Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” a girl asks Marlon Brando, as he leans on a bar in The Wild One (1953). Hat tipped over his eyes, he shoots back, “What’ve you got?”
And with that, Brando’s character, the biker Johnny Strabler, became a cultural icon. Young, surly, violent and risk-taking, he embodied what was then a recent, western invention: the teenager.
But the idea of the teenager didn’t come from nothing. As cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore argues in Inventing Ourselves, adolescent behaviours have always been around. Socrates and Shakespeare complained about them. And they’re present in all cultures, not just the west.