Movie Reviews from
By John Ruch
© 1999 CM Media, Inc.
Alternaflicks:
Juvenile Deliquency (column, 1999)
A 20-year-old girl, angered by a traffic ticket, storms a police station and puts a shotgun to a cop’s head.
A teenage 90-pound weakling is called a “runt” by another teen, so he whips out a switchblade and stabs the boy to death.
A 10-year-old boy in a pleasant small town spends Father’s Day shooting at anyone in sight with two handguns, pinning his own father behind a utility pole.
They’re shocking examples of youth violence, ripped straight from newspaper headlines.
But not recent headlines. No, these outrages all occurred within two weeks in June 1957. Yes, 42 years and one month ago—back in those “good old days” members of Congress keep referring to as they despair our “newly” violent age.
Back then, the problem was termed “juvenile delinquency.” Video games, Leonardo DiCaprio movies and the dreaded Goth subculture weren’t around to take the blame, but congressmen had no trouble finding the responsible demon: comic books.
There were Senate hearings on the evils lurking in the lurid pages of comic books, and in 1954 they bullied the industry into adopting a self-censorship policy (sound familiar?) that obviously wasn’t cutting juvenile crime three years later, but it did result in the comic books of the ’60s and ’70s being intensely stupid and trivial.
A month before this June crime wave, a Senate subcommittee released a report on dealing with juvenile delinquency. A couple of its recommendations were progressive: dumping curfew laws that punished kids while letting the parents remain lazy and uninvolved, and sending drug-addicted offenders into rehab instead of prison.
On the other hand, while noting that much teen crime centered in urban slums, the reported concluded that cleaning up the projects wouldn’t help. And it shot down the idea of more teen recreational facilities, saying that the teen criminal is often highly sociable and “it is partly through his group interests and activities that he gets into trouble in the first place.”
Thank God video games and the Internet have fostered stay-at-home isolation! Right?
As usual, the thrust of the Senate hearing and report was to demonize and stigmatize nonconformist teens and their “fighting gangs” on every level of society—unless they wanted to join the army. The report said a proposal to ban juvenile delinquents from the government’s own fighting gang was “out of the question.” According to one newspaper report, parole officers and the military were to work together to “select the best from this large manpower resource.”
One of those Columbine High shooters was sorely disappointed about being turned down by the Marines. How quickly we forget the lessons of history. Why, he could be profitably plugging foreigners for us right now!
Well, there’s nothing new about politicians panicking over teen crime and lashing out at everything except their own brutal, mean, authoritarian power structures that are the real problem. And there’s nothing new about people milking that panic for a profit.
Exploitation producer/director Roger Corman has been a master of it for more than 40 years. He’ll take you back to that good old year of 1957 with “Teenage Doll” (1957), his outrageous flick about a good girl who accidentally sets off a gang war between the Vandals and the Tarantulas.
It’s part
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….