A disorienting
Journey through
A society whose
Cherished institutions have all
Gone bottom up.”
Rebel’s critique of conventional fifties life:
•Sterility of conventional life
•Absence of meaning, adventure. . .
•Absence of role models
•Failure of life built on materialism
“Don’t we buy you anything you want,
Jim?”
• Failure of society to provide meaningful ways
to live
– Jim’s father is inadequate, weak,and indecisive:
– “You give me a direct answer!”
– “10 years! I want an answer now!”
– He’s not a man in the 50’s sense--so Jim doesn’t
know how to live as a man
Hey, Jim boy, you thought I was mom?
– Jim’s mom is cold and domineering
– Judy’s father withholds affection
– Plato’s parents are gone
• Jim shows the signs of alienation, of
being a “stranger in a strange land,”
• These are the feelings one will have if
one is aware that one is a unique
individual in a conventional society.
• No one is like you
• No one speaks your language
• No one understands you
• Everyone else is playing a game by
rules which you don’t understand
• Jim has a sense of honor that he can’t
articulate.
• He asks his father for answers but his
father won’t or can’t provide them.
• Thoreau: I’ve never heard a word of
good advice from anyone older.
• Being unable to articulate and
understand his own “genius,” his own
instinctive moral code, Jim is open to
manipulation.
If Buzz says “you’re chicken,” Jim feels
Obliged to show him that he’s not, even
Though what he’s going to do is not a real
Test of courage or of manhood--it’s a
stupid
And lethal game.
• Jim understands what Romantics teach:
that you can’t rely on others to decide
how to live.
• His mother asks “Do you think the other
boys will turn themselves in?”
• Jim: “It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter!
It doesn’t matter!”
• His parents are hypocrites:
• Dad: “You can’t be idealistic your whole life.”
In other words, ignore your values if they’re
going to get you in trouble. Forget about
integrity. But Jim has too much of the
Romantic in him for that.
• Jim: “Just tell a little white lie..?”
Jim knows better than they do:
“Just once, I’d like to do something right.”
• He’s searching for an authentic way to
live and the best he can do at the
moment is to have integrity.
• That’s why Jim is anguished: (“You’re
tearing me apart!”) he feels the necessity
of living his own way but he doesn’t
know what that way is.
• He has to do what he thinks is right, no
matter what his parents say or what his
future self might think.
• Jim exhibits the anguish that Romantics
say one will feel when one is trying to
be authentic while the world is
punishing your for it and you yourself
are not yet sure what your true path is.
• He is afraid of his freedom but can’t
help but try to be himself.
• Jim is alienated from his world, a world
in which no one listens to him, no one
sees who he really is, everyone tells
him what to do
• He goes to the police station to talk to
Ray about the chicky run and the cops
on duty are too busy to pay any
attention. Frustrated once again, he
turns away.
• He has tried to be a man, to take
responsibility for his actions but adult
society won’t let him.
• His parents dishonor and disrespect
him. They tell him he shouldn’t value
who he is now.
• Dad “You’ll learn when you’re older.”
• Mom: “In ten years this won’t mean
anything to you.”
• But Jim understands what Romantics
understand:
• You live now, in the moment and you
have to be true to your self now. You
can’t discount yourself and your beliefs
because of what some hypothetical
future you might believe.
• You can’t let the future make the
present meaningless.
• Other kids aren’t any better. All they can
think of is “kicks”
• Or they’re conformist popularity junkies
• Judy to Jim: “You shouldn’t believe what I say
when I’m with the rest of the kids. Nobody
acts sincere.”
• Sincerity =authenticity.
• J,J & P are not natural rebels--they’d like to
conform but they can’t find anything
worthwhile to conform to.
• That’s why they’re “rebels without a cause.”
• Notice how sexually tame the film is.
Judy adheres to the values of a “good girl”
of the fifties.
She and Jim fall in love and they kiss
But there’s no suggestion that they
“go all the way.”
• And Plato clearly has a homosexual
crush on Jim. But that’s an idea that could
not be expressed in any mainstream
film of the fifties. It was “the love that
could not speak its name.”
• Before the “chicky run,” Jim asks Buzz,
“Why do we do this?”
Buzz answers, “Well, ya gotta do something!”
When conventional life gives one no
opportunities for excitement, for adventure,
for living life to the full,
People will invent ways, even if they’re lethal
and meaningless.
People yearn for something to give their lives
passion
• Society tries to ignore real problems
– Jim’s parents want to let the chickie-run
death just go away
– They don’t want to be involved.
“We are all involved!”
• You can’t retreat into your private life
and ignore things that are unpleasant
• Identification with the
disenfranchised, misfits, outcasts…
Plato: “What does he know about
man alone.”
Jim, Judy, Plato don’t fit in with other
kids anymore than they can see
themselves fitting into the adult
world
• Parents fear and reject youthful
sexuality--Judy’s father
• Sense of doom in first post-bomb
generation: planetarium scene:
“man is an episode of little
consequence”
“It’s all over. The world ended.”
• Jim, Judy & Plato attempt to
imagine alternative social roles
Judy and Plato, flee to the deserted
• Jim,
mansion. The mansion becomes a special,
sanctified playhouse within which Jim, Judy,
and Plato live out imaginative possibilities
inconceivable within their real families. They
play with their old identities, improvise new
ones, and try out a shifting series of
pretended roles and relationships. They turn
life into an ebullient game. As they parody
adult tones and voices in a cascade of
comic impersonations, they demonstrate
that they apparently can be anything-that
the notion of a fixed social
identity is an arbitrary limitation on one's true
imaginative multiplicity. They show us that
personal identity doesn't have to be narrow and
formulaic (as it is for the adults in the film), but can
be experimental, shifting, open-ended, and
playful. They show us that social relations can be
stimulating and creative. Their final impersonation
is to play at being a family (with Jim and Judy as
the mother and father, and Plato as their son)-a
family organized along entirely different lines from
the families they grew up in: one in which
relationships are not rigid, authoritarian, and
hierarchical, but egalitarian, democratic, loving,
and sensitively responsive to one another's needs.
It is against this background of wide-spread cultural anxiety and
uncertainty that the performances of Marlon Brando in The Wild
One and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause should be
viewed. Brando and Dean were dangerous and exciting
actors precisely because they tapped into pervasive
undercurrents of dissatisfaction in fifties society. Nicholas
Ray's Rebel Without a Cause is stunningly in tune with the
Beat sensibility. Ray's film demonstrates that if the Beat
movement is not confused with its external trappings,
its spirit can be captured without even alluding to the Beats. Ray
mounts a powerful critique of the social and emotional
dysfunctionality of the American family, and, specifically, of the
failure of the married-to-his-job father to provide a role model for
his son to emulate. (The father as missing-person is one of the
secret subtexts of many Beat works.) Ray documents the
materialism and spiritual aridity of suburban life. In the planetarium
scene, he breathtakingly communicates the dread and doom felt by
the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the mushroom
cloud. And, on the positive side, in the performances of James
Dean and Sal Mineo, he captures one of the most important
emotional dimensions of Beat culture: its tenderness toward and
identification with the weak and disenfranchised members of
society.
• And ultimately the film ends with a very
conventional happy ending as Jim and
his parents reconcile, presumably to
live happily ever after in fifties nuclearfamily bliss.
(His mother even gives an affectionate
look at his father.)
• This conventional-seeming ending has led to
controversy over the film’s meaning. Peter
Biskind in “Seeing is Believing” sees “Rebel’s
message as a profoundly conformist one:
That Jim Stark’s problems would be solved if
his too-weak dad and his too-strong mom
would assume their traditional gender roles. .
. nothing short of a restoration of the fifties’
suburban ideal.”
• Supporting this view is the fact that the
most sympathetic figure in the film and
the only one Jim thinks he can talk to is
Ray Fremick the policeman who works
in juvenile hall. The police are of course
a standard symbol of authority and to
make a policeman the only one who
understands Jim must mean something.
• On the other hand, “”Rebel is a radical
work, criticizing the ossified roles and
conventions of mainstream society and
offering an alternative. . . Jim, Judy and
Plato work out ‘a new way of caring for
each other.’ The film’s basic message is
“listen to these young people, listen to
their ideals.
• Chris Fujiwara says that “perhaps Ray’s
intentions was to espouse neither
rebellion nor conformity but to document
the contradiction between the two in
American society.”
• Seen today, the film is neither a pure
paean to youth’s unbridled selfexpression nor a conservative tract on
the need to shore up the patriarchal
nuclear family. Instead, it’s a film in
which the urge to rebel and the longing
to conform coexist in a state of peak
tension.