Page 106 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

enlightened social policy. Anxieties about the “anomie of affluence”
and middle-class conformity provoked a lively social criticism. The
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emergence of the United States as a superpower after World War II was
accompanied by fears of impotence in a world spinning out of control;
the threat of nuclear war helped set the stage for the politics of peace of
the next decade. The social experimentation and political activism of the
1960s were rooted, to an extent not often appreciated, in the “worried
optimism” of the 1950s. 38
A problem that worried parents, policy-makers, and some filmmakers
during the 1950s was juvenile delinquency. Concern with delinquency
was widespread, and the movies were implicated in two ways: first, as a
symbolic stimulus to delinquency, and, second, as a social setting con-
ducive to vandalism and violence. In the 1950s, movie theaters became
rowdy and, on occasion, dangerous places. The growing numbers of
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films about teenagers that serviced the expanding youth market “seemed
to be going out of their way to suggest that among American youth,
delinquency, rather than being the exception, was the rule.” 40
However, the Hardy films notwithstanding, films connecting youth
with crime and violence were nothing new. The delinquency rates of De-
pression films such as Mayor of Hell (1933), Girls on Probation (1938),
Crime School (1938), and Boys Reformatory (1939) matched or exceeded
those of most 1950s youth films. The new problem in the 1950s was not
delinquency, but disrespect. With the first rumblings of an autonomous
youth culture in the early postwar years came symbols of rebellion among
the young and feelings of rejection among adults.
Generational conflict in Rebel Without a Cause is set in a favorite
1950s social problem—the erosion of the moral authority of father. James
Dean, as Jim Stark, is an isolated and rootless adolescent who wants his
father to stand up for him, to stand for something. His father, and by
extension, the new postwar white-collar, middle-class suburban world
has gone soft, impersonal, and abstract. What does Jim’s father do for
a living? The film does not say, but in contrast with the Hardy films, it
matters very little. The audience only knows that he works in an office,
most likely as a middle-level bureaucrat. Unlike Judge Hardy, Jim’s father
is an instrument of an organization that he does not control.
Mr. Stark does not really “make” anything, except money, which
he lavishes on Jim (“Don’t I buy you everything?”). Jim resents this
transparent effort to buy his love, obedience, and respect. The 1950s
rebels without a cause may not know what they want, but they do know

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