The mod subculture originated from London in the late 50s and peeked in the early 60s. Elements of the mod subculture includes fashion (suits), music (African American soul, Jamaican ska, British beat music and R&B) and their love for scooters. Teenagers at this time are board and see their lives as dull they are not inspired by the British culture around them they are repressed and riddled with war (mods vs. rockers).

The defining attitudes towards authority figures i.e.) family police etc is very negative on both sides. In Quadrophenia examples of this are shown for example Jimmy's dad was very negative when Jimmy was listening to the who and was very disrespectful.

The film ‘Quadrophenia’ is set in 1965 which follows the life of Jimmy Copper played by ‘Phil Daniels’ a London mod. He is a typical mod with a low paid job, lives with his parents and rivals with the rockers. A bank holiday provides the excuse for the rivalry between the mods and rock he then gets arrested and fined. He then gets kicked out of his home after his mother finds amphetamine pills. Then later to his horror, discovers that his idol, Ace Face, is in reality a lowly bellboy at a Brighton hotel. Jimmy steals Ace's scooter and heads out to Beachy Head, where he crashes the scooter over the cliff.

At the end of the film Jimmy walks back up the incline from the cliff-edge. He's symbolically trashed the culture of mod and trashed the Ace Face scooter and due to the easy-to-follow disillusionment with friends, lifestyle and politics of youth culture. Ace Face is not all he seems, and Jimmy realizes that the whole reason of the mod is built on fragile foundations.

Quadrophenia deals with collective identity and personal identity.The film deals with the mod culture portraying them in a truthful way and also how the media portrays them.

Modern day youth subcultures will always be in existence, the mods and rockers were one of the first youth subcultures and shown obvious conflict with assaults with the Briton conflict. However their is no obvious conflict in a war way in today’s cultures but oppositions such as the example above have different fashion (black clothes vs. trackies), music (metal vs. Dub step) and attitudes (don’t care vs. hatred) are all stereotypical view in the media today. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson described youth subcultures as symbolic or ritualistic attempts to resist the power of bourgeois hegemony by consciously adopting behaviour that appears threatening to the establishment. Conversely, Marxists of the Frankfurt School of social studies argue that youth culture is inherently consumerist and integral to the divide-and-rule strategy of capitalism. They argue that it creates generation gaps and pits groups of youths against each other (e.g. mods and rockers), especially as youth culture is the dominant culture in the west.