18,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Right from the origins of cinema, countless films and television dramas have offered sensational and seductive representations of young people's lives. Youth is typically associated with energy, idealism and physical beauty, but it is often represented as both troubled and troubling. These representations are almost always created by adults, implicitly reflecting an adult perspective on how young people 'come of age'. Youth on Screen provides a historical account of representations of youth in Britain and the United States, stretching back over seventy years. From Blackboard Jungle to This is England, and from Jailhouse Rock to Skins, it covers a range of classics, as well as some intriguing obscurities. Engagingly written and clearly organized, it offers a perfect introduction for students and general readers.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 430
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Notes
2 Troubling Teenagers: How Movies Constructed the Juvenile Delinquent
Notes
3 Dreamboats, Boybands and the Perils of Showbiz: The Rise and Fall of the Pop Film
Notes
4 Reeling in the Years: Retrospect and Nostalgia in Movies about Youth
Notes
5 Gender Trouble: Cinema and the Mystery of Adolescent Girlhood
Notes
6
This is England:
Growing Up in Thatcher’s Britain
Notes
Skins
and the Impossibility of Youth Television
Notes
Conclusion: Histories and Futures
Notes
Further Reading
TV and Filmography
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
Pages
iii
iv
vi
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
Youth on Screen: Representing Young People in Film and Television
DAVID BUCKINGHAM
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © David Buckingham 2021
The right of David Buckingham to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4525-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4526-1 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Description: Cambridge [UK] ; Medford : Polity Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A star scholar’s exciting history of young people in film and TV”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020049118 (print) | LCCN 2020049119 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509545254 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509545261 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509545278 (epub) | ISBN 9781509548705 (pdf )
Subjects: LCSH: Youth in motion pictures. | Youth on television.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.Y6 B836 2021 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.Y6 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/65235--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049118
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049119
Typeset in 11.25 on 13 Dante
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International Ltd
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Most of the chapters in this book were originally developed as essays in my online project Growing Up Modern: Childhood, Youth and Popular Culture Since 1945. This material has been substantially edited and revised for this volume. Other essays in the series (including several others on youth film, and on youth culture) can be accessed at https://davidbuckingham.net/growing-up-modern/.
I would again like to thank my editors at Polity, Mary Savigar, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer and John B. Thompson, for their continuing encouragement and careful support.
1Introduction
As I was completing the outline of this book in late 2019, a news story about youth and screens briefly hit the headlines. ‘Police attacked during machete brawl at Birmingham cinema,’ it proclaimed.1 Apparently, a group of Asian youth – possibly queuing to attend a new British film called Blue Story – had been involved in a fight in the foyer of the Star City multiplex at around 5.30 one November afternoon. About 100 people were involved, several police officers were injured, and five young people were arrested. The cinema chain Vue promptly withdrew Blue Story from its theatres across the country, although it eventually relented, and the film went on to enjoy reasonable box-office returns.
Directed by the young Black British director Andrew Onwubolu (also known as Rapman), Blue Story is set in the mean streets of Peckham in South London. It focuses on two young African-Caribbean men and their steadily deepening involvement in drug-related gang violence. The film was Onwubolu’s first feature and was a developed version of a short drama series he first created for YouTube in 2014; his subsequent YouTube hit Shiro’s Story (2018), reportedly shot for just £3,000, had gained around 8 million views for each of its three episodes. While Blue Story was financed by the BBC and eventually picked up by Paramount for global distribution, its origins reflect the changing circumstances of media production in the so-called digital age.
Nevertheless, there is also something curiously old-fashioned going on here. The ‘brawl’ surrounding Blue Story recalls the rioting in UK cinemas that accompanied the release of one of the oldest films I’ll consider in this book, Blackboard Jungle, almost sixty-five years earlier. In both cases, the violence resulted in outraged newspaper headlines and swift action from the authorities. In this instance, there was no evidence that the young people involved had actually seen the film, or that they even intended to do so. For his part, Onwubolu condemned the response as ‘racist’, while other commentators invoked the rather predictable charge of ‘moral panic’.
Furthermore, like Blackboard Jungle, Blue Story is essentially a cautionary tale, and a fairly traditional one: the two well-meaning heroes are driven by love, friendship and loyalty, even as they are pulled into the inevitable spiral of gang violence by ill-intentioned older members. Some critics praised the film for its authenticity and gritty realism, although it also uses rap to comment on the action in a much more distanced way. Yet the film is far from being a celebration of youthful violence, and it can hardly be said to glamorize the lives it portrays.
Debates about the influence of the media on young people, and the representation of youth on screen, take different forms at different times and in different locations. These may seem like perennial issues, but they are also historically specific: youth in the USA in 1955 is not the same thing as youth in the UK in 2019. Nevertheless, youth has always had a unique and ambiguous status in film and television. Right from the origins of cinema, countless films and television dramas have offered sensational and seductive representations of young people and their lives. And young people have also been an increasingly significant and lucrative audience, with considerable amounts of disposable income.
Yet, to state the obvious, representations of youth in film and television are rarely produced by young people themselves. Of course, young people do make their own films; and, while there is a long (and partly hidden) history here, the advent of digital media has significantly extended the opportunities for young film-makers. Even so, almost all commercially produced movies about young people – the films that reach cinemas, commercial streaming services and broadcast television – are produced by adults. The same is true for ‘youth television’, and indeed for most novels about youth.
Furthermore, these representations are addressed and marketed not only to young people themselves but also to adult audiences. For young people, particular movies or television dramas might appear to sustain subversive desires – desires to challenge or escape adult authority, to indulge in illicit pleasures, or to enjoy forms of power that are rarely possible in real life. For adults, they may provide retrospective fantasies about ‘the way we were’, although they sometimes seek to question or disrupt any easy nostalgia: they may remind us of what we have lost, but also of places and time periods that we might not actually want to revisit. As this implies, representations of youth on screen may tell us as much (or more) about adulthood as they do about youth itself.
Troubling ‘youth’ and ‘screens’
The idea of youth has a considerable symbolic potency. It is typically associated with notions of energy, idealism and physical beauty; yet it is also frequently represented as both troubled and troubling. The term itself has ancient origins, but modern ideas of youth owe a great deal to the work of the social psychologist G. Stanley Hall. Writing at the start of the twentieth century, Hall regarded youth (or adolescence) as a particularly precarious stage in individual development. It was a period of ‘storm and stress’, characterized by intergenerational conflicts, mood swings, and an enthusiasm for risky behaviour. From this perspective, the discussion of youth often leads inexorably to concerns about drugs, delinquency, depression and sexual deviance. Hall’s symptomatically titled book Youth: Its Education, Regimen and Hygiene (1906) includes extensive proposals for moral and religious training, incorporating practical advice on gymnastics and muscular development, as well as quaint discussions of ‘sex dangers’ and the virtues of cold baths.
Youth, then, is popularly regarded as passing stage of life. Young people are typically seen not as beings in their own right in the present but as becomings, who are on their way to something else in the future.2 Adults may pine for their lost youth, or create fantasies about it; but youth is only ever fleeting and transitory. Yet, in all this, there is a risk that the child may not successfully manage the transition to what is imagined to be a stable, mature adulthood. As such, at least in modern Western societies, youth is often regarded as a potential threat to the social order.
Of course, there is considerable diversity here. ‘Youth’ is not a singular category but one that is cut across by other differences, for example of social class, gender and ethnicity. Constructions of youth are historically variable and often reflect wider cultural aspirations and anxieties that are characteristic of the times. Both the representation and the actual experiences of youth can vary significantly between national settings; and, as anthropologists remind us, if we look beyond Western industrialized societies, our conceptions of youth may have very little relevance. Like gender, age can be seen as something that is ‘performed’ in different ways and for different purposes in different contexts.3 To some extent, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has asserted, ‘youth is just a word’.4 Even the words that appear to mean similar things – ‘teenager’, ‘adolescent’, ‘juvenile’, ‘young person’ – tend to carry different connotations and to serve different functions.
Over the past seventy years (the period covered by this book), it’s possible to identify a continuous drawing and redrawing of boundaries, both between childhood and youth and between youth and adulthood. The question of where youth begins and ends has become increasingly fraught. Some argue that childhood has increasingly blurred into youth – provoking anxieties such as the continuing concern about the ‘sexualization’ of children. Meanwhile, youth itself seems to be extending: young people are leaving the family home at an older age and ‘settling down’ in terms of stable jobs and relationships at a later point. Many official definitions of youth now extend into the late twenties, and in some instances well into the thirties. New categories – such as ‘tweens’ and ‘adultescents’ – have emerged in an attempt to pin down what appears to be the changing nature and significance of age differences.
This blurring of boundaries is also increasingly apparent in the marketing of media and in media representations themselves. The appeal of what were once seen as ‘youth media’ – computer games or rock music, for example – increasingly seems to reflect a broadening of the youth demographic. ‘Youthfulness’ is something that can be invoked, packaged and sold to people who are not by any stretch of the imagination any longer youthful. Contemporary media marketing seems to imply that you can be ‘as young as you feel’5 – although young people themselves may also resent adults trespassing on ‘their’ territory and develop new ways of excluding them.
This is equally evident in relation to film and television. Scholars have tied themselves in knots attempting to define ‘youth film’. The films and TV programmes I consider here all feature young people in central roles, but not all of them would be generally categorized as ‘youth films’ or ‘youth TV’. However, this begs the question of how we might determine what a ‘youth film’ actually is in the first place. Is it a quality of the film itself, or of its intended or actual audience? Not all films about young people are necessarily made exclusively, or even primarily, for a youth audience; nor is ‘youthfulness’ (whatever that is) necessarily the defining quality of such characters, or even a major theme of the films in question.
‘Youth films’, we might argue, are those which tell us stories specifically about youth itself – and, very often, about the transition from youth to adulthood. However, most of them do so for audiences of both young people and adults. Indeed, it’s possible that a great many films that we might perceive as ‘youth films’ implicitly view youth from the perspective of adulthood. This is the case, I would suggest, not just when it comes to some of the well-known ‘classics’ I consider here, such as American Graffitiand Badlands, but also with allegedly juvenile comedies such as American Pie and Porky’s, which also attract substantial adult audiences.
The same difficulty applies to ‘youth television’, or what is often called ‘teen TV’. While young people have always been a key audience for films in the cinema – and became even more important during the 1950s and 1960s, as the adult habit of regular cinemagoing fell into decline6 – they have generally been much more elusive when it comes to television. Programmes targeting teenage audiences have an uneven history: although there are some interesting precursors, teen-focused dramas did not fully emerge until the rise of specialist cable channels in the 1990s.7 Yet children and young people have always watched programmes intended for a general ‘family’ audience, while adults make up a significant proportion of the audience for what might be categorized as ‘youth TV’.
Amid this complexity, my approach here is fairly straightforward. My title is Youth on Screen, not ‘Youth Film’ or ‘Youth Television’. The films and programmes I discuss all focus primarily on young people, and many of them explore the transition between youth and adulthood. They are by no means intended only for ‘youth’ audiences, however we might identify or define that. Yet, implicitly or explicitly, all of them are about youth: they raise questions about the characteristics and condition of youth, about the place of youth in the wider society, and about the meaning of ‘growing up’.
Aims and focus of the book
This is by no means the first book on this topic, and it is most unlikely to be the last. There are several useful surveys, especially of US youth films; some valuable, more in-depth studies, focusing on particular time periods; monographs based around single films; and other books looking at specific aspects of representation, especially gender and sexuality. (In place of a ‘review of the literature’, I offer a short guide to some of these publications in the Further Reading section at the end of the book.) Rather than offering a comprehensive survey, my aim here is to provide a set of historical case studies, presented in roughly chronological sequence. Running through these particular examples are several broader themes and critical debates, which I briefly flag up below.
This book does not assume any knowledge of (or interest in) the outer reaches of film theory. My aim has been to write as clearly as possible, at a fairly introductory level, for students and general readers. I do not ask the reader to wade through a forest of academic references; footnotes simply refer on to the references at the end of the book. I have deliberately spent very little time engaging with what other researchers and critics have said about the texts I discuss. Although I have aimed for depth rather than breadth, I avoid spending too long on any single text, not least because readers are unlikely to have seen all of them.
Inevitably, there are absences here. Unlike some other books in this area, the aim is not to catalogue and categorize the many thousands of relevant film and television titles. While each of the chapters does provide some account of the wider field of media and the social and historical contexts of the period, the primary emphasis is on detailed discussions of specific texts. With a couple of exceptions, the films and TV programmes chosen for close attention are British and American; while some of the American films have been discussed by generations of film scholars, the British ones have attracted much less attention.
Many of my choices are probably predictable, although others are more obscure. Chapter 2, for example, begins with some ‘classic’ American juvenile delinquent movies from the 1950s that are very widely discussed by film scholars – although I suspect that most readers will be rather less familiar with them. However, it then goes on to look at some British examples that are much less widely known. While there is an extensive ‘pre-history’ of youth in film, my account (like most others) begins in Hollywood in the mid-1950s.8 I have deliberately avoided some ‘classic’ films and TV shows that the reader might expect to find and included some that might seem surprising. For example, I don’t consider the well-known and widely discussed youth movies directed by John Hughes; but I do talk about some films – from the USA and particularly from the UK – that some would regard as deservedly obscure.
Chapters 2 and 3 cover what might be called ‘sub-genres’ or ‘cycles’ of films about youth. Chapter 2 looks at the idea of juvenile delinquency and how it was constructed in British and American cinema in the late 1940s and the 1950s. It begins by considering how well-known US films such as The Wild One (1953), Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1956) responded to moral panics, both about youth crime and about the effects of film viewing itself. It then compares this with how the ‘troubling teenager’ was represented in British films, from Good Time Girl (1948), Boys in Brown (1949) and Cosh Boy (1953) through to Violent Playground (1958). It explores how, in the process of representing the ‘problem’ of youth crime, films both reflected and helped to set the terms of wider public debate about age relationships.
Chapter 3 focuses on pop films featuring more or less well-known performers from the late 1950s and the 1960s. It outlines the broader context of these films and then considers several examples: three films featuring Elvis Presley (Loving You, Jailhouse Rock and King Creole, 1956–8) and two with Cliff Richard (The Young Ones and Summer Holiday, 1961 and 1962); the first two Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night and Help! (1963 and 1965); and a couple that are more obscure, Catch Us If You Can (featuring the Dave Clark Five, 1965) and Head (1968), starring the American band The Monkees. I explore the ambivalent ways in which these films represent youth and youth culture; how they portray the media and the music business; and how they explore the process of representation itself.
Chapters 4 and 5 are more thematic in approach and range across broader time periods. Chapter 4 explores the issue of retrospect and nostalgia in cinematic images of youth through a discussion of three pairs of Hollywood films from the last fifty years, all of which are set in the past: American Graffiti and Badlands, both released in 1973; two time-travel films, Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Pleasantville (1998); and two directed by Richard Linklater, Dazed and Confused (1995) and Everybody Wants Some!! (2016). The analysis suggests that, while retrospection may entail nostalgia, it can sometimes challenge it, and that nostalgia itself may have several dimensions, motivations and consequences, not just personally but also socially and politically.
While gender is an issue that recurs through several of the chapters, it comes to the fore in chapter 5. Here I consider five very different films that all represent adolescent girlhood in troubling and mysterious ways. Two recent films, The Falling (2015) and The Fits (2015), are considered alongside three older films, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Heavenly Creatures (1994) and The Virgin Suicides (1999). These films mostly dwell on ‘Gothic’ themes of sexuality and adult repression and on sickness, contagion and death. In different ways, and to different degrees, they all blur the boundaries between reality and illusion. In doing so, they challenge the constraints of the conventional ‘coming of age’ movie, showing the development of gender identity as a source of disruption, not just for the girls themselves but also for adults.
In chapters 6 and 7, the focus shifts to television; and here I consider a couple of British examples in greater detail. Chapter 6 begins with Shane Meadows’s film This is England (2006), a coming-of-age story set in the UK in the early 1980s. It goes on to discuss the three television mini-series, made between 2010 and 2015, which traced the lives of the characters at two-yearly intervals between 1986 and 1990. While the film is more explicitly political, focusing on the appeal of right-wing racist movements at the time, the television sequels address more personal questions about growing up, the passing of time, and the relationship between the present and the past.
Chapter 7 looks at Skins (2007–13), one of the most successful UK youth television dramas of all time. It analyses Skins in the light of broader questions about ‘youth television’ – and, in particular, the issue of authenticity. I explore how the programme claims to speak on behalf of youth, not least through its claim to realism, and how the youth audience is addressed and defined. The final sections of the chapter look at how the producers attempted to draw in youthful audiences, especially through the use of social media, pointing to some of the possibilities and limitations of digital technology.
Chapter 8 concludes by reflecting on the historical dimensions of the various case studies and briefly considering the potential for representing youth in the digital age. Despite the rise of short-form online video, it suggests there is also growing interest in immersive, long-form material, and that film and television fiction will continue to be central to our understanding both of the idea of ‘youth’ and of young people’s lived experience.
Representing age
Age is surely a key dimension of social identity and, indeed, of social power; yet, in comparison with other dimensions such as gender and ‘race’, it has been relatively neglected in media analysis. It is as though age is seen as something that can be left to psychologists or to those who study media audiences (the people who do ‘children and television’ or ‘youth as consumers’). In the process, questions about the representation of age – about how the meanings of age relations are defined and constructed – are effectively marginalized. Equally problematically, this leaves the category of adulthood unexamined and taken for granted.
This book’s central focus is on the representation of age. While other aspects of social representation come into focus at different times here – most notably class and gender – it is the ‘youthfulness’ of these films and television programmes that is my primary concern. That is, I am interested in how the idea of youth itself is invoked and portrayed, both explicitly and implicitly. How are the qualities and characteristics of youth identified and defined? How, for example, is youth opposed to childhood, or to adulthood? How is the process of ‘growing up’ or ‘coming of age’ understood?
One abiding problem here is the continuing tendency to think of representation in binary terms. Representations are most frequently judged in terms of whether they are politically ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. In most instances, this comes down to a kind of ideological litmus test: conservative views of gender, race or class are either reinforced or destablized and challenged. If it’s not one, then it must be the other. Cutting across this is another familiar debate, about whether or not representations are accurate: ‘misrepresentations’ and ‘stereotypes’ have to be replaced with realistic images. However, the demand for political correctness can often conflict with the demand for accuracy: for example, positive stereotypes may serve useful political purposes, and accurate representations (for example, of disadvantaged people’s lives) can easily be construed as negative.
In his influential book Subculture, published forty years ago, the British sociologist Dick Hebdige argued that media coverage of young people could be understood in terms of one such binary distinction: either we had ‘youth as trouble’ – for instance, in stories about youth crime, drug-taking and violence – or we had ‘youth as fun’ – in images of youth as energetic, carefree pleasure-seekers.9 Hebdige was writing primarily about news coverage, although this binary can to some extent be traced through the fictional case studies here. The juvenile delinquent films I consider in chapter 2, for example, are predominantly about ‘youth as trouble’, while the pop films of chapter 3 are mostly ‘youth as fun’; and if the majority of ‘trouble’ narratives are about young males, those in chapter 5 explore the different kinds of trouble provoked or experienced by young females. However, in most instances, the picture is much more complex than a simple binary: fun can cause trouble, but trouble can also be fun; what troubles young people may not trouble (or even be apparent) to adults, and vice versa. ‘Images of youth’ cannot be so easily divided into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’.
The issue of representation obviously raises questions about realism. This is partly a question of visual aesthetics (for example, camerawork, mise-en-scène, the use of locations) and partly about narrative plausibility. I don’t explore either of these areas in any detail here. However, I do consistently return to an issue that is a central preoccupation in representing youth, that of authenticity. By this, I mean the sense not only that a text offers an accurate, or at least recognizable, image of young people’s lives but also that it somehow ‘speaks’ to and from their everyday experience. Authenticity in these terms is notoriously difficult to achieve; and the risk of failure – of being judged as somehow ‘fake’ or ‘phoney’ – is exceptionally high. Yet, as we’ll see, especially in chapters 6 and 7, the imperative of authenticity doesn’t necessarily imply documentary-style social realism.
As I’ve suggested, most representations of young people in mainstream film and television are produced for them rather than by them. They may invite us to enjoy the hedonistic antics of youth, but at the same time they may seek to provide cautionary tales or warnings or to reinforce moralistic ‘adult’ views. The central question, then, is the extent to which such texts provide a ‘youth-centred’ or an ‘adult-centred’ perspective, or both at the same time. Do they view youth in their own terms, as ‘beings’, or merely as ‘becomings’? Do they speak to or for young people, and how do they do this? Are we getting an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’ perspective, or some combination of these?
Answering these questions is unlikely to be straightforward: for example, a text in which young people occupy central roles might nevertheless take an adult-centric perspective. Many narratives about young people focus on their experience of ‘coming of age’, yet they often reflect an implicitly adult perspective – although coming of age can be seen as a corruption or loss of innocence as well as an acquisition of knowledge and enlightenment. This process of transition is itself frequently shown as precarious and risky, and its success is far from guaranteed. An incomplete or unsuccessful transition is likely to end very badly indeed – as is the case in several of the films about girlhood discussed in chapter 5. In other instances, adulthood may be seen as positively undesirable: the transition may be achieved, but only through surrendering autonomy and freedom, as in the case of some of the films discussed in chapter 4.
At the same time, all these texts are also bound to view youth or childhood retrospectively, from the perspective of the present. Implicitly or explicitly, this frequently involves a comparison between past and present, which takes one or the other as better, or as preferable. We create narratives about the ideals or the freedom we have lost or the misery and oppression we have escaped. These issues of retrospection and nostalgia run throughout the following chapters, although they come into particular focus in chapter 4, which looks at films explicitly set in the past, and chapters 6 and 7, which explore how characters are tracked across time in long-form television drama.
As I’ve suggested, many representations of youth on screen are not targeted solely at, or watched by, young people themselves. On the contrary, they often address both youthful and adult audiences at the same time. They may offer points of identification and recognition both for younger audiences and for adults. They may enable us to interpret a narrative, or the outcome of a narrative, simultaneously from an adult and a youthful perspective. This ‘dual address’ is apparent in many of the texts I discuss, even those that appear to fall on one or other side of this divide. The youth-oriented pop films of chapter 3, for example, offer many pleasures for adult audiences, from wishful escapism to ironic humour, to rueful regret at the follies of youth. Even Skins, the paradigmatic British ‘youth television’ drama considered in chapter 7, seems to permit a retrospective adult reading – despite its predominantly negative representation of adults themselves. Youth appears here as something wild and hedonistic but also as fleeting and precarious – and this is something that adult viewers recognize, even if the young people they are watching on screen do not.
Here, again, we need to beware of seeing this in terms of a simple binary distinction. A given text may have multiple audiences – and, indeed, many ‘youth films’ (or TV programmes or novels) may appeal not only to the adult but also to the youth in us all. Adults may ‘identify’ with young people on screen and vice versa; some adults may refuse moralistic readings of young people’s dangerous or troublesome behaviour, while some young people may fully accept them. Audience responses to these representations may thus be quite diverse, and even contradictory. Of course, there are limits to how much textual analysis can tell us about any of this: it can reveal the potentials and parameters of interpretation, but we have to consider real audiences (of various ages) as well. Nevertheless, I hope that Youth on Screen will at least play a useful part in this broader investigation.
Notes
1
The Guardian
’s account can be found here:
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/24/police-attacked-during-machete-brawl-at-birmingham-cinema
.
2
This distinction has been much debated in the sociology of childhood (see, for example, Prout 2005), although it clearly applies to youth as well.
3
There is a vast literature here, but Griffin (1993) and Lesko (2001) remain useful contributions.
4
Bourdieu (1993).
5
See Bennett (2007).
6
See Doherty (2002) and
chapter 2
for further discussion.
7
See Davis and Dickinson (2004), Ross and Stein (2008) and
chapter 7
for further discussion.
8
Driscoll (2011) contains a useful account of (mostly US) ‘youth film’ from earlier decades.
9
See Hebdige (1979) and
chapter 3
for further discussion.
2Troubling Teenagers: How Movies Constructed the Juvenile Delinquent
The story you are about to see is about violence and immorality –teenageviolence and immorality. Children trapped in the half-world between adolescence and maturity, their struggle to understand, their need to be understood.
Perhaps in this rapid progression into the material world, man has forgotten the spiritual values which are the moral fibre of a great nation: decency, respect, fair play. Perhaps he has forgotten to teach these values to his own. He has forgotten to teach his children their responsibility before God and society.
The answer may lie in the story of the delinquents, in their violent attempt to find a place in society. This film is a cry to a busy world, a protest, a reminder to those who must set the example.
These portentous words are intoned over the opening titles of Robert Altman’s first film, The Delinquents, shot in 1955 but not released until 1957. They are preceded by a pre-credit sequence, which begins with the black rhythm and blues singer Julia Lee entertaining the entirely white clientele of a bar. When a group of young people enter and attempt to buy drinks, they are told to leave because they are under age. After a tense confrontation, they eventually depart, smashing the window behind them, and the credits begin.
The trailer for The Delinquents strikes a rather different tone. Over scenes of violence, sex, drinking, vandalism and jive dancing, it promises to show ‘the screen’s most shocking portrait of the babyfaces who have just taken their first stumbling steps down Sin Street USA.’ ‘Here,’ the trailer continues, ‘is a picture that dares to put on film the ravaged lives in the adolescent jungles of America today …’ Likewise, the publicity posters screamed: ‘The hoods of tomorrow! The gun molls of the future! The kids who live today as if there’s no tomorrow!’
The film was shot in suburban Kansas City, Altman’s home town, and its central character is Scotty, a rather clean-cut middle-class young man. When his girlfriend’s parents forbid the couple to be together (for reasons that are not fully explained), they resort to deceiving them, with the help of the nefarious group introduced in the opening scene. Scotty’s rapid descent into crime seems partly accidental and partly a result of the evil intentions of the group: he is forced to drink a bottle of whiskey and then left to take the blame for the killing of a gas station attendant, assaulted with a pump nozzle during a bungled robbery. Scotty is essentially a victim of bad luck rather than the product of a poor social environment – although what motivates the ‘delinquents’ who lead him astray remains quite unclear.
Nevertheless, the film’s conclusion is unequivocal about the need to deal with the problem:
Violence and immorality like this must be controlled and channelled. Citizens everywhere must work against delinquency, just as they work against cancer, cerebral palsy, or any other crippling disease. For delinquency is a disease. But the remedies are available: patience, compassion, understanding, and respect for parental and civil authority. By working with your church group, with the youth organization in your town, by paying close attention to the needs of your children, you can help prevent the recurrence of regrettable events like the ones you have just witnessed. You can help to beat this disease before it cripples our children, before it cripples society.
From what we know of Altman’s subsequent career, as a kind of anti-establishment auteur (his films include MASH, The Long Goodbye and Nashville), it is tempting to read these inflated words as a kind of parody. For, like most juvenile delinquent films of the period, The Delinquents is a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it. Despite the claims of its marketing campaign, it is hardly salacious; but it does nevertheless provide the forbidden pleasure of witnessing violence, immorality and other such ‘regrettable events’ – albeit framed by assertions about the film’s moral and social purpose.
Such disclaimers and moral warnings to concerned older citizens (the ‘you’ of the last quotation) were almost de rigueur in such films, at least in the mid-1950s when they first appeared. Like many of the films and TV shows I will consider in this book, these films seem to have a dual address: they are targeted both towards young people and towards adults – and, in this case, towards adult authority figures as well as adult viewers in general. As such, they tend to offer contradictory messages. And, as we shall see, these contradictions reflected the film industry’s attempt to deal with the conflicting economic and social demands that were being placed upon it at the time.
The JD films, as they have come to be known, were a movie ‘cycle’ of the kind that was characteristic of Hollywood in its heyday. (Perhaps the most obvious precursors, in terms of both theme and approach, were the gangster films of the early 1930s.) Successful breakthrough films spawned countless imitators, often with remarkably similar titles, seeking to cash in on box-office success. Inevitably, it’s hard to draw a line around them: studies of such films tend to blur the boundaries with other Hollywood cycles such as rock-and-roll movies or films about beats or other counter-cultural groups.1 Yet not all films featuring youth crime, or even ‘delinquent’ or antisocial behaviour (such as drug-taking or violence), are necessarily ‘juvenile delinquent’ films. Hollywood was making movies about youth crime throughout the 1920s and 1930s – the appearances of the future president Ronald Reagan as a caring social worker in the Dead End Kids series are particularly notable in this respect; and of course there have been countless films on the topic over the past fifty years. What distinguishes the JD films of the 1950s – and is apparent in the quotations from Altman’s film – is the explicit framing of such behaviour as a social problem that requires both explanations and remedial actions to prevent it.
In this chapter, I look fairly briefly at the three breakthrough films that effectively initiated the JD cycle in the United States – The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause – and subsequently at a group of British films that have not been so widely discussed. I’ll look at three films from the end of the 1940s and early 1950s, and then in more detail at Violent Playground, a British film released in 1958. These British films offered some distinctively different perspectives on the issue of delinquency – albeit ones that were equally riven by tensions and contradictions.
Constructing delinquency
The wave of concern that was both reflected and constructed in the JD films of the 1950s was by no means new. The history of anxiety about youthful misbehaviour dates back many centuries.2 The idea that the younger generation is out of control is often taken as evidence for much broader claims about cultural or moral decline. As I noted in chapter 1, the early twentieth century psychologists who defined – and effectively invented – ‘adolescence’ as a unique life-stage clearly saw it as a period of fragility, vulnerability and risk. With the advent of modernity, young people increasingly came to be seen as both troubled and troubling.3
Yet what remains striking – and in need of explanation – is that these waves of concern often seem to bear little relationship to the actual incidence of youth crime. The ‘facts’ on youth crime are very difficult to establish because the evidence is so unreliable. Official crime statistics – as well as other data such as victim surveys and self-report studies – vary significantly depending upon which kinds of behaviour are perceived as crimes and which measures are used (for example, whether crimes are reported, or recorded, or result in arrests and convictions), as well as how these figures are interpreted.4
For contemporary criminologists, the issue here is more to do with labelling – that is, how it is that some kinds of behaviour come to be defined as ‘delinquent’ in the first place. In the case of youth, there is a particular issue of status offences: that is, types of behaviour that are defined as criminal when committed by young people, yet are not seen in this way when adults commit them. There is a history of such youth-related crimes – often of a very minor kind – being ‘legislated into existence’ in this way; and alternative sentencing and punishment regimes for juveniles – such as reform schools – are then designed to treat the problem. In other words, public debate, and then the legal system, effectively criminalizes particular kinds of youth behaviour.
The label ‘juvenile delinquent’ really entered into public debate only in the post-war period, when it came to be defined as a specific, and somewhat new, social problem. Nevertheless, public anxiety about the problem of delinquency was oddly out of step with the apparent incidence of youth crime. There were waves of concern immediately after the Second World War and then again in the mid-1950s (1953–8). Public debate on the issue began to fade away in the late 1950s, although statistics (however unreliable) do not suggest that youth crime had fallen at this time: in effect, what had disappeared, or at least declined, was the particular way of formulating the ‘problem’ – in other words, the label of ‘juvenile delinquency’.5
Nevertheless, there were some underlying social changes in the period, for which ‘juvenile delinquency’ became a kind of shorthand. Changes in family life during the war – men fighting and women working – led to concerns about a breakdown in family communication and socialization. As in the conclusion of Altman’s Delinquents, many commentators emphasized traditional notions of family and community as a means of preventing impending social collapse. Meanwhile, the 1950s was a period of increasing affluence and greater youth autonomy: the social and generational changes that eventually erupted in the 1960s were already beginning to appear. In this context, ‘delinquency’ became a coded term for much broader shifts in young people’s behaviour. Part of the concern here was provoked by the gradual integration of distinct racial groups (the black rhythm and blues group in the preface to Altman’s film is not coincidental) and by fears about middle-class white Americans being somehow corrupted by their increasing access to ‘lower-class’ fashions and styles of behaviour, not least through the institution of the high school. Such changes, it was feared, would turn young people into premature adults.
The uneven response to juvenile delinquency may simply have reflected the fact that public opinion was slow to catch up with these changes.6 However, there were also numerous intermediaries and commentators who took it upon themselves to define and explain the phenomenon: journalists, campaigners and lobby groups, ambitious politicians, philanthropic foundations, academics, social workers and law-enforcement agencies all had different motivations for talking up the problem of juvenile delinquency. Numerous explanations of the apparent epidemic of delinquency were proffered at the time; and these different ways of framing the problem also inevitably implied particular solutions to it. Where sociologists tended to emphasize the breakdown of mechanisms of social control (especially among immigrant groups) or the role of social class and poverty, psychologists were more inclined to consider the precarious nature of the modern family or the difficulties of social adjustment during adolescence. However, as the debate evolved, much of the concern came to focus specifically on the influence of the media and mass culture.
Delinquency and the movies
The psychologist Frederic Wertham’s enormously influential book The Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954, drew attention to the effects of comic books, and especially so-called horror comics, on young people’s behaviour. It led to public campaigns in which children were encouraged to incinerate their comic book collections, as well as to new regulatory codes within the industry.7 Meanwhile, the ambitious senator Estes Kefauver initiated and led a Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, whose hearings lasted for several years between 1953 and the end of the decade (although it continued for many years thereafter). Here, again, comic books came under scrutiny, but the movies were an increasing focus of concern.
The movie industry responded in several ways. Its formal submissions to Kefauver’s Senate investigations were keen to play down the influence of movies – and, in this respect, it was supported by many academics, as well as professional experts such as social workers. Like many participants in these debates, Kefauver was wary of the charge of censorship during a period in which the power of Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee was starting to wane.
However, the industry was quite ready to censor itself, or at least to strengthen its regulatory codes. All the Hollywood films I consider below – as well as a great many others – were subject to detailed scrutiny by the industry’s Production Code Administration. For example, the original script for The Wild One was rejected on the grounds that it might encourage gang violence: the producers reduced the explicit violence and strengthened the pro-social message by playing up the redemption of the central character.8 Likewise, the script of Blackboard Jungle was adapted to reduce elements of sex, violence and profanity, although this did not enable it to escape criticism (and bans in some cities) once it was released. Other strategies of this kind included extensive ‘health warnings’ in the opening titles, although these were rarely as elaborate as those in Altman’s The Delinquents. In other instances, the ‘voices of authority’ within the film – such as the sheriff in The Wild One – were strengthened and moral ambiguity or complexity was eliminated. Even so, critics within and beyond the industry were not altogether convinced of the effectiveness of such strategies: concerns continued to be expressed about the dangers of young viewers ‘identifying’ with the delinquent characters, however painful their ultimate come-uppance or however convincing their ultimate redemption might have appeared.
At the same time, the industry faced a more fundamental dilemma. Before the 1950s, the cinema had been a genuine mass medium: movie-going was typically an intergenerational experience, with whole families attending together. As the decade progressed, this began to unravel. The advent of television was part of the explanation, obviously; but there were also changes in film production and exhibition (the break-up of the studio system and legislation that made it impossible for studios to retain control of local cinema distribution). The industry gradually came to realize that it was targeting an older audience that was no longer going to the movies very much; and it began, albeit belatedly and uncertainly, to focus on the increasingly lucrative and available audience of teenagers and younger adults.
By the late 1950s, Time magazine was estimating that US teenagers had a combined spending power of $10 billion, of which 16 per cent was spent on ‘entertainment’. This duly led to what the film scholar Thomas Doherty calls the ‘juvenilization’ of American movies: the targeting of young people via movies and stars designed specifically to appeal to them. It also led to changes in film exhibition: teenagers were keen on drive-in movies and on double-bills where they could spend a longer time socializing (or necking).9 The JD movies were one consequence of this – even if elements of them still appear to be targeted towards an older adult audience. Selling representations of juvenile delinquency as a form of entertainment might well have offered a vicarious (and perhaps quite superficial) sensation of power for younger viewers, who experienced relatively little power in their own everyday lives.
This situation posed a dilemma for the industry. On the one hand, it was keen to target the teen audience, not least by promising apparently salacious content; yet, on the other, it needed to convince adult authority figures of its own moral legitimacy. Anxieties about juvenile delinquency made for good box office, but they also increased the visibility of those who criticized the industry for its irresponsibility. Placing overt moral messages alongside sensational portrayals of deviancy was thus a risky strategy, but an economically profitable one.
As we shall see, much of this debate (and of course the movies themselves) spread across to the UK. The industry’s dilemmas here were also quite similar, although they arguably took longer to become apparent. Britain experienced its own home-grown moral panic about the effects of comic books,10 although there was rather less concern about the harmful influence of the cinema. Nevertheless, the release of Blackboard Jungle in 1956 was apparently greeted with ‘riots’ in some UK cinemas, and (astonishingly) The Wild One was banned by the British Board of Film Censors until 1967. Meanwhile, the affluent teenager took a little longer to appear on this side of the Atlantic, becoming apparent to researchers and social commentators only towards the end of the 1950s. Perhaps for some of these reasons, the British film industry’s response to the ‘problem’ of juvenile delinquency was generally rather more restrained, and perhaps even sedate, although it was by no means less contradictory.
Screening delinquency
How were these tensions and contradictions manifested in specific films? In this section, I consider the three Hollywood films that effectively initiated the JD cycle: The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. These are all very well known and have been the subject of extensive critical commentary.11 Rather than offering a detailed analysis, my aim here is merely to contrast the three films in terms of their perspective and how they construct the figure of the ‘delinquent’: this then provides a context for the British films I go on to consider later in the chapter.
The Wild One
