Page 110 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

socialize young people and to remind them who was in authority. But in
the youth culture films of the 1950s, institutions also work together, but
in a perverse way, conspiring against the young to block their access to
adult roles and opportunities. Even the one “good” adult in Rebel, Ray,
the juvenile officer who befriends Jim at the beginning of the film and
tells him to “call me day or night if you need me,” is nowhere to be found
when Jim calls on him near the film’s end. Instead, Jim is thrown out of
the police station and forced back into the adolescent subculture.
The final scene takes place at sunrise, in the planetarium, after Plato
has been killed. As everyone leaves the scene of the tragedy, a professor
walks up the steps of the planetarium where, early in the film, he had
lectured on “man alone” in a universe without meaning. There is a men-
acing sound to the music that comes up at the end, leaving the audience
to wonder whether “sincerity” will be sufficient to meet the challenges
of the new day.

Youth Culture as Counterculture: Generational Conflict
and Social Transformation

You can get anything you want. . . .
—Arlo Guthrie

As the baby boomers came of age in the 1960s, they directed the pre-
political rebelliousness of the 1950s youth culture to specific targets and
replaced “the silent generation” with a social movement. For a decade
that seems in retrospect to have been inordinately bleak (especially in its
later years, marked by death, defeat, and despair for the future), a hope-
less or defeated generation could not possibly have mounted the mass
movements, created the alternative communities, or effected the cultural
changes that characterized the 1960s. The sheer number of people who
passed through their teens or early twenties during the decade virtually
guaranteed that youth would be considered and would consider itself a
significant political and cultural force. Wave after wave of eighteen-
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year-olds, each one larger than the one before, hit the political and
counterculture beachheads of the 1960s—the colleges and universities.
In 1960, 24 million Americans were between the ages of fifteen and
twenty-four; by 1970, the number of teenagers and young adults had
grown to over 35 million strong.
Not only were more young people coming of age in the 1960s than

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