In the year 2004, few Ball State students are familiar with the phrase "Middletown Studies" and their impact on the city in which we reside.
Known by sociologists world-wide, "Middletown" is code for our very own Muncie. In 1924, Muncie was chosen by Robert and Helen Lynd to perform a study of the average American small town. Theodore Caplow, leader of the most recent study of Muncie in the 1990's known as Middletown IV, said of the Lynds in the PBS special The First Measured Century, "They wanted a place that was as unexceptional as possible, with nothing outstanding about it."
Muncie apparently fit the bill, and the Lynds began the research that would make Muncie the "most studied community in the world" according to the same PBS special. The Lynds split their research into six sections: making a living, homemaking, youth/education, leisure, religion, and community activities.-รก
It is these areas that the Lynds and other researchers later focused on in multiple Middletown studies.
They asked residents of Muncie to answer simple, survey-type questions. The answers they received were very telling of the attitudes of the time period, such as when a judge told the Lynds that cars were "houses of prostitution on wheels."
Almost 50 years after the original Middletown research had begun, the major award-winning filmmaker Peter Davis took an interest in the studies of Muncie, which had resulted in such world-wide attention, and produced the "Middletown" film series, creating a documentary-film for every one of the six areas that the Lynds had originally focused on.
The films were very well received after being broadcasted on PBS in the early '80s and were praised by newspapers and critics the world over. The Boston Globe said, "'Middletown' is a masterpiece, one of the most important films ever made of the American experience."
Indeed all of the films were a great success - except for the controversial film "Seventeen." "Seventeen," created to represent the youth and education area of the studies, was never officially released by PBS because the filmmakers, Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines, refused to make the cuts that were demanded to make it 'appropriate' for viewers.
The film focuses on the lives of students at Muncie's Southside High School in the early '80s. It paints a brutally honest picture of racism, drugs, a failing education system, death, loss and much more. "Seventeen" is full of shocking real-life scenes such as teens rolling and smoking joints, interracial sexual innuendo, parents collecting keg money, a 10-year-old guzzling down a beer and the effect the death of a fellow student has on a room full of friends.
My Muncie 202 class, after studying the Middletown films and studies, had the opportunity to see "Seventeen" last week at the Virginia Ball Center. I found the film to be incredibly raw, and even though it was made decades ago, I have yet to see its equal. The film holds nothing back in its disturbing reflection of the life of its characters. Though the mechanical aspects of the film pale in comparison to contemporary special-effect-pumped films, today's idealized portrayal of youth is so warped that "Seventeen" is a thousand times more genuine than the latest teen flick.
The dark and sometimes violent scenes in "Seventeen" that were deemed "inappropriate" at the time of its creation can be found in any city, any school and any community - especially here in Middletown, USA right now; these themes again haunt us as we grieve over the loss of two of our own students.
Write to Carla at caalderman@bsu.edu
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