Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 19

Fifties Juvenile Delinquency Films

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Finally, the film indicates that the teenagers are the victims of a Mafia syndi
cate. High School Confidential tells the audience that teens taking drugs are ulti
mately conformists, the dupes of organized crime. Mr. A. represents the cynical
drug dealer who has no concern for human life. When Wilson meets Mr. A, Mr. A
tells him that “The more kids that get hooked, the better.” Mr. A tells Wilson that
he is safe because he can hide behind a mantle of respectability: “I’m a solid citi
zen. I’m clean. No marks.” Thus, the film suggests that when teens associate drug
use with rebellion against authority, they are merely playing into the hands of an
insidious and cynical adult authority.
Like Blackboard Jungle and High School Hellcats, High School Confidential
ultimately glosses over the issue of rebellion itself. Teenage dissatisfaction is pre
sented as merely a form of conformity, and one that can be broken if the right
authority figure intervenes. Only one scene in High School Confidential discounts
questions of mainstream middle-class life. At a club where the teens meet, Mr. A
plays piano while a young woman recites a Beat-style poem entitled “Tomorrow is
a Drag.” The poem’s lyrics represent a mish-mash of dissatisfaction with middleclass American values and existential philosophy. The girl, for example, describes
the oppressive life of her uncle who has “a button-down brain.” She questions the
arms race and space race, stating, “We can cough blood on the moon . . . Tomor
row is a king-sized drag.” She advocates existentialism as the only reaction to the
world: “Turn your eyes inside and dig the vacuum.” While the questions that she
poses would become, increasingly, those of the youth culture in America in the
Sixties, in the context of High School Confidential, her questioning is merely the
result of her being stoned and the puppet of Mr. A.
This containment of rebellion is also borne out by the ending of the film,
which shows us order restored. A nairator tells us that Mr. A and Bix are in prison
and the Wheelers and Dealers are in reform school. Joan is reformed, as she smokes
only tobacco now. Williams is content because she can teach in a clean school. Yet,
the narrator reminds us that undercover cops like Wilson must be vigilant so that
“this insidious menace to the schools of our country is exposed and destroyed.
Issues such as the fact that Joan's drug use may not have just stemmed from avail
ability of drugs, but from deeper dissatisfactions with the society, are not broached.
Like Joyce in High School Hellcats. Joan now cheerfully accepts the values of her
siKuety.
The Blackboard Jungle. High School Hellcats, and High School Confidential
all diagnose juvenile delinquency as a symptom of the larger movement toward
conformity that many in Fifties America feared. Ultimately, the films, however,
merely offer a different type of conformity as the solution. Thus, Gregory Miller in
Blackboard Jungle presumably will now conform to middle-class values as he
gets an education and becomes part of middle-class America. Joyce will now live