Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 16

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Popular Culture Review

pinpoint the causes for middle-class teen criminals, stating that “I would hazard
the guess that family tensions, unloving homes, over-protective mothers, and the
general dullness of life all play a part” (xii). From the first moment that they ap
pear in the film, Joyce’s parents represent distracted, conformist parents who have
little concern for their daughter. On the morning of her first initiation, her mother,
Linda, is late getting up and has not prepared breakfast for the family. Her father,
Roger, is engrossed in a newspaper and takes little notice of Joyce, except to criti
cize her. When she comes home after the humiliation of being the only girl in the
class wearing slacks, both parents are gone. Her mother doesn’t return home until
after eight and she has no intention of preparing dinner for the family. Joyce wel
comes the call of Connie to meet the gang because, we are very obviously shown,
she cannot turn to her parents for comfort or advice. Connie promises Joyce a
“home away from home.” Joyce reflects that “1 guess I do need a club like this.”
Later, Joyce explains to Mike that her membership in the gang is based on the
neglect of her parents: “For all the attention I get at home, I might as well be
renting a furnished room m yself” Yet the parents are not only conformist, welloff, and indifferent. Roger represents the nightmare father of Fifties America, one
who hasn’t resolved his own Oedipal conflicts and hence takes them out on his
daughter.
Roger is obsessed with his daughter’s physical appearance. The first time that
he speaks about her he complains about how she looks, “Those tight sweaters and
too much lipstick.” When Joyce goes to her first meeting of the Hellcats she comes
downstairs in a slip, and Roger becomes livid: “How many times have I told you
not to walk around the house like that!” He then slaps her. Joyce must keep her
relationship with Mike a secret because her parents “don’t approve of my dating.”
When Joyce arrives home later after taking care of a wounded Mike, Roger pro
nounces that she is “out of control.” Roger’s unre.solved sexual desires for his
daughter make him a nightmare father, one who is in turn producing abnormal
sexuality in his daughter. When Joyce has a quarrel with Mike about the Hellcats,
she accuses him of being like her father. Yet, Roger does not understand the source
of his anger. He tells Linda that “1 don’t know why I fly off the handle like that. I
don’t mean to.”
In Freud: The Mind o f the Morcdist (1959) Philip Rieff constructs a version of
Freudian psychology that was palatable to Fifties America. Rieff argues that Freud’s
importance for American society lies in the morality that he offers in the form of a
thinking man’s conformity. By understanding the sexual impulses within, Ameri
cans can learn to conform to a normal sexuality. Rieff credits Freud with “unearth
ing the sexual daemon beneath,” but the value arising from the fact that Freud
always remained “far from admiring instinctual revolt” (309). Additionally, Rieff’s
view of Freud equated rebellion with neurosis rather than with any real social