Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 12

Popular Culture Review

despite the fuss over the supposed animal savagery of the delinquents in the film,
the film focuses much more on delinquency as a problem of conformity than one
of lack of civilization. Teachers and students clash because of their inability to act
as individuals.
The students at North Manual behave like a mass entity. At the opening com
mencement for the school year, they hoot and jeer at Lois Hammond in unison.
After Dadier saves Lois from a rape attempt, the students refuse to do the work in
class, believing Dadier has betrayed one of their own, and they all deliberately do
a grammar exercise incorrectly. In Hunter’s novel, another teacher explains to Dadier
that the students are part of a machine. Speaking of Miller, the teacher tells Dadier
that “He gets inside the machine, and he becomes a part of the machine” (151).
Rather than the delinquency being produced by rampant individualism or lack of
control, it is well-organized. West’s attack on Dadier and Josh Edwards; the heisting
of a paper truck; the letters and phone calls that Anne receives: these are the signs
of a well-oiled machine of delinquency and a machine of which the students must
be part in order merely to survive.
Gregory Miller does not want to be part of the machine, and his ability to
break out of the delinquency mode illustrates the film’s bent toward individual
ism. Dadier suspects Miller of organizing the acts of crime because he is the most
intelligent student in the group and because he is black. Dadier confronts his own
racism when, angry with Miller, he starts to use a racial epithet against him, and
then stops himself. In a sociological study of juvenile delinquency published in the
late Fifties, Len O’Connor demonstrates a perception of delinquency that fell along
racial lines. O’Connor’s book illustrates a Noble-Savage perception of the black
JD as somehow more dignified than the white JD. Discussing one of the subjects
he interviewed, a young man he calls Boot Straps, O’Connor comments that “He
had that special ability of his race to recognize the failings of other humans with
out moralizing about them” (131). Overall in his study O ’Connor separates white
and black delinquents and sees that black delinquents are not only more noble but
also more redeemable.
Dadier’s perception of Miller falls along these lines. Miller isn’t really a de
linquent at all. Although he disrupts Dadier’s class, he apparently does little else.
When the gang of students attacks Math teacher Josh Edwards and breaks his
phonograph and records. West comments that Miller never shows up for violent
acts: “When there’s action, he cuts.” Miller works at a garage after school, so he
has little free time for delinquency. Yet, Dadier assumes that Miller is the leader of
the gang because of his race and his intelligence. This perception prevents Dadier
from seeing that West is the one who is tormenting him and Anne.
Although Miller is not a delinquent like the other boys, he does succumb to
conformity. An intelligent young man who is interested in learning, his environ-