Page 108 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

served to his wife, who is in bed with “a headache.” He begs his father
to stand up for him. This pathetic patriarch can only respond, “You can’t
be idealistic all your life.”
Each day, the middle-class men of the white-collar world leave offices
in which they are not engaged in honorable work for homes where they
cower before their wives in full view of their sons: “She eats him alive
and he takes it,” Jim observes. “They make mush out of him,” referring
to both his mother and grandmother. 41
The young respond to this world of collapsed standards and paternal
weakness and retreat by attempting to use one another as parental sur-
rogates and then, when that fails, by falling apart. Sal Mineo, as Plato,
adopts Jim and Judy as substitutes for his parents who have abandoned
him with a kindly maid and monthly checks. Jim and Judy cannot meet
his emotional needs, and Jim is unable to prevent the police from killing
him. Plato’s fate, the film suggests, is a warning. At the film’s climax,
Jim’s mother speaks directly to the camera: “You never thought it could
happen to you.”
Even ineffective parents are better than none at all, and Plato’s personal
disintegration is but an extreme form of Jim’s, who screams to his parents
at the beginning of the film, “You’re tearing me apart.” He confides to
a police officer, who is a model of adult strength and support, that he is
“all confused,” tired of running away from problems, and just wants to
“belong someplace.” Significantly, this exemplar of institutional support
is nowhere to be found when Jim needs him the most.
On the surface, the conclusion of the film is optimistic, offering a
reconciliation of the generations, restoration of the traditional fam-
ily structure, and a repudiation of youthful solidarities that threatened
generational peace and adult authority. At the end of the film, as Plato’s
body is taken away in Jim’s jacket, Jim’s father gives him his coat, and
says, “You can depend on me. Trust me. . . . I’ll stand up with you.” Jim
introduces Judy to his parents, as one adult to others. This upbeat “fifties
ending” seems contrived, but it is important to ask why such endings
were so typical of the time. The claim that “Hollywood demanded happy
endings” only begs the question. These endings, as contrived as they
were, fit with the mood of the times, which held that all problems, social
as well as technical, had solutions, and solutions were to be found in the
restoration of traditional standards of conduct. They also presupposed an
optimistic view of the future on the part of audiences, including a viable
personal future for Jim and Judy. If they were typical of teenagers of the

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