Page 105 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CHAPTER 4

grandparents than parents. They relate to one another largely through
their institutional affiliation, even referring to one another as “mother”
and “father.”
The result is that, for Andy and other adolescents, sex is safe because
it does not venture beyond clear and secure institutional limits. In the
Hardy myth, the family is intact and functional, furnishing the necessary
protection for youthful sex and the sole purpose for adult sex. Sex will
become dangerous in later youth films, when it is dislodged from its tra-
ditional social context and becomes a mode of youthful self-expression
and freedom from adult control.
In the Hardy films, adolescence is comedy. By the mid-1950s, ado-
lescence is tragedy—and dangerous. Generational conflict in the 1950s
youth film begins with the discovery by adolescents and adults alike that,
in the postwar period, Judge Hardy does not and cannot exist.

Rebelling Against Uncertainty: Anxiety and
Expectation in the 1950s

You’re tearing me apart.
—Jim Stark

After World War II, an emerging youth subculture generated a market
that made it profitable for filmmakers to address adolescent interests
and concerns. Meanwhile, television, as a new medium with a limited
but growing audience based in the home, continued the traditional adult
perspective that had defined the 1930s small-town family film myth.
The world of Andy Hardy became Father Knows Best and Leave It to
Beaver.
The 1950s has generally been regarded as a period of sustained
economic growth, expanding opportunities, widespread optimism, and
faith in the future. The decade also was characterized, however, by
cultural ambiguity and social contradiction: materially expansive, up-
beat, and progress-oriented, yet anxious about a dangerous new world
that seemed beyond the comprehension and control of the individual.
The very progress that was (and continues to be) so widely celebrated
reflected underlying changes that traditional values and institutions
were ill equipped to handle. Growing affluence set into sharp relief the
persistence of poverty and racial inequality, but also helped to generate
the optimistic belief that domestic problems could be resolved through

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