Shock Treatment
By Joshua Rothkopf
You'll hurt yourself if you think too hard about Ken Smith's new book, a deceptively whimsical history of progressive education's most desperate measure of the '50s and '60s--the "social guidance" film. Lurid, conformist and often frighteningly gory, thousands of these films were commissioned by school boards across America to indoctrinate their students into proper dating habits (no sex), good citizenship (returning library books on time) and a stomach-churning fear of running with scissors or driving too fast. Dope experimenters became howling heroin junkies within 10 minutes of screen time ("Narcotics: Pit of Despair"); one night with a "girl who parks" inevitably led to syphilis ("The Innocent Party").
Do you remember this programming from your curriculum? If so, then Mental Hygiene may resonate like the righting of some wrong--an expos of the seeds of countless debilitating complexes. How else for Smith to justify the better part of 10 years spent ferreting through university archives for forgotten films about toenail clipping ("Healthy Feet") and the onset of menstruation ("It's Wonderful Being a Girl")? His recent invitations to appear on National Public Radio and a 70-film curatorial stint in New York suggest the arrival of important insight.
But Smith seems embarrassed to corral his exhaustive research into something so bald; instead he comes across like an Egyptologist blinded by the sun, unsure of what he has found. He opts for that familiar pose of trendy remoteness, trading what might have been a revealing pop anthropology for the hipster's "can-you-believe-this" smirk. (Smith has previous experience at a now-defunct comedy channel mining these bizarre films for decontextualized laughs.) He never gets too deep, circling the material with a slippery sense of irony; he knows a film like "Are You Popular?" only becomes darkly funny after years of hindsight. But with each jokey synopsis on the merits of obsessive hand washing ("Soapy the Germ Fighter") or owning a car ("What It Means To Be an American"), Mental Hygiene reveals itself as one more example of smugly enlightened cultural tomb raiding, and Smith as the good little boy who watched too many tracts about the dangers of questioning authority.
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What plagues the book is its overwhelming sense of historical detachment, resulting in a postmodern froth of almost complete meaninglessness. Even Smith's strongest suit, his dozens of wry capsule reviews of the films, suffers from its thoughtless presentation in an alphabetized encyclopedia taking up half the book. A chronological ordering might have charted the fascinating escalation of decades of parental anxiety: from bad manners to unplanned pregnancies; from "fitting in" with the group to "saying no" to drug-induced peer pressures; from practicing better penmanship to learning to "duck and cover" in an atomic blast.
As such though, the listing can only be a reference to itself, a strangely compelling catalog of secondhand kitsch marked mainly by its profound uselessness--since most of these films are lost or unavailable to the casual viewer. (Either as a remedy or shrewd cross promotion, the publisher offers a companion videocassette of selected films sold separately.) The fact that most of these films had to be rescued by Smith from certain oblivion carries, in itself, a poignancy his book only hints at; it's hard to fathom how teachers could have ever hoped to survive a cultural war waged against such iconic romantic loners as James Dean or a hip-swiveling Elvis Presley. Image-makers of Hollywood, always better at this kind of gig, were busy extolling their own form of guidance, also targeted to kids and in many ways just as didactic. Perhaps comparisons with these bigger-budgeted kin (Rebel without a Cause, The Blackboard Jungle) seem unfair, as they obviously do to Smith, who peevishly steers clear of them, but it's a missed opportunity that could have shed light on the failed cinema of educators--noble-minded but hopelessly uncool. And given the dawning awareness among advertisers of the exploding youth market in the same era, it's inexcusable that Smith doesn't speculate on the provocative likelihood of teenagers being forced to watch a scare film like "Keep Off the Grass" in the morning and paying to see Easy Rider at night.
Similarly, the complicated frisson between the tightly constructed universes of social guidance films and their roiling civil contexts of rampant McCarthyism, political assassinations, mandated interracial busing and the rise of the counterculture is cursorily treated in a two-page "historical overview." A Nixonite social guidance film like 1970's "The Political Process" (which champions a bland form of volunteerism, answering phones in congressional offices) deserves to be considered in its expanded context of student rioting and corridor-blocking sit-ins.
It's baffling how thoroughly Smith avoids exploiting these parallel narratives of Hollywood and history, which might have wedged him a purchase into the critical conundrum he all too soon confronts (as would any writer on this subject): the difficulty of judging a social guidance film's initial reception or effectiveness. Did these films actually change habits and behavior? Did they traumatize kids or were they laughed at?
Smith's ambivalence on this rates a glib two paragraphs in his introductory "primer," acknowledging both the longevity of the genre--it must have been considered valuable to have survived, he asserts vaguely--and the especially rebellious generation it targeted. One would think that a collection of testimony from teachers or the many psychologists who lent their endorsements to these films, let alone from former audience members, would be of paramount importance.
Chapters devoted to the scrappily independent producers and crews--who labored on these films in relative anonymity with surprising conviction--are steps in the right direction though; many of these self-styled auteurs could easily justify books of their own. Of particular mention is David Smart, the multimillionaire publisher of Esquire, who established a small film studio on his private estate in the suburbs of Chicago after a reputedly inspiring visit to the classrooms of Nazi Germany. His company, Coronet, would go on to produce some of the more polished and benign "classics" of the genre ("Shy Guy," "Dating: Do's and Don'ts") before its pathophobic founder died on the operating table after electing an ill-advised exploratory colon surgery. (There's something apt to that.)
Smart's alter ego in terms of style, content and collateral was Sid Davis, a hulking former stand-in for John Wayne, who broke into the lucrative guidance film market with his crude warning of perverts in sport jackets called "The Dangerous Stranger." Intended for fourth graders, the film was such a success with school boards that Davis was given carte blanche to pursue even more alarmist treatments of topics such as playing with fire ("Live and Learn"), driving too fast to impress a date ("What Made Sammy Speed?") and homosexuality ("Boys Beware"). All featured a signature Davis trademark: the unforgiving narrator, mercilessly intoning lines like, "Can you continue the way you're going and stay out of trouble? You wish you knew!"
Smith is more assured when discussing these filmmakers and others, formulating the social guidance phenomenon in straightforward terms of profit and passion. But the gravitation of entrusted educators to this shrieking brand of disinformation remains a mystery and the chief failure of Smith's lazy investigation--all the more upsetting in light of examples as recent as 1972's "Drugs and the Nervous System": "Many young children have eaten several sweetened aspirin tablets thinking they were candy--and died!"
Twenty years too late, Mental Hygiene settles for easy laughs. But who are we really laughing at when young anorexics dream of being Ally McBeal, AIDS is still considered a "gay disease," and 12-year-olds flock on cue to the latest computerized product sermon from George Lucas? It might take more than the passing of time to identify the social conditioning happening today, a mental hygiene far more insidious, shielded by publicists and our own urges. Though Smith would have us sigh with relief, we are not yet survivors.
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In These Times ©
2000
Vol. 24, No. 7 |
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