From the Coffee-Stained Couch of William Bibbiani:
I’m at a little bit of a loss on this one, not because I don’t love me some Juvenile Delinquent movies, but rather because I’m a little ill prepared. The Professor just wrote up a fascinating piece on the “Scare Film” genre, which has a heavy overlap with the Juvenile Delinquent genre, in the pages of Free Film School. He was ready to go with this article, since at least half the JD films out there are designed not to entertain teen audiences but to scare the bejeezus out of their parents. The irony has always been that, in the case of Rebel Without a Cause in particular, that’s exactly the effect that real-life juvenile delinquents are going for, upsetting “The ‘Rents,” and teen audiences frequently wind up emulating their on-screen behavior – or at least their fashion trends – to get a rise out of “The Man.”
“The Man” is a villain who, I suspect, is never going to go out of style, particularly amongst the young. If you’re reading this as an adult, let me put it this way: imagine if from this day forward you were required by law to live with two randomly selected relatives who had absolute control over your finances, your clothing, and your social interactions for the next eighteen years. Imagine you have to spend the next two decades being forced to attend an institution five days a the week, where you’re force-fed information that you may not even agree with, and will be punished for arguing against it. Imagine that this will be your life from age 30 to age 48. You’d be pretty pissed off and rebellious too after a while. So why are teens expected to grin and bear it from 0-18 when, from our own perspectives, it would probably seem like a Kafkaesque nightmare of soul crushing, arbitrary institutionalization?
The JD genre may have started as a series of Scare Films, and in the case of films like Spring Breakers and at least one other that I’m about to discuss in a moment, they still can be. But over the last 50 years, teenagers turned out to have a lot more disposable income than studios originally assumed, leading to a series of juvenile delinquent movies that actually celebrated teen rebellion against the status quo. This particular breed of JD films usually portrays parents less as monsters than as clueless guardians of the conservatism, who somehow forgot by their 40s what it was ever like to be young, and that the harder you try to force someone into a pattern of conservative social behavior – particularly when the only reason is, “Because I said so” – the harder they are going to try to break your rules and get away with it. And even if they don’t get away with it, at least they’ll get a rise out of their parental and educational overlords. It’s a win-win situation for teenagers in these fantasy universes, provided violent crime doesn’t get too heavily involved (which it sometimes does, in real life and in films).
But juvenile delinquents don’t always wind up in jail, and their acts of teen renegadism sometimes – with the benefit of hindsight for adults, and for teens themselves, probably from day one – come across as pretty reasonable. Like Witney, I’m going to avoid some of the obvious picks – Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild Ones and A Clockwork Orange really are too obvious, and West Side Story doesn’t seem very dangerous since its gangs are comprised entirely of musical theater students – and focus on some of my personal favorites.
The Switchblade Sisters (dir. Jack Hill, 1975)
The Switchblade Sisters, also known as The Jezebels, is a teen crime saga from 1975 about a group of young female thugs who self-operate a prostitution ring out of the high school restroom and eventually wind up fighting rival gangs on the city streets in their very own homemade tank. There’s an exuberance to The Switchblade Sisters that’s easy to admire, and their proto-Grrl Power has an undeniable appeal, but director Jack Hill (Foxy Brown) infuses his film with a grimy reality about teen violence and sexual subjugation. Rape is a constant threat – and sometimes a reality – to The Switchblade Sisters, who go by “The Jezebels” within the story proper, including by their wardens at a juvenile detention center. They’re rebelling against their punishment for rebellion, they’re rebelling against their male “peers,” they’re rebelling against a society that strips women of their power, and forces those women who do attain power to behave like men in order to keep it. It’s hard-edged, but The Switchblade Sisters is a damned good film.
Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (dir. Allan Arkush, 1979)
On the lighter side of juvenile delinquent movies we find Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, a Roger Corman-produced rock comedy starring Halloween’s P.J. Soles and The Ramones… as themselves. Rock ‘n’ Roll High School is set in a cartoonish world of teen rebellion, where the wild and crazy student population drives one principal after another into debilitating nervous breakdowns. When Principal Togar (Mary Woronov) arrives on the scene to maintain order, it’s up to the world’s biggest Ramones fan (Soles) to take over the school with the assistance of her punk rock idols. It’s kind of like If… if If… wasn’t so morally iffy. Rock ‘n’ Roll High School may be the perfect JD film, embracing the outbursts of its young cast as genuine social outrage – their parents actually start burning their vinyl records – while maintaining a light, funny tone that makes even the most questionable events in the movie nearly impossible to criticize.
Hackers (dir. Iain Softley, 1995)
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine why adults are so afraid of juvenile delinquents. Sure, they want the best for their kids, but what’s the worst-case scenario? In Iain Softley’s Hackers, the worst-case scenario is that these reckless youths are going to take over the world. Sort of. Hackers stars Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie and Matthew Lillard as a group of teen super-geniuses who grew up in the computerized world their parents’ generation put in place, but don’t understand nearly as well as their kids. These hackers can make free telephone calls, hijack local TV lineups, change their high school class schedules and even have their enemies declared legally dead. The grown ups only seem to be overreacting – every time a teen or even prepubescent hacker is arrested, they’re arrested by a SWAT tea – but in fact the adult oppressors think they’re fighting to retain order in a world increasingly driven and even run by their hooligan children. That’s exactly what they’re fighting for, of course, they just don’t realize they’ve already lost the war. I wrote about Hackers very recently in my weekly CraveOnline series The Test of Time, where I became a fan of Iain Softley’s film all over again.
Battle Royale II (dirs. Kenta Kukasaku & Kinji Fukasaku, 2003)
Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale was one of the best films of the last decade: an impossibly dark but believable dystopia where children, mostly delinquents but also the normal classmates who just happened to share the troublemakers’ homeroom, are sent by the government – and by extension all adults – to an island where they are forced to kill each other. The idea is to thin out the ranks of the young population before they get out of hand, but in the often-maligned sequel Battle Royale II, we see that the events of the first film have created a new breed of monster. The survivor(s) of the original Battle Royale (I won’t reveal who) have taken to terrorism against the society that would allow children to fight each other for survival, and have now been labeled terrorists. So this time, a group of students has been enlisted not to fight each other, but to fight the enemy of the state… their own peers.
Battle Royale II is a little classless compared to the original, and it’s a lot more blunt about its social allegory, but it’s a passionate film about the ongoing war between rebellion and conformity, and between childish idealism and fully formed cynicism. If you’ve only seen the original, you’re missing out. Just make sure you watch the original first. It’s still the better film, by leaps and bounds.
Thirteen (dir. Catherine Hardwicke, 2003)
Before Catherine Hardwicke helped turn teenagers’ minds to mush with her ultra-conservative Twilight movie, the first in the series at least, she scared parents half to death with Thirteen, an alarming story of teenaged moral dissolution written – this is the most disturbing part – by a teenager. Nikki Reed co-wrote and co-stars in this story about a seemingly sweet young girl, played by Evan Rachel Wood, who slowly and without any particularly dramatic reason begins turning into what society might call “a little tramp.” Sure, her parents are getting divorced and she wants to be popular, but does that really explain her moral downfall into pickpocketing, wrist-cutting and sexual experimentation?
Oh dear, maybe it does. It’s the simplicity of Thirteen that sticks in your mind long after the credits roll, the matter-of-factness of the heroine’s transformation. The devil didn’t tempt her, she tempted herself, and it could happen to anyone… and anyone’s children. Is it evil, or just childhood rebellion? When does childhood rebellion go too far? When, if ever, will she grow out of it? Who knows? Thirteen is the most effective kind of JD scare film, because you’re ever really sure what you should be scared of.
