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Over the course of Hollywood history, movie studios have reveled in a crafty fascination with juvenile delinquency, which has been traditionally founded on a certain masculine mythology. There has recently been new attention given to how the media have represented delinquent girls (Kearney 1996; Orenstein 1996; Shary 2000), yet the historical dominance of boys’ delinquency in movies is primarily due to how “JD” films depict the ripe conflict of boys becoming men within a supposedly progressing society. This essay traces the development of the male juvenile delinquent in teen movies, showing how rebellion has moved through a range of thematic discourses while revising (and often reviving) past notions of masculine behavior in cinematic depictions of teenage deviance and violence. The analysis reveals that despite the constant struggle of young men dealing with their conflicted gender roles, Hollywood has changed its methods of generating sympathy for the plight of delinquents while nonetheless remaining consistent in showcasing the rousing thrills of delinquency itself. Juvenile delinquency has evolved through the generations, and young people find that their acts of deviance must be more extreme than those of their predecessors in order to gain attention. Such behaviors as swearing, stealing, vandalism, and fighting have been somewhat common among youth for centuries, while the sophistication of these particular acts develops within their social contexts. Swearing, for instance, can only be determined by what terms adult authorities deem problematic, and vandalism also changes its nature with its surroundings, since young people need to be told what objects are of most value (schools, churches, cars) in order to select their targets. Class is thus an integral issue to youth movie delinquency, with working-class characters often stereotyped as “typical” delinquents struggling to rise above their lowly status while wealthy brats turn to delinquency out of boredom and in 21 1 bad boys and hollywood hype Gendered Conflict in Juvenile Delinquency Films Timothy Shary timothy shary 22 retaliation for their privilege. In both cases, teens must find ways to break free of their class expectations, and this parallels boys’ efforts to both disrupt and conform to their gender expectations, as they resist following the cultural order and yet long to prove their prowess through traditional customs. In recent years juvenile delinquency has taken on more lifeand -death consequences, with youth gaining greater access to guns (which allow them to be more cowardly in their attacks by enacting violence at a distance), engaging in more recreational drug use (which may distort their sense of reason), and being more sexualized by capitalist culture (which objectifies their bodies and thereby makes them easier targets for abuse). Other trends have also been factors. With the sharp rise in divorce rates since World War II, many children have grown up in divided households with competing sets of moral views. Not long after the open rebellion of youth in the 1960s, the children of those rebels more aggressively questioned moral standards. And the proliferation of the Internet since the 1990s has given youth entry into a world of sensitive information and potentially dangerous covert activity, although movies have generally ignored this development. One of the primary reasons why the American film industry has specifically sensationalized boys’ behavior is that boys are quite readily vilified by the culture at large. Hollywood has become steadily more suspicious of young men since the post–World War II era, and until recently was portraying deviant boys in ever more threatening ways, as in the progression from stylized gang conflict in West Side Story (1961) to drug-driven felonies in Bad Boys (1983) to pointless savage brutality in 187 (1997). In most films before World War II, the opposite was true, when the few delinquents onscreen were often shown as redeemable on some level and were usually reformed in the end (e.g., Wild Boys of the Road [1933], Boys Town [1938]). After the war, as David Considine (1985) points out, Hollywood began producing films in which society became a larger culprit in generating delinquency, and thus troubled youth were hopelessly trapped by their fate (e.g., City Across the River or Knock on Any Door [both 1949]). In the 1950s, delinquency became an outright cultural obsession as “teenagers” emerged, disenchanted by postwar prosperity and filled with existential angst, most famously in Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle (both 1955). While the sensational focus on teen deviance somewhat subsided over the next generation, by the 1980s delinquent [18.118.164.151] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 06:58...

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