The 400 Blows and Juvenile Delinquency Annmicha Blugh College

Francois Truffaut, director of the film The 400 Blows (1959), concerns himself with the delinquent child abandoned by the education system and even the family. As a French New Wave director, Truffaut’s motive is to represent the real-life drama of an iconoclastic protagonist who searches for love and meaning to his life. The hero ultimately sinks to a life of crime and recidivism however, Truffaut traces for us the stages of his fall and brings to the fore, the underlying reasons for this social deviant.

The prevailing approach to The 400 Blows is an ideology in which the underlying principle is Hollywood hegemony. Truffaut’s approach is ideology because the themes and concerns revolve around a delinquent child, his family and his school. This movie gives a searing critique against the home, educational and penal institutions. These units are geared toward the development and growth of the individual but in particular circumstances, these systems can be very self-defeating since a child is neglected and resorts to crime. The ideological principle that is represented only in its absence is Hollywood hegemony. Hollywood hegemony advocates a more glossed, superficially perfect portrait of society: a comfortable middle class...