Ferris Bueller took the day off. The Breakfast Club enjoyed detention. The Heathers lost their cool. The Outsiders broke the rules.
The teens of the 1980s films did what they wanted. They didn’t conform or follow. They embraced who they were and ran with it. They were all on their own.
And Elaina Cole was determined to give them the credit they deserve.
“I wanted to legitimize the 1980s teen film as a genre,” says the sophomore William Aiken Fellow, who – as a computer science major, double minoring in math and film studies – was hardly discouraged by the dearth of academic publications she discovered about the subject: It wasn’t the first time she’d forged her own way. “That just made me more determined.”
Cole ran with it, and – when she presented her resulting paper at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Undergraduate Conference last April – credit was finally given where credit was due: Cole had done it all on her own.
