Page 109 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CHAPTER 4

time, Jim and Judy would be married by the time Judy turned twenty,
and would have their first child a year or so later. Jim and Judy may have
been abruptly transformed into adults at the end of Rebel, but the move
from adolescence to adulthood, from high school to marriage and family,
was in fact more rapid and abrupt than would be the case ten, twenty, or
thirty years later. It is not unreasonable to suppose that many teenagers
in the audience could imagine themselves in Jim and Judy’s position as
young people taking on major new responsibilities, and leaving kids’
games and problems behind. In the 1950s, the myth, if not the reality, of
adulthood remains strong.
The world Jim and Judy will enter, the film proposes, will restore
parents to their traditional roles of moral guardians and thereby reconcile
generational antagonisms. However, the film does not advocate the resto-
ration of the premodern social conditions in which traditional values were
rooted. The extended family of Judge Hardy’s rural America is pointedly
rejected when Jim puts his foot through his grandmother’s portrait. Nor is
the unyielding tradition-directed patriarch, represented by Judy’s father,
the answer to the modern discontents of youth and the family. Somehow,
standards of personal integrity and honor will be reestablished in a highly
complex and uncertain world. The only answer the film offers to this
seeming contradiction is “sincerity,” a firm but gentle touch.
However, the film’s ending also contains elements that undermine
this optimistic resolution. Jim’s father concludes the vow he makes over
Plato’s body with these words: “I’ll try to be as strong as you want me to
be.” Such a qualified pledge would be unimaginable coming from Judge
Hardy. Although sincere, the vow rests on intention, not conviction. In its
abrogation of responsibility. Jim’s father’s promise reinforces the very
problem it is intended to resolve: the restoration of adult authority. If Jim’s
father is going to wield authority, it will certainly be of a different sort
than that exercised by Judge Hardy, since it is now Jim’s responsibility
to define its limits.
A dominant theme of modern social criticism is that strong institutions
produce strong adults who do not question their capacity to protect, sup-
port, and socialize the next generation. Weak institutions produce indeci-
sive, anxious adults, unable to prepare themselves or others for a future
they cannot imagine. Within this context, the postwar youth film depicts a
world in which institutions must compensate for the weakness of others,
have collapsed altogether, or have been seized by the young. In the world
in the Andy Hardy films, adult-controlled institutions worked together to

94