And what were the children doing, all the while? That's the most important question, isn't it?
To recap, the larger question I am exploring in this series is how to explain the massive cultural shift in America that became visible during the 1960's. I have taken, as one particular thread in that tapestry, the changing expectations and representations of adulthood. My answer is that our social and cultural expectations stopped short, because a generation of parents neglected to explain them to their children; and that the reason they failed to pass on these inherited values is that they were shocked into silence by the Second World War. In Part One I posed the question, and explained why the War is the only explanation that fits the timeline. In Part Two, I used two classic movies (The Best Years of Our Lives and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) to show how the War affected the men who fought in it, and how their reintegration into civilian society suffered accordingly. The remaining question is, What was it like to be raised as a child of such men? Let's look at that now.
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Rebel Without a Cause is a movie about fatherlessness, or about the damage done by failed or absent fathers. The three main characters—Jim Stark, Judy (no surname given), and "Plato" Crawford—all suffer in that respect.
- Jim's father (Frank) is weak, and is chronically pushed around by his wife (Carol, Jim's mother) and his own mother (just called Mrs. Stark).
- Judy's father is cold and stern, and pushes away any affection from his daughter while still lavishing affection on her younger brother. (It is strongly implied that his coldness is a defense to keep his daughter at arm's length now that she is sexually attractive.)
- Plato's father abandoned the family when Plato was a toddler, and Plato's mother is frequently absent. Plato is raised by the housekeeper.
- There is exactly one character who acts the way a good father ought to act: Police Inspector Ray Fremick, who focuses on juvenile crime and who tries to steer these three in the right direction when he meets them. But of course for him it's a job; and at one point when Jim desperately needs him, he's tied up with another case.
Comparing this context briefly with the two movies we considered in Part Two, there are certain basic consistencies. Nobody mentions the War. But Jim, Judy, and Plato are all teenagers; if the movie is set in present time (1955) then it's possible that these characters should have been born somewhere in the years between, let's say 1938-1942. Their fathers—at any rate, Jim's and Judy's—might have been young men* before the War, who shipped out leaving wives and infants behind.** We are explicitly told that Plato's father abandoned the family, so perhaps he was in business and already beyond draft age; it hardly matters, because he is simply not there. One interesting touch is that Tom Rath (in Grey Flannel Suit) is offered an impressive promotion that would require him to work and travel all the time, at the cost of never coming home. He turns it down so that he can spend time with his family. If he had accepted it, his children might have grown up something like Plato.
What do these children do, in the absence of any parental attention or direction? They get into all manner of trouble. But what's heartbreaking is to realize what they want, which is a simple and ordered family life: the kind of family lives they might have had in reality if Jim's father had been strong, if Judy's father had been loving, and if Plato's father had been there. The three of them spend a lot of time wandering around together, or staying out late at night—again, because no one is supervising them. And they end up creating a kind of replacement family unit of their own: Jim as father, Judy as mother, and Plato as child.
It doesn't last. It all goes badly wrong. And it was never a terribly detailed "family" anyway—more a hint, or a gesture, or a wish than anything solid. But the game they play with each other is, in its evanescent and vestigial way, just what Joan Didion said a decade later about the games at Haight-Ashbury: "the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum."***
As I said, nobody in Rebel ever mentions the War. But the fathers in this movie are shut off from their children—inaccessible in any meaningful way even when they are physically present. If their inaccessibility wasn't caused by the War, it could have been. I bet dollars to donuts that Al and Homer and Fred from The Best Years, and Tom from Gray Flannel Suit, end up just as inaccessible to their own children.
And, as we can see, it's a hell of a way to grow up.
The Graduate (1967)
And so we come to The Graduate, these days possibly the most famous film of the four. It was released in December, 1967. Only a few months before was the Summer of Love, the exact time that Joan Didion wrote about in the passage I quoted in Part One (or immediately above). In terms of the question I have been pursuing, this is Ground Zero, The Thing To Be Explained. Everything else builds up to this.
I'm not going to summarize the plot. Odds are high that everyone reading this knows the story of Benjamin Braddock and Mrs. Robinson and her daughter Elaine. But I want to look at the fathers in this story, and at what they taught their children.
Ben is a little younger than the main characters of Rebel. If he is a college graduate in 1967, then he was likely born in the first couple of years after the War ended. Could his father, Mr. Braddock—and Braddock's business partner, Mr. Robinson—have fought in the War, and then built a thriving law practice in the twenty years after, while Ben was growing up? Sure, maybe. It's entirely possible. And it would be consistent with the story I am telling, because all we ever hear from these men is superficial.
Mr. Braddock is proud of Ben's successes in college because … success is good, and Ben's successes reflect well on him. He buys Ben a deep sea diving outfit that Ben will obviously never use or want because … it shows off that he can afford it, I guess. He wants Ben to "take stock of himself" and go get a good job because … well, that's what you do after college. Isn't it? Nowhere in all this is there any kind of explanation that reaches beyond the action itself.
- He might have said that Ben's successes in a particular activity in college (pre-med, pre-law, journalism, debate, even football) were good because they would prepare him to take on that activity as an adult.
- He might have bought Ben a graduation present that Ben would have liked, or that he could have used pragmatically in his young adulthood.
- He might have said that Ben needs to get a job because the world is a hard and dangerous place, and the possibility is ever-present for poverty and ruin.
- Or he might have acknowledged that he has been fortunate enough to provide Ben and his mother a comfortable living, but Ben now has a duty to the family (and his own family-to-be!) to go out and do likewise.
But he doesn't. He probably doesn't even know why he finds important the things he finds important. He has obviously never reflected on them, and he doesn't remember what he was taught back when he was a boy. He remembers that certain things are important, but not why. He has forgotten the melody that ties the words together.
Mr. Robinson is just as shallow. He urges Ben to "sow a few wild oats" without ever thinking what that might mean in reality. Then when he discovers Ben's affair with his wife, he divorces her. Why? That's what you do, I guess. It's not that Mrs. Robinson is wracked with lovesickness over losing Ben, and it's not that he thinks Ben will try to steal Mrs. Robinson. Ben says as much. There is certainly no risk that Mrs. Robinson will bear a child to Ben. Nor is it that Mr. Robinson thinks of sex as a high and sacred thing that has to be restricted to marriage, or he wouldn't have encouraged Ben to sow some wild oats. (More pointedly, he and his then-girlfriend wouldn't have conceived Elaine in the back seat of a Ford, so that they then had to get married.) Again, all the reasons that might drive his actions are missing. But he remembers that "this is what you are supposed to do."
What does this mean for how Ben and Elaine were raised? They were taught isolated things, with no context. They were taught "this is what you do" but with no reasons. They learned the words, but not the music. Or, to quote Didion again, their parents "had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game [they] happened to be playing."**** Their parents were inaccessible to them in all but the most superficial ways while they grew up, and so all they learned—all they were taught—were superficialities.
And Ben says as much. When he takes Elaine out for a hamburger, he tries to explain to her how confused he feels. And he expresses it perfectly. “It's like I was playing some kind of game, but the rules don't make any sense to me. They're being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.”
That's it. That's it exactly. A few of the rules are still remembered, as a kind of cargo-cult left over from the pre-war period. But they hang in the air. None of the social or cultural infrastructure that supported them remained. And without that infrastructure, without the thousands of implicit assumptions that supported the whole pre-war way of life, none of the rules made any sense.
When the rules make no sense, they are easy to ignore and to sweep away. And something else takes their place. Grownups are replaced by old dudes.
And so the Sixties left us with a brand new world.
__________
* Or at any rate not old men.
** In fairness, Frank Stark (Jim's father) wouldn't have been young when the War broke out. The part was played by Jim Backus, who was born in 1913 and therefore was 42 when he made Rebel. But by that same math he was only 28 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and there must have been soldiers as old as 28. So it is not impossible that Jim's dad could have been a veteran, even though nothing is said about it.
*** Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, 1981), p.127.
**** Ibid.
