Title: American Youth Culture in 1960s’ Hollywood Movies

Abstract: In the mid 1960s, the Hollywood, known as a dreaming factory, began to favor the baby boom generation born after World WarⅡand produced a number of well-known movies reflecting American youth culture in 1960s. Keen enough to capture the increasingly aggressive and combative mood among American youth, Bonnie and Clyde focused on showing and rendering a culture of violence; Graduate reflected the intensified conflict of generation and youth rebel; while Woodstock 1969 and Easy Rider recorded and reproduced the new conscious revolution of the young people who appealed to an alternative lifestyle represented in the trinity of “sex, drug and music” to rebel against the mainstream culture. Hollywood movies, as image texts, coincide with the thought and culture of the American youth in the 1960s.

Keywords: Hollywood movies, youth culture, violence, rebel, counterculture

Author: Wenyu Xie, Associate Professor, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China.