Quadrophenia

Quadrophenia

The film Quadrophenia is all about Youth culture and mainly mods and rockers. These were the main groups that teenagers associated themselves with during the 1960s. During the 60s teens had a sense of freedom as national service wasn’t compulsory anymore so they were free to enjoy themselves. There was also a large number of teens at this point in time due to post-war celebration adults were having. The mods wore tailored, sharp suits, had short hair, ties, and drove around on scooters. They took inspiration from countries such as Italy, France and USA. At the weekend they would go ballroom dancing and socialised with one another and took drugs to stay awake. Whereas, rockers wore leather jackets and jeans, boots and drove around on motorbikes. In the early days, there was no animosity between the two groups but that changed and the media picked up on this leading to moral panic across the country. Theorist Stanley Cohen suggests moral panic occurs when the media overreact to an aspect of behaviour that challenges the social norm. This happened and escalated the problems, as more youths wanted to associate with the two groups and the rest of the country feared the youths assuming they were trouble. The main character in the film is Jimmy, a mod. He is a typical mod who wears suits, rides a scooter and does drugs to keep him going. He associates with the mods as he feels it gives him an identity and he regards the people around him as family as his actual family disregards him. He is represented as a stereotypical youth, as he is presented doing drugs, causing trouble and getting into fights. He is shown in the film to aspire to be another character; ‘ace face’. He is seen by other Mods to be the ‘king’ of all the mods and at the top of the pecking order and in charge when it comes to mods. He’s arrogant, anti-establishment and funny. He is also seen to have a lot of money and a great bike. Jimmy quits his job as he feels insignificant and heads to Brighton where he realises, Ace face also has a poor job, under-paid job as a bell boy. A further reason Jimmy wanted to be a mod is because of Steph. Steph is a checkout girl who is also a mod. Steph and Jimmy are a ‘thing’ for a small time while the mods are on a weekend in Brighton but, when they return after Jimmy is arrested Steph is now dating Jimmy’s friend.  This is another reason Jimmy joined the mods, to get girls, when this fails he decides to stop associating himself with them.

One of the key ideas about youth representation is how they are demonised by the mass media. In the film there is reports in the newspaper about the riots and trouble in Brighton which is ultimately why Jimmy is removed from his home. This links back to Cohen’s theory of moral panic as a result of media portrayal.

A further theorist whose ideas are seen in the film is Hebdige. He argues that the representation of youths is very limited, they are either causing trouble or having fun and there is nothing in-between, it is either one or the other. In the film, youth are shown as having fun but then we see others in the film that think they are nothing but trouble.