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