Fantasies of Neglect

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813573625
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In our current era of helicopter parenting and stranger danger, an unaccompanied child wandering through the city might commonly be viewed as a victim of abuse and neglect. However, from the early twentieth century to the present day, countless books and films have portrayed the solitary exploration of urban spaces as a source of empowerment and delight for children.    Fantasies of Neglect explains how this trope of the self-sufficient, mobile urban child originated and considers why it persists, even as it goes against the grain of social reality. Drawing from a wide range of films, children’s books, adult novels, and sociological texts, Pamela Robertson Wojcik investigates how cities have simultaneously been demonized as dangerous spaces unfit for children and romanticized as wondrous playgrounds that foster a kid’s independence and imagination. Charting the development of free-range urban child characters from Little Orphan Annie to Harriet the Spy to Hugo Cabret, and from Shirley Temple to the Dead End Kids, she considers the ongoing dialogue between these fictional representations and shifting discourses on the freedom and neglect of children.    While tracking the general concerns Americans have expressed regarding the abstract figure of the child, the book also examines the varied attitudes toward specific types of urban children—girls and boys, blacks and whites, rich kids and poor ones, loners and neighborhood gangs. Through this diverse selection of sources, Fantasies of Neglect presents a nuanced chronicle of how notions of American urbanism and American childhood have grown up together.   

1

Boys, Movies, and City Streets; or, The Dead End Kids as Modernists

Many of the most stereotypical images of urban childhood neglect have their point of origin and dominance in Depression era Hollywood. During the Depression orphans, waifs, and street urchins dominate the screen. Not coincidentally, the Depression was the era of the child star. Figures such as Shirley Temple, Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, Dickie Moore, Virginia Weidler, Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Jane Withers, and the ensemble actors of the Jones Family, Dead End Kids, and Our Gang films series saturated the screen. Beyond movies, comics and radio showcased the kids of Little Orphan Annie and Gasoline Alley. The presence of child stars and child-centered texts was not entirely new. Nineteenth-century theatergoers witnessed the ascent of child star Elsie Leslie, who played Little Lord Fauntleroy at age seven, and the silent film era featured adult actresses such as Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish in numerous childlike roles, as well as child stars such as Jackie Coogan, Chaplin’s sidekick in The Kid (Charlie Chaplin 1921). But the proliferation and dominance of child stars and child images in the Depression was extraordinary, and those child stars often featured in narratives of neglect and poverty.

Some have argued that the rise of children in film was a response to the Motion Picture Production Code’s clamping down on violence and sexuality in films (J. Hampton). Certainly, child-centered films circulate in a context of concern about media influence. But to posit that child-centered films were presented in the 1930s as better influences for children ignores the role already played by children in silent cinema and does not explain the appeal of children to audiences or the complexity of their representations. Moreover, the child films investigated here were not marketed as children’s films: in the 1930s no such ratings system existed. Children watched a wide range of films, including gangster pictures, romance, melodrama, screwball comedies, as well as, potentially, child-centered films (Brown 2). More likely to target children were serials, westerns, and adventure stories. Surprisingly, perhaps, Universal horror films of the 1930s were especially appealing to children (Brown 15). Accordingly, child-focused films should be considered adult or family fare: their target audience and fan base seem to have been adults as much as children. Indeed, Noel Brown argues that, while child-star films were successful, there is no evidence that juvenile audiences were the spectators. Thus, the images of childhood neglect must appeal to adult fantasies and fears of childhood as much as provide sources of identification for children.

Rather than a strategic sop to censors, some critics have argued that child films provided a “palliative” counter to the miseries of the Great Depression (Brown 17; Eckert). If, however, these films provided an escape, they did so in complicated ways. The notion that these films provide an escape may be related more to the spectator’s feelings of sentimentality or utopian affect when watching them than to the content of the narratives.

In part, these Hollywood child films function much like the musicals and other forms Richard Dyer analyzes in his essay “Entertainment and Utopia.” Dyer takes seriously the usual dismissal of entertainment as “escape” and “wish-fulfilment” to suggest that entertainment responds to real needs in society, by offering forms of nonspecific utopianism (“what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized” [20]). He argues that in order to make spectators feel better, entertainment doesn’t just offer us visions of a better world (pretty people, nice cars, lavish sets) but also, and more importantly, provides the illusion that it solves problems. But entertainment delimits the needs and desires of society even as it addresses them because it offers solutions to only some needs and problems, and that enables us to ignore others. These problems are, in Dyer’s account, the generic problems of people in capitalist societies rather than more specific issues. They work at the level of affect. So exhaustion, related to the condition of living and working under capitalism, is resolved filmically through scenes that convey energy (tap dancing, for example). A sense of scarcity is countered by scenes of abundance (expensive sets, images of wealth, lots of extras). Emotional intensity (such as torch songs) counter feelings of dreariness; images of community offset feelings of alienation; and transparency (characters speaking or singing their feelings directly) neutralizes the effects of being manipulated and lied to. Like the “solutions” of capitalism—buying more products—these texts create problems internally and then resolve them within the film, deflecting the real concerns that might have brought one to the movie theater seeking escape in the first place, providing a false and temporary respite only.

In child films of the 1930s the feelings of utopia are produced, for example, through energetic musical performances in the case of Shirley Temple and Jane Withers; heartfelt expressions of sentiment in the case of Temple, Withers, and Jackie Cooper; scenes of community in Our Gang and the Dead End Kids; intensity in moments of crisis; a child’s tears; and so on. Abundance figures occasionally—as the urban child encounters wealth. Still, these films do not completely direct attention away from real-world concerns. Rather than deflect or ignore the traumatic effects of the Depression in a purely escapist mode, images of childhood in the 1930s serve to acknowledge and work through many of the anxieties of the Depression. In line with Dyer’s argument, however, direct topical references to the Depression or the New Deal are rare (Temple’s film Just around the Corner [Irving Cummings 1938] is an exception that will engage the New Deal directly). Instead, the issues of the Depression and of the status of children are refracted into more long-term lingering issues of modernity accentuated by the Depression, including urbanization, industrialization, overcrowding, massification, immigration, changing social mores, and family structures.

Instead of reading these films as a direct response to the strictures of the Production Code or to assume that they present images of childhood innocence that will cheer audiences, we need to think of the “palliative” effects of child-centered films and their relation to the Depression in more complex terms. The rise of the child in American film needs to be examined in the context of a number of intersecting trends and issues in American culture that galvanize images of childhood neglect for adult audiences. The Depression engendered many contradictory discourses around children. In the 1930s the displacement of children from home, loss of parents, and loss of income created a sense of crisis around childhood, with fears about child homelessness, runaways, truancy, and risk all potentially leading to child endangerment and the loss of innocence (Mintz 235–248). Parental abandonment and desertions also raised questions about the value of the child and family, as more and more children were placed in custody or left to fend for themselves (Mintz 237). At the same time, as Viviana Zelizer explains, from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, perceptions of childhood shifted, from viewing children as economically worthwhile participants in public and family life to being economically “worthless” but emotionally “priceless.” This transition was uneven, however: nineteenth-century working-class children were still expected to contribute wages and household assistance even as middle-class children began to be viewed differently; and the Depression restored the need for “useful” children across a wide range of families.

This tension between viewing the child as “priceless” and as economically useful continues throughout the 1930s. In line with views of the child as priceless, or intended to be outside the realm of economic usefulness, child labor laws were under debate from 1904, with Progressive activists, such as the National Child Labor Committee and National Consumers League, working to pressure Congress to enact laws protecting children. Children’s working conditions in mills and factories were publicized using the photographs of Lewis Hine and other means to shape public opinion.1 Not until 1938, however, did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sign the Fair Labor Standards Act, which placed limits on child labor, excluding agricultural work. Thus, while children were ever more ideologically positioned outside the labor force, they were legally available or, in many cases, subject to it.

In terms of child stars, in particular, the California Child Actors Bill, also known as the Coogan Act or Coogan Bill, was passed in 1934 to protect the earnings of child actors. The law was named for the very successful child star Jackie Coogan, who earned approximately $4 million in his youth but discovered, when he was twenty-three years old, that his mother and stepfather had spent almost all the money he had earned. After suing his parents, Coogan recovered less than $126,000 of the $250,000 left of his fortune. The Coogan case not only set in motion laws that still stand today—requiring set aside amounts from children’s earnings, schooltime, and limited workdays—but also exposed the problematic relation between children and work and the child’s use value within the family. Coogan’s mother claimed, “No promises were ever made to give Jackie anything. Every dollar a kid earns before he is 21 belongs to his parents. Jackie will not get a cent of his earnings” (“Strange Case”; Zierold 7–45).

The child star, and images of youth, thus worked to reassert the pricelessness and innocence of childhood at a time when the status of the child—his or her worth and his or her innocence—were up for grabs. The child star, of course, embodied contradictorily both the image of the priceless child and the image of extreme wealth and success under capitalism, as a figure whose labor was simultaneously celebrated and obscured. Many other critics have examined the figure of the child star in relation to economics and labor. Charles Eckert, for example, analyzes the way Shirley Temple’s star text obscures not only her labor but the labor of all the other film production personnel around her at the same time that she plays characters who engage issues of the Depression by modeling charity and concern for the working class. Rob King analyzes Jackie Coogan, arguing that Coogan’s portrayals of poor dependent children were easily commoditized and absorbed into consumer culture—turned into costumes and dolls. My interest here is less in the labor of the child star herself than the ways in which the filmic representations of children engage issues of labor and economics and similarly highlight the density of the child’s innocence and pricelessness.

Most viewers and commentators today assume nostalgically that the child-star era was an age of innocence. But children in Depression era texts are very often orphaned or displaced or even homeless; they are often depicted as trapped in poverty or as falling out of the middle or upper class into poverty; often, they are workers, or petty criminals, subject to the economy, not existing outside it. Films focused on children in this period situate the child in an urban milieu structured by economic status and often outside traditional family structures. As I suggested in my introduction, the urban child is always already compromised in terms of innocence, and many of the texts from this period assert innocence, if at all, only in the face of the child’s experience and knowingness. The urban child, similarly, unnerves precisely because, in the context of a culture of “pricelessness,” she registers as out of place, too adult, not innocent. There is sweetness and sentiment in these films, to be sure, and moral virtue, but never lack of knowledge or complete insulation from harsh realities.

Because they raise the specter of so many issues associated with urbanization and modernity, neglected-child films of the 1930s can be read in terms of what Miriam Hansen has termed “vernacular modernism.” As opposed to modernist aesthetics, the concept of vernacular modernism will “encompass cultural practices that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity” (“Mass Production” 333).2 In her figuration classical Hollywood cinema can be “imagined as a cultural practice on a par with the experience of modernity, as an industry-produced, mass-based, vernacular modernism” (Hansen, “Mass Production” 337). Rather than a mere reflection of modernity, vernacular modernism must, in some way, reflect upon modernity. Hansen writes: “The question was, and continues to be, how particular film practices can be productively understood as responding—and making sensually graspable our responses—to the set of technological, economic, social and perceptual transformations associated with the term modernity” (Hansen, “Tracking Cinema” 608). This reflexivity differs from the self-reflexive style often associated with modernism; indeed, vernacular modernism encompasses “plenty of films that transmute conflicts and contradictions arising from modernity into conventional narrative and compositional forms” (Hansen, “Tracking Cinema” 613). Vernacular modernism thus differs from what Liesl Olsen has identified as the modernist penchant for representing and describing the ordinary, insofar as Olsen’s argument still balances the ordinary as subject against modernism as style.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the image of the child focalized anxieties over increased urbanization, and the growing squalor of industrialized cities, including overpopulation, tenements, and slums, the urban child in cinema could function as a palimpsest showing the effects of modernity. In particular, 1930s child-focused films depict what David Pike, in his consideration of subterranean spaces in nineteenth-century literature, has characterized as “a burgeoning modernity perceived personally—through the lived space of the child—rather than solely as representation, as modernism” (872). The contradictions of modernity are played out through the figure of the child in these films by balancing, on the one hand, a kind of social miserabilism, or woeful sociological gaze, and, on the other, a sense of mobility, spatial freedom, and play. While showing kids as subject to economic and social forces, and as figures of neglect, these texts also show kids as independent, resourceful, and playful—able to navigate urban life with amazing pluck and skill.

Acting Urban

To consider how the urban child functions as a vehicle for vernacular modernism, we need to define the parameters of the urban in the child-centered narratives of this period.

Part of my argument in this book is that not only definitions of the child but also ideas and ideals of the urban change historically, and in tandem. Additionally, at any given time multiple and contradictory urbanisms might coexist. Films are selective and ideological in their vision: they produce different ideals and images of the city and variable philosophies of the urban. Therefore, for example, 1930s RKO musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers depict urbanism in terms of an urbane, sophisticated, global cosmopolitanism—a world of resorts, white telephones, fancy hotels, and nightclubs, all animated and romanticized through spontaneous and erotic dances. Their cities are wealthy, white, and devoid of children. By contrast, the urbanism of Depression era child films tend to focus on lower-class neighborhoods, street life, different ethnicities and occasionally mixed-race groups, and the encounter among children and between children and adults. For moviegoers, potentially seeing an Astaire-Rogers musical in the same week as a film featuring Jackie Cooper as a tough newsboy, these visions of the city might be each as real or as fantastic as the other but hard to imagine conjoined.

Urbanism is more than setting. Being an urban child is not simply a matter of being placed in a city setting. Rubes and hicks can come to the city; it does not make them urban. The urban child, by contrast, is of the city. Thus, in considering the paradigm of the urban child in the 1930s, we need to consider what actions an urban setting generates and, equally, how the child’s performance produces the urban.

In what follows, I will consider the performance of urbanism in the films starring the Dead End Kids, the ensemble of actors who gained stardom on the stage in Sidney Kingsley’s sensational play Dead End (1935). My analysis is limited to some of their earliest films in the 1930s, before they become the Little Tough Guys, the teenage East Side Kids, or the grown Bowery Boys in films that continue through the 1950s. In the late 1930s the Dead End Kids are still convincingly kids, seemingly as young as nine and not older than thirteen. Furthermore, these early films differ from later incarnations. As Amanda Klein has argued in her book on film cycles, the initial cycle of Dead End Kids films was topical, addressing the plight of urban youth via a Progressive emphasis on social justice (62). Within a very short span of time, however, rather than “referents of real people suffering in a real world,” the Dead End Kids began to signify themselves as types or “‘facsimiles’ of their former selves” (Klein 80). Accordingly, as the Dead End Kids splintered into Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids, and the Bowery Boys, their films turned toward comedy and comedic suspense films, similar to Abbott and Costello monster films. These later films do not place the boys as clearly in an urban environment and do not address concerns about neglect or urbanization.

While considering their performance of urbanism, I will also signal ways in which their films render modernity from a child’s perspective. I will be taking the Dead End Kids as paradigmatic for, at least, representations of urban boys, but I will acknowledge some differences from other representations of urban boys. To be sure, the actors Billy Halop, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabe Dell, Bernard Punsley, and Bobby Jordan themselves “act urban” in order to embody the Dead End Kids. While Leo Gorcey fell into acting and played more or less himself for twenty years, most of the other kids trained at the Professional Children’s School and/or had some schooling and experience as child actors in radio and onstage before being cast in the play Dead End. Rather than focus on the actors who formed the Dead End Kids, however, I consider the characters they play as themselves performing the urban, or, to be precise, I consider the way in which the actors show urbanism as a mode of everyday performance for the characters and do not consider the particular method the actors used.3

In the Dead End Kids films, as in many other 1930s child-focused films, the performance of urbanism is intertwined with the performance of class, gender, and race. The urban children in th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Mapping the Urban Child
• Chapter 1. Boys, Movies, and City Streets; or, The Dead End Kids as Modernists
• Chapter 2. Shirley Temple as Streetwalker: Girls, Streets, and Encounters with Men
• Chapter 3. Neglect at Home: Rejecting Mothers and Middle-Class Kids
• Chapter 4. “The Odds Are against Him”: Archives of Unhappiness among Black Urban Boys
• Chapter 5. Helicopters and Catastrophes: The Failure to Neglect and Neglect as Failure
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author