Page 107 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CHAPTER 4

what they lack. They are looking for direction, affection, and adult role
models who live up to the morality that they so easily espouse. As Jim’s
friend Judy puts it, they want “sincerity”—as much from one another
as from adults. Ironically, the adolescents in Rebel need adults to help
them avoid the hypocrisy of adult relations with one another and with
their children.
“Nobody acts sincere,” Judy laments at one point, referring to herself
and other teenagers. “You shouldn’t believe what I say when I’m with
the rest of the kids.” Conformity corrupts the young as well as adults,
with deadly consequences. Jim rebels against his father’s weakness, but
he also rejects the destructive counter codes of Buzz and his gang. None-
theless, he acts as if he were committed to them. So does Judy. Jim is
trapped by his unwillingness to back down from a challenge to personal
honor into playing a game of “chicken” that ends in Buzz’s death. Judy’s
motivations, while evidently as complex as Jim’s, are only suggested
and not fully explored in Rebel, a double standard characteristic of the
youth culture genre.
Jim needs his father to tell him what to do in a complicated moral
dilemma in which honor is ensnared by conformity. If he goes on the
chicken run, he is simply conforming to the gang’s expectations, but if
he does not go, he is a “chicken.” Buzz is no help. When Jim asks, “Why
do we do this?” Buzz answers that they “have to do something.”
In the teen comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, generational relations are
planted in traditional standards that support the authority and capacity of
adults to socialize adolescents into adult roles. But in the postwar youth
film, adults are incapable of providing protection or moral direction for
their children. They exercise none of the Weberian authority of Judge
Hardy. Traditional authority has no place in a modern, relativist world
of shifting moral standards. Rational-legal authority loses its legitimacy
for much the same reason. Logical standards are difficult to apply in a
world that makes little sense. Finally, persons without power cannot,
by definition, possess charismatic authority. Jim, Judy, and Buzz live in
a world in which adults cannot be counted on to prevent young people
from destroying each other. Jim asks his father for guidance, insisting
that “it’s a matter of honor.” His father doesn’t even understand the
question and suggests that they “consider the pros and cons,” “make
a list,” “get some advice”; that is, rely on moral experts of one sort or
another. Later, after Buzz’s death, Jim again comes to his father, who is
now shown in an apron on his knees, picking up scraps of food he has

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