Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film of the movie trailer for Rebel Without A Cause.
DVD Review
Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, directed by Nicholas Ray, 1955
One does not have to a consummate academic historian of the modern bourgeois family (since the 1700s), like the late Professor Lawrence Stone, to realize that being a teenager, of any class and in any period in the modern era, is fraught with terror, danger, loneliness, and maddening experiences (and those are the "good" teenage days) as one tries to cope with a world that one has not made, or been asked about making. While the locus of teen angst and alienation issues shift over time, and as a general proposition seems to me to have gotten more baffling in the modern hi-tech world, they tend to follow that above-mentioned pattern. Except that the rich and the middle class have more resources than the working class and poor to “cushion” the blows.
And that last statement kind of sums up the film under review, Rebel Without A Cause. The troubles of one deeply alienated, tongue-tied, slightly oedipal, middle class teen, Jim Stark (played by "live fast, die young and make a good corpse", short film-careered, hard-living, hard-driving, and I don’t mean just automobiles, but eternally worshipped “heartthrob”, James Dean), his wanna-be girl, Judy, nice, middle class, girl gone slightly wrong, ever so slightly incest-driven (played by Natalie Wood), and his wanna-be friend the slightly trigger-happy, family-abandoned forever “lost” boy, Plato, (played to a tee by Sal Mineo) seem minor compared to today’s mass assault on teen sensibility.
The film nevertheless disclosed in its own way the attempt to gather in the youth tribe (or, rather tribes, old Jim seems to have made a few "bad boy" enemies from another "tribe,"including one played by a very young Dennis Hopper) as our hero, Jim, tries to assert his manhood, his personhood, and his "style" in a post-World War II up- and-coming "little boxes" bourgeois community (California "little boxes", of course) that just wants to everybody, including said wayward teens to make “nice.” Making nice meaning, in those days, keeping your eyes straight forward with blinkers on, not stepping out of line, or else, and please, please don't say anything political that would offend anyone to the left of father "Ike". Actualy don't say anything political at all, as it turned out. Rumblefish, The Flatlanders or any of S.E. Hinton’s master works this is not, but as a slice, a thin slice, of dealing with the complexities of teen angst, and how adult writers and filmmakers think that it plays out as a reflection of their society at a particular period, it is worth a watch.
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