Date Seen: 7/12/17
Score: 5/5
DIRECTOR: Nicholas Ray
PRODUCER: David Weisbart
STUDIO: Warner Bros.
SCREENPLAY: Stewart Stern & Irving Shulman
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ernest Haller
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| James Dean |
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| Natalie Wood sums up postwar teenage angst |
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| The root of Jim Stark's problems: his dysfunctional middle class family. From left to right: Jim Backus, Virginia Brissac, Ann Doran, and Edward Platt |
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| "You're tearing me apart!!!" |
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| Natalie Wood and James Dean |
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| Sal Mineo |
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| Corey Allen and Natalie Wood |
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| Corey Allen brandishes a knife while young Dennis Hopper looks on and smiles |
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| A prime example of imbalanced gender roles |
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| Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood |
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| An explicitly distorted perspective of a mother- visually and subtextually |
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| Dean's Jim tries to reconcile his parents' imbalances |
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| Playing house |
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| A family portrait |
For a film that explicitly establishes itself as a picture about teenage angst and rebellion, Nicholas Ray's cult-favorite 1955 Rebel Without A Cause is about as conservative a film as it could have possibly been while still managing to beautifully display the complicated emotions of its Baby Boomer protagonists. For this reason I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I recognize it as a cinematic treat for dozens of reasons, ranging from the obvious appeal of a just-prior-to-premature-death-James Dean and a visually dazzling film shot in Cinemascope. On the other hand, it's hard to properly make sense of the film's social exploration and messages without realizing that, perhaps unwittingly, Nicholas Ray created a film that actually encourages conformity, patriarchal order, and the institution of traditional gender roles.
To understand more about the era that produced Rebel Without A Cause- the anxiety-riddled 1950s- I immersed myself in research about the early Cold War-era and society's influence over young people. In his assessment, Nils Kristian Bogen makes several conclusions about adolescence in the midcentury, among which are the notions that "youth culture took a much more privatized form" than it had prior to the second World War; "alienation was something that extended far beyond a limited group of people such as artists, beats or intellectuals," and, primarily, that the political sphere of the country left the youth feeling the magnitude of "the powerlessness of ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events." Ray's film pinpoints the conflicts of his characters on these conclusions, particularly the overarching feeling of hopelessness for change that would give way to the apathetic nature of the film's juvenile delinquents.
The title of the film reflects this apathy- the pointlessness with which the characters carry out their petty crimes and dangerous games. Do they flirt with death because they think they are invincible, or because they simply do not care if they live or die? The famous planetarium scene, in which the Griffith Observatory lecturer tells his young audience that "Man existing alone seems an episode of little consequence," seems to encourage the idea that the film's characters generally hold an existentialist worldview that encourages them to partake in a life of crude fun, because, as delinquent Buzz asks James Dean's Jim, "What else is there to do?"
A beautiful juxtaposition of the film puts the adolescent apathy in contrast to the gargantuan telescope of Griffith Observatory; there is no lost irony that while the characters complain about their lives being meaningless and find sport in calling their existences into question, their very lives and the events that they encompass are hyperbolic exaggerations of rebelliousness, over-the-top delinquency that serves as the focal point of a visual spectacle. In other words, the viewer somehow finds herself identifying with the lonely, alienated teenagers of Ray's film, who feel as though their dull lives are headed nowhere, while also participating in a spectacle show of these same lives. The characters are like the stars seen from the observatory- isolated in space, lightyears away from others, and viewed quizzically by an audience.
Here's the thing about Rebel Without A Cause, though: despite Ray's best efforts to create a film that encompasses the postwar anxiety felt by pointlessly rebellious teenagers in the 1950s, his film is by no means a rebellious one. Instead, its conflict hinges on basic Freudian philosophy about families and gender roles. Jim Stark's family is imbalanced- his mother lacks the loving, feminine qualities of the social paragon of womanhood, and his father is much too feminine, depriving his son of the stern male role model he needs to properly develop. Somehow, this setup does nothing to encourage Jim to express himself however he feels comfortable doing so, and instead forces him into a life of pointless delinquency, perhaps hoping that if he acts out enough his mother will turn into a "mother" and his father will turn into a "father." Likewise, Natalie Wood's Judy is trapped in an oedipal complex in which her father refuses to give her the affection she so craves, so in order to satiate her desire for male acceptance and love, she becomes kind of slutty. Finally, Sal Mineo's Plato suffers from a vaguely-defined home life, including a walkout father, a mother who is so carless that she leaves weapons unsecured around the house, and a protective and loving (but apparently ineffective) Black maid. Everyone in this film is looking for a father figure, and when the viewer realizes this, she understands that Rebel Without A Cause is basically encouraging the idea of a return to the patriarchal family order that Postwar America exemplified as a model of happiness and domesticity. Ray acknowledges that teenagers of the 1950s were unhappy and anxious, and instead of attributing these fears to any number of legitimate sociopolitical realities, such as the pressing threat of Nuclear war or the culture of paranoia built around McCarthyism, he puts the blame on any number of interruptions in the glorified Nuclear family unit, effectively arguing that non-traditional families produce delinquents, but not even delinquents with purpose- rebels without a cause.
Rebel Without A Cause is not the first film to tackle issues of unresolved family imbalances- I was reminded of Hitchcock's 1943 Shadow of a Doubt several times while watching- but it's certainly one of the best known examples of one. As much as I enjoyed the film, often for its ridiculousness (this all happened in one day? The knife fight, the cliff car accident, the abandoned mansion, the shootout at the observatory?), but also for its genuinely fine acting performances by Dean, Wood, and Mineo, I was disappointed with its message. I was also surprised that James Dean, an actor whose public image is so dependent on his nontraditional, more feminine masculinity, would end up the figurehead of a movie that essentially advocates for more patriarchal masculine figures (at one point he even tells a police officer that he wishes his father would "knock [his mother] cold just once" to keep her in line).
Rebel Without A Cause is a film worth seeing for many reasons, but it should be taken with a grain of salt, as one man's (flawed) reaction to what seemed like a teenage craze of sudden and unexplainable delinquency, but what actually resulted from an increase of wealth and leisure time in the United States following the second World War. Teenagers were frightened because they had legitimate things to be terrified about, but they were reckless because they belonged to a new generation that could afford to be reckless. While Nicholas Ray and his film tackle this issue, they never successfully reconcile cause and effect, leaving Rebel Without A Cause to stand as a good-intentioned but poorly-moraled tale of juvenile delinquency that has represented a lost generation since its release in 1955.
Sources Used:
"Rebel Without A Cause: Nicholas Ray in the Fifties" by Peter Biskind, from Film Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Autumn, 1974)
"Rebels Without A Cause: Towards an Understanding of Anxious Youth in Postwar America" by Nils Kristian Bogen, published in Studies in Popular Culture, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1989)
"Rebel Without A Cause" from Wikipedia
All photos and gifs from FilmGrab.com, Giphy.com, and Pinterest.
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