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Teen spirit
Fifty years after his death, James Dean remains an icon of adolescent angst
BY MICHAEL BRONSKI

There is a scene in the beginning of Rebel Without a Cause in which James Dean howls in pain and fear at his bickering parents, "Stop it! You are tearing me apart!" His grief, loneliness, and torment are palpable. When I played Rebel for a Dartmouth College freshman seminar titled "Beatniks, Hot Rods, and the Feminine Mystique: Sex and Gender in 1950s Films," the students engaged in a collective wince, so completely did they feel Dean’s choking ache.

It’s amazing — appalling, really — how quickly popular culture dissipates. On the first day of class I had reeled off the names of some of the most notable entertainers of the decade and all my students, most born in 1986, drew blank stares. Except for one gay man, no one had ever heard of Bette Davis or Judy Garland or Liz Taylor. In spite of frequent Marlon Brando imitations on Late Night with David Letterman and Debbie Reynolds’s regular appearances on Will and Grace, their names could have belonged to obscure peasants in 17th-century France. But when I mentioned James Dean, everyone’s eyes lit up. While most of them couldn’t name a James Dean movie, they all knew James Dean. They knew what he looked like, they knew the image, they knew the attitude. He was immediate to them, real in a visceral way.

So what is it that makes James Dean — who died a full half-century ago this week in a car wreck on September 30, 1955 — such a potent icon? It wasn’t just that my students related to some sense of "cool" style — Dean images and look-alikes frequently appear in Gap ads — but to the immediacy and the power of his performance as well. Fifty years later, Rebel Without a Cause, and Dean himself, speak to them in a way that characters from The OC and Napoleon Dynamite simply cannot. What gives Dean this lasting power to speak to young people across the generations?

THE MAKING OF A MAN

In his short career — three major films, two posthumously released over a period of 18 months — James Dean was simply riveting. This was due, in part, to the simple fact that Dean — along with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift — had essentially reinvented the very concept of the "American man." With their highly emotional screen presence and their Actors’ Studio emotionalism, they showed post-war Americans that men could have feelings. Hell, between Clift hysterically shouting outside of Olivia de Havilland’s door in William Wyler’s The Heiress, Brando sobbing and screaming "Stella" in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film Streetcar Named Desire, and Dean, curled up in a fetal position and drunkenly weeping during the opening credits of Rebel Without a Cause, the message was clear: real men cried, sexy men cried; the days of the strong, silent American hero — John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Randolf Scott — were over. Without Clift, Brando, and Dean, there would be no Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Johnny Depp, or Brad Pitt.

But Dean embodied more than a new masculinity — he also marked out the beauty and emotional contours of a new social type: the teenager. Dean was born in 1931, making him seven years younger than Brando and 11 years younger than Clift. He was part of that first generation of adolescents who epitomized the fears and confusions of post-war America. The US may have won World War II, but it was also thrown into a shocking transition — nothing was the same: the post-war economic boom radically transformed how and where people lived and worked, society was both sex-possessed and family-obsessed, and sex and gender roles shifted. Meanwhile, clothing retailers and the new medium of television asserted a squeaky-clean, sanitized version of "teens," even as the emerging popularity of rock and roll and the rise of "juvenile delinquency" contradicted all that. James Dean managed to capture all the pain young men and women on the cusp of modern adulthood felt as they faced a world whose traditional moral and ethical moorings had become dislodged. And, excruciatingly, the whole world seemed to be watching.

While other ’50s-era movie teens — Troy Donahue, Tab Hunter, and Frankie Avalon — now look like processed, undigested Hollywood studio fodder, Dean’s portrayal of teenagers remains fresh. Then as now, Dean is a weird juxtaposition of "hot" and "cool" — sexy and distant. With his heavily lidded eyes and yielding body language, he is a gorgeous sexual object. In East of Eden Abra, played by Julie Harris, frantically confides to her lover Aaron (Richard Davalos) about Dean’s troubled character Cal: "he has animal eyes, he’s like an animal watching us." And it is true — even now, watching Dean 50 years after his death, we can feel an urgency in his gaze, a demand that we watch him and deal with his sexuality. Unlike Brando, who despite the emotional sensitivity he brought to his roles often comes across as an aggressive sexual predator, Dean signals us to take care of him. Even in George Stevens’s 1955 Giant, the only film in which Dean’s character has some degree of social agency and power, we respond to him as needing to be cared for.

This hot/cool dichotomy — which generates such strong emotional and sexual responses — is, in large part, a result of a glorious passivity on Dean’s part. In many ways Dean’s persona is a vessel, a slate upon which we can project our own longings and the culture’s shifting identities. In the 1950s and now Dean resides in some liminal space between straight and gay, between black "cool" and white propriety, between working-class punk and rich-boy-gone-bad, between urban hip and heartland wholesomeness. Film critic and historian Molly Haskell has noted that Greta Garbo works the same way: she is a screen upon which we project our own fantasies and desires.

In many ways Dean’s complete vulnerability — which forms a succinct and clear bridge of emotional androgyny between the repressive 1950s and our own time — remains the quintessence of teen angst. It isn’t that Dean’s teen-rebel persona is somehow "universal" — today’s teens live in a world that is far more complicated, sophisticated, and emotionally chilling than that of 50 years ago — but that he taps into a deep, core feeling of abandonment. Sure, dressed in his jeans and red jacket and slouched against the hood of a car Dean still communicates the essence of "cool" — but beneath that pose we can all see the terrified boy frightened of his emotions and the world around him, of who he is and who he might become.

Michael Bronski's newest book is Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press). He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com.


Issue Date: September 30 - October 6, 2005
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