Comparing American Graffiti And Superbad

Both American Graffiti and Superbad highlight the character’s view of the adult world as being something to fear by including adult characters who can’t let go of their adolescence. In American Graffiti, John is older than his high school friends. He is “the king of the town” and the best drag racer. Throughout the film, he seems to be on the brink of letting go of his reckless adolescent past but never seems to reach this conclusion. One example is when Falfa (Harrison Ford) is racing him and runs a red light while John stops. This shows that he is starting to realize his recklessness and although, to his admittance, that he will not go off to college like the other characters, he will be able to move on from his adolescent persona. After John loses the drag race with Falfa, John …show more content…
The biggest difference between the two films is the difference in provocative content. In American Graffiti the characters are presented in a more innocent manner. The film does show them drinking but when Terry loses his virginity the film merely shows them walking out of the forest and the audience can presume they had sex. In Vera Dika’s book Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Uses of Nostalgia, she states that American Graffiti is a “curiously gentle story, presenting a group of uniformly good, kind, and considerate teenagers…. specifically constructs the past and its youth as innocent.” (91) There is barely any violence in the film and even the “bad guys”, The Pharaohs, are mostly harmless. This film is so important because it truly is a picture of American in the early 1960s. It was before things went downhill as President Kennedy would be assassinated in 1963 and America’s culture and society changed forever. American Graffiti shows the time of America’s innocence in the 1950’s before everything changed in the