.. authors: Hunter Dukes ; mailto:hunter.dukes@publicdomainreview.org
.. category: journal
.. comments: true
.. date: 2023-04-18 0:00:00 UTC
.. description: ”Glenview, Illinois; Coronet Instructional Films, 1947.
Before loners, stoners, slackers, geeks, and nerds became recognized misfits
of American high-school cinema, there was Phil (played by a young Dick York),
the shrinking violet of Shy Guy (1947). The first of many “personal guidance”
or “mental hygiene” shorts produced by Coronet Instructional Media between
the 1940s and 80s, Shy Guy was designed to be screened in the classroom — the
environment where our protagonist falters. Recently enrolled in a new school
after moving from Morristown, Phil is having trouble fitting in. “In class
it’s not so bad”, says our narrator, “but when school’s out and the others go
off to enjoy themselves, well, if you’re what they call a shy guy, that’s
when you really feel it.
.. enclosures:
Shy Guy (1947) ; magnet:?xt=urn:btih:722674ba6776e6e2ac319f0870f5219af8ebc7d1&dn=ShyGuy1947&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=http://ia601306.us.archive.org/34/items/&ws=http://ia801306.us.archive.org/34/items/&ws=https://archive.org/download/>`_
.. link: 2023-04-18-shy-guy-1947
.. related:
Shy Guy (1947) — The Public Domain Review ; https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/shy-guy/
.. slug: 2023-04-18-shy-guy-1947
.. tags: society
.. title: Shy Guy (1947)
.. type: text
.. image:: /graphics/publicdomainreview.svg
:alt: The Public Domain Review
:height: 200px
:loading: lazy
:target: /graphics/publicdomainreview.svg
:width: 200px
.. raw:: html
`Shy Guy (1947) video `_
We meet the shy guy from behind, looking through the window of a local
drugstore, as soda jerks serve malts and cokes to booths of smiling,
well-adjusted teens. “You’re on the outside looking in”, we are told, “there’s a
barrier and you don’t know how to begin breaking it down.” It’s an affecting
opening: all the loneliness and distance of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, painted
five years earlier, driven home by the camera angle and our narrator’s
second-person address. If Phil is a shy guy, we are even more so — placed at a
double remove from the object of his voyeuristic longing.
Dad will help. We cut to home, where Phil is soldering a transmitter and
microphone in the basement. He can’t figure out how to wire in the oscillator.
“I know I have to connect it to the amplifier, but where? It just doesn’t fit
in!” Well son, begins his father, “maybe school is like your radio. This
oscillator will do its work well, but you still have to fit it in, so it can
work with all the other parts”.
There’s nothing subtle about the social message. Yet it’s a surprisingly
explicit cybernetic conception of American society in the early days of economic
acceleration. Phil doesn’t need to actualize or individuate, he just needs to
wire himself into the right circuitry. As Zoë Druick writes, in a paper on
postwar education, “cybernetics was championed after the war as an apolitical
universal model for technological civilization . . . educational and documentary
media in particular are genres in strategic positions to operationalize social
visions.” For real-life shy guys, films like these could supposedly decrease
social latency. Watching a cinematic version of a self-help text, we glimpse the
aspirational role of educational media at this time, how, using literature’s
age-old tricks of empathy and identification, it sought to correct behavior and
achieve a specific societal vision.
Shyness, then, is not merely a personal inconvenience. It was a detrimental bug
in the civilization-building machine. During her study of shyness, power, and
intimacy in the United States after World War II, Patricia A. McDaniel reminds
us that “emotions are social experiences, or processes, rather than visceral
sensations that happen to our unwitting bodies”. In mid-century America, shyness
became a familiar topic in self-help manuals pitched at white middle-class men.
Not only was overcoming timidity essential for establishing a productive
heterosexual relationship, it also translated directly into the booming white
collar labor market. Instead of doing business with “timid, lukewarm Caspar
Milquetoast”, as one text labeled the shy guy type, customers preferred to shake
hands with people like Chick Gallagher, the popular boy at Phil’s high school.
“Echoing the advice given to young girls to be discreet in advertising their
interest in a particular boy”, writes McDaniel, “self-help authors argued that
the key to appealing to others in the business world was to show just the right
amount of self-restrained interest in them.”
And this is exactly how Phil comes to win friends and a romantic interest: he
learns to “listen” and “think about the other guy”. Taking the advice of his
pocket-square-suited father, who himself “had quite a time making friends in a
new office where everybody else knew each other”, the shy guy begins to reverse
engineer popularity: “pick out the most popular boys and girls in school and
keep an eye on them”. But Mean Girls this is not. He soon learns that women like
Jane Davenport are beloved because they attune to others. Unlike his hobbyist
audio equipment, she successfully completes the feedback loop of communication
and amplifies social signals. “She’s listening! Hearing about Helen’s collection
of menus. And liking it! That makes her kingpin with Helen.” Returning to the
drugstore, we cheer as Phil gets hailed over to a booth by Chick, enfolded into
a masculine acoustic order because the women will not stop conversing noisily
about shopping: “We men need some support to run down this girly chatter”. Phil
gets invited to tomorrow night’s mixer, locking eyes across the drugstore with
Mary Lou whose face dissolves in a blur transition. At the mixer, students
finish a sing-along to the minstrel song “Oh! Susana” — a detail that perhaps
reveals who is allowed to fit so seamlessly into this vision of middle-class
America — and Phil hears the boys asking Beezy Barnes about radios. Beezy
hesitates: the communicative circuit is momentarily broken. And Phil bravely
fits himself into the gap. “They know he’s alive now”, the narrator says, “and
strangely enough, he’s just discovered that they’re alive.”