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

10 Popular Culture Review The Blackboard Jungle largely achieves this Oedipal explanation through in direction and absence. The film does not delve into the home lives of the children, focusing its domestic drama on Anne and Dadier. In The Blackboard Jungle, the JD is still Other, not shown in a home environment, but like a beast living only on the street. Yet, the conformity that the students display undercuts this idea of the student as beast. The policeman who attempts to get Dadier to press charges against the students for the beating he has suffered at their hands traces the problems back to the family, and specifically World War II: “Father in the Army, mother in the defense plan t. . . gang leaders have taken the place of parents.” Yet. because of its status as a transitional film, one straddling adult and teen audiences, the actual home lives of the students remain unseen. With the movement of the JD film into an explicitly teenage market, the Oedipal explanation for delinquency became even more pronounced, indicating the conformity of teenagers not only in representa tion, but also in reality, as they accepted a conformist psychoanalytic explanation for their own behavior. High School Hellcats (1958) is one of many of American International Pic tures’ forays into the JD picture.^ The film focuses on Joyce Martin, a girl who has just transferred to a new high school. On her first day of school she is approached by Connie, a girl who heads a girl gang known as The Hellcats. Connie pressures Joyce to Join and begins an initiation process on her. Meanwhile, Joyce becomes involved with Mike Landers, a young man who works at the campus coffee shop and who is working his way through engineering school at night. Joyce must keep her relationship with Mike a secret from both her parents and the gang. At a party Connie apparently falls down a flight of stairs and dies. Because the kids have broken into a home in order to have the party, they must keep silent about the incident. Dolly, a Hellcat member who has been Jealous of Joyce since her appear ance, takes over the Hellcats. The Hellcats, including Joyce, keep their promise and say nothing to the police. After Connie’s body is discovered, Dolly asks Joyce to come to a Hellcat meeting. Joyce goes, hoping to break with the gang. Dolly has tricked Joyce into meeting her alone so she can murder her. Dolly reveals that she is Connie’s killer and tries to stab Joyce, but falls off a balcony instead. High School Hellcats takes up the issue of female Juvenile delinquency, a subset of the national concern with male delinquents. Wini Breines has argued that female rebellion in Fifties America was largely ignored: “When fifties deviance was and is portrayed, however, young white women are invisible” (70-71). Breines views the representation of female delinquents as always an appendix to the males, stating that “Restless teenage girls in 1950s movies were not themselves rebels but Joined boys who were because they were in love” (144). While this statement applies to many JD films, including Rebel Without a Cause, B films provided a forum for the exploration of female Juvenile delinquency that did not necessarily