Ben Stein 'at home' at Presbyterian College

"Why don't we have more movies about adolescents who grow up to serve - who grow up to do for other people?" he said. "Why don't we have a movie about a young Martin Luther King and what he became? I would like to see more movies and t.v. shows that show genuinely heroic adolescents who show disregard for their own vanity and disregard for their own luxury who instead go out to serve others."

-Ben Stein

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Declaring himself "at home" in the South, author and performer Ben Stein wowed a near-capacity audience in Presbyterian College's Belk Auditorium Tuesday as he opened the college's Arnold Symposium on Adolescence and the Media.

"This is the America we pledge allegiance to when we pledge allegiance to the flag," Stein said, noting his esteem, in particular, of Upstate, South Carolina. "... This is the essence of the American South."

From there, Stein tacked the topic placed before him at this year's Arnold Symposium – the effects the media and adolescents have on each other. He began with his own experiences as a law student at the Yale School of Law – taking a movie criticism class taught by famed film critic and author Stanley Kauffmann.

"I took to it like a duck to water," he said. "I just loved it and I started writing papers and essays about stereotypes in the media – not about whether the movie was good or bad – but about stereotypes."

After law school and a few years of being an "icky lawyer," he began a career teaching – often on aspects of society and the media – and began writing about these same ideas as a columnist for the New York Times and, later, for the Wall Street Journal.

Those experiences – and his experiences as a writer for television and an actor most noted for his role as a teacher in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" – have presented numerous insights into the media's effect on young people.

"When I first started thinking about it, I thought it's really not that complicated," he said. "In the mass culture today, we have overly sexualized, overly violent kids whose only values are looking cool, getting the girl or boy, and, again, being cool. ... This has changed totally since the 1950s when the world was viewed as a much cheerier world. It's become a much scarier world for adolescents according to the media."

But, he noted, the portrayal of adolescents by the media and, in turn, the effect media has on teens is more complicated than he initially thought. Looking back at three of the earliest portrayals of young children and adolescents to mass audiences - Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Oliver Twist - there is a darker side to the cheerful innocence of youth, he said. In Huckleberry Finn, for instance, life on the Mississippi is enjoyable, but only if you are white, Stein said. The story in Oliver Twist includes enslavement of children, violence, and gang activity, he added.

Still, the earlier part of the 20^th century demonstrated films like "Gone With the Wind," that showed, for the most part, young people who were always polite and eager to please adults, said Stein. By the 1950s, as evidenced by films like "Blackboard Jungle," "Gun Crazy," and "Westside Story," movies shifted to portrayals of teenagers who are "out of control of their parents," he said.

These characters, Stein said, were "unsettling - but still basically good kids."

Thought the times in America were prosperous, he said, there was a rise in middle class juvenile delinquency during the 1950s - perhaps as a result of more indulgent parents. The film he declared the "granddaddy of them all" when it came to typifying this attitude was "Rebel Without a Cause."

On television during the 1950s, it was a different story, Stein said. Shows like "Ozzie and Harriet," "Father Knows Best," and "Leave it to Beaver" were full of happy kids and loving parents – but parents who were increasingly irrelevant, he said.

In the 1960s and 1970s, portrayals of young people went even darker, Stein noted, with films like "Village of the Damned," "The Omen," and "The Exorcist." He said it is important to remember that the writers, directors, and producers who create these works are human beings themselves - people whose experiences are found metaphorically onscreen.

"I believe this came about because the kids of the writers, producers, and directors in the west side of Los Angeles where they live – a very, very prosperous area - and some in New York City discovered that their kids are little monsters," Stein said. "They were devils. They weren't nice, sweet kids like you. They were little monsters with parents who put no restrictions on them and they became little devils themselves – and this view came up in popular culture. ... Movies don't write themselves – they're written by writers and what the writers see in their own lives gets transferred to the screen."

Thus, said Stein, was the evolution of the basically sweet but confused adolescent into the epitome of outright evil - a result of the writers themselves. Writers, he said, are much to blame for the way adolescents are often portrayed in the media - adding that they also are, on the whole, a negative bunch of unhappy adults.

"Human beings write the movies and those people don't like the capitalist system very much. They don't like small town America very much. They don't like businessmen very much. They don't like the military very much, and they don't like families very much," said Stein. "The Writers Guild, which is the union for writers in Hollywood, is a very negative, anti-capitalist, anti-free market group. That doesn't mean they should be blacklisted or tortured but it's a fact that they're not great fans of what America was or is and they show their disdain for America in many ways."

Even during the 1980s, which Stein called the "zenith" of the adolescence-themed films, it is important to understand the influence writers have on teen stereotypes – lovable kids who have problems created almost entirely by parents and story after story about nerds tormented by the cool kids.

"It's the nerds who write the movies," he said. "You are the cool kids. ... You'll end up owning the Toyota dealership and the nerds will wind up writing movies and making fun of you."

Young people in this era – in Hughes movies like "Pretty in Pink" and, yes, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" – also have an endless amount of self-pity to draw from. Even when the characters are seemingly well off, they only seem interested in their own suffering. Contemporary shows like "Veronica Mars," are the exception – characters who rise to the occasion to beat the odds. For the most part, he said, what we see onscreen is the "overwhelming quest to be cool" - complete with characters who use drugs to prevent themselves from showing their feelings and contempt for knowledge.

Sadly, Stein said, adults today envy young people and want to relive their youth.

"This is a dangerous situation," he said. "We need adults - grown-ups. Not grown-ups who want to be kids.

And society needs to see more characters that are heroic, Stein said.

"Why don't we have more movies about adolescents who grow up to serve - who grow up to do for other people?" he said. "Why don't we have a movie about a young Martin Luther King and what he became? I would like to see more movies and t.v. shows that show genuinely heroic adolescents who show disregard for their own vanity and disregard for their own luxury who instead go out to serve others."

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