Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 13

Fifties Juvenile Delinquency Films

ment has made him conform to an anti-scholarly path. Miller explains to Dadier
that “In the beginning I tried.” Miller has given up on trying to succeed in school
because neither peers, nor teachers, nor parents care whether he succeeds or not.
He tells Dadier that no one encourages him, “Not my folks, even.” Miller’s con
formity is encouraged by apathy. He goes along with the games in the classroom,
even though he does want to learn and help Dadier encourage the other students to
learn, as is demonstrated when Dadier shows a cartoon based on the story “Jack
and the Beanstalk” and Miller fosters the discussion, winking at Dadier as he leaves
class.
When Miller emphasizes the conformity of his parents, who believe that a
black man cannot succeed in anything but a manual profession and hence encour
age him to quit school and go straight to work in a garage. The Blackboard Jungle
participates in the most common thread in JD discourse— blaming the parents. A
Fifties commonplace explanation in the media for the juvenile delinquency prob
lem was that bad parents produce bad teens.
Hollywood representation of delinquency took up that call with a vengeance.
In Blackboard Jungle, it is the absence of parents that seems to create the problem.
The problem students spend their evenings engaging in illegal activity because,
presumably, their parents either don’t care or can’t control them. Blackboard Jungle
approaches the bad parent angle from the working class and its problems, but
middle-class parents were not immune, as High School Hellcats and High School
Confidential illustrate. Len O’Connor’s study of delinquency traces almost every
single case back to a problem in the home. In one case study