhere in this book it is here. Part of this chapter's aim is to take issue with the idea that suburbia is by definition a non-place.

I wish to say a few words here about my choice of films. As the film scholar Timothy Shary has noted, the teen film is an increasingly diverse, ‘complex, dynamic, and revealing’ genre.