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Rebel Without a Cause
Inarticulate teens feel totally ennuious
1955
Review: January 13, 2008
Director: Nicholas Ray
Starring: James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Jim Backus, Ann Doran
Eh, whatever.
THE SETUP:
Troubled teens turn self-destructive because they can’t relate to their parents.
DISCUSSION:
There are some movies that are classics because they’re brilliant and/or technically innovative, and some that become classics not because they were good, but because they were a sensation and captured the zeitgeist of the period, and this is one of the latter. I was eager to see it when my friend brought it over as his contribution to movie night, and was amused throughout, but disappointed to find that, for someone watching in 2008, there’s not much to it except nostalgia.
James Dean plays Jim, first seen falling down drunk in the street and relating with a toy monkey. He is brought into the police station, where we meet a hysterical Natalie Wood as Judy. She’s upset because her dad rubbed off her lipstick and “Called me a dirty tramp! My own father!” Also present is troubled teen Sal Mineo as John, nicknamed Plato, who is at such a desolate place [his parents have abandoned him] that he was found shooting puppies[!]. Meanwhile Jim’s parents come in and start bickering over him, causing him to suddenly wail “You’re tearing me apart!” Clearly these kids’ hormones are set to “High.”
So the next day Jim sees Judy in the street and flirts with her, and she is quite cool to him. “You live here, don’t you?” she asks, to which he replies “Who lives?” Woah! So it’s Jim’s first day at the new school—apparently his family had to move because he had such troubles at his last school—and he finds the students entirely invested in maintaining this hierarchy of illusory status, which they are not very keen on letting him in on. There’s a field trip to the planetarium that day, where they hear a lecture about how man is alone in the universe. Afterward, the local thugs slash Jim’s tires, and Jim reluctantly gets involved in a knife fight. He doesn’t want to fight, but if that’s the way it has to be, they’ll settle all this at a big game of chicken out by the big bluffs that night.
The teens repair home, where Judy finds that her father won’t give her a friendly peck on the lips anymore, and feels all alienated and confused. Then Jim goes home and finds his dad in an apron. Mom is sick and he has dropped a tray and is cleaning up, which seems to send Jim into a mental anguish. I guess because that women’s work, and it kills him to see his father doing it? Regardless, the apron lets us know that Jim’s Dad is clearly emasculated. Jim asks his dad for advice, in a completely vague and unfocused way—I’m not sure a single complete sentence is uttered—then feels all alienated and worse when his father can’t tell him what to do. It’s like my asking you “What should you do when—there’s this guy—you should be a man—and you don’t want to—and you’re confused?” and then expecting you to give me a well-reasoned and insightful answer that specifically responds to my problem. This, for me, seriously inhibited my ability to sympathize with the teens, finding their plight pretty insipid, and generally feeling as though their own stupidity brought their problems on themselves. Which I don’t think is what the movie was going for.
So Jim takes his father’s inability to respond to his vague gibberish as reason to go compete in the Chicken Run, wherein he and Buzz, the main thug, are going to drive toward a cliff, and whoever jumps out first is the chicken. Buzz and Jim have a brief man-to-man about how insane the whole thing is—I tell you, watching this movie, I suddenly understand where the entirety of S.E Hinton’s oeuvre sprung from—then get in their cars, both having a little discussion with Judy—who is entirely behind the idea of this idiotic race, by the way—before being ready to run. Judy assumes that Plato knows Jim, and asks about him. Plato pretends to have known Jim for years, and says “He doesn’t say much, but when he does you know he’s sincere.”
SPOILERS > > >
So they have the race, and Jim jumps out okay, but Buzz’s jacket gets caught on the door and he flies off the cliff to his doom. Okay wait—so regardless of the outcome, both of these kids are planning on ruining their cars? Do these kids have enough money that they can toss cars away like used tissues? Or are they ruining their parents’ cars, or the ones their parents bought for them? In either case, I’m supposed to sympathize with these kids IDIOTIC activities because they, like, feel a little conflicted in a like, totally, you know, way? Uh-uh. Regardless, Jim is now the “chicken,” because he jumped first, and Buzz IS the man, despite being dead. That’s the cruel paradox!
So Jim returns home, Plato at his heels, saying “Gee, if only you could have been my Dad.” Sal Mineo was gay [and ended up dying under mysterious circumstances in some kind of gay slaying], and I’m quite sure we’re supposed to understand that his character her has some homo tendencies—well DUH, he’s obviously got a huge daddy fetish! Soon he’ll be buying Jim cigars and asking to polish his boots. But it’s all because of his missing parents, abandonment issues, and general mental instability. Anyway, Jim comes in and, as you can imagine he’d need to after such a stressful night, hits the milk pretty hard.
Turns out his parents are still up. Did is still a pussy-whipped ineffective wuss, and Mom is a castrating harpy who just wants to say nothing and place the blame elsewhere, while noble Jim continues in his inability to form a coherent sentence, yet becoming furious that his parents won’t understand.
He goes to the cops to try to tell them what happened, in more semi-retarded mumblings, once more wounded when they don’t understand. Talk about someone who could benefit from a word-a-day calendar. But I suspect that if he could form a sentence he’d be perceived as less “sincere.”
Anyway, he runs into Judy, who is now all moony-eyed over Jim since her former boyfriend is a mangled corpse. Hey—girl’s gotta move on, right? They decide to go up to this abandoned mansion [actually the Getty Mansion in exteriors] and find a sanctuary of luvv. They go there, relate, and then Plato shows up, apparently oblivious to the fact that Jim and Judy want to play hide the salami and don’t need a socially-maladjusted gay moron as a third wheel. Maybe he’s named Plato because that’s the only kind of love he can look forward to. Plato also keeps hinting about playing house, and it becomes clear that in his mind, the trio form a kind of surrogate family, with Jim and Judy as the mom and dad. They could be known in town as The Inarticulates. Anyway, Judy and Jim go upstairs to do the hokey-pokey, leaving their maladjusted surrogate son downstairs.
One thing occurs to me, as I keep mentioning how Plato is portrayed here as the socially-maladjusted gay person, and that is that this film can be seen as part of the prevalent attitude in the 50s that being gay MEANT being socially maladjusted and so desperate and screwed-up in one’s affections that you would end up psychotically adopting this tough teen as a surrogate Dad. It’s the sort of thing that led my mother to say, first thing upon my coming out, “Oh, but it’s such a sad life.” How did she supposedly know? Why, because she had seen movies like this one, or hundreds like it.
Anyway, so upstairs Jim and Judy pledge their love, while downstairs the police break in. Plato, who has a gun, shoots a cop and, upon finding Jim and Judy, shouts “Why did you run out on me? You’re not my father!” He then runs to the planetarium, and somehow gets inside, and the police follow him there, and then Jim goes in after him, blah, blah, and it all leads to the expected “tragic” conclusion that leaves us all a little older and wiser, and finds Jim’s dad, having found his masculine supportive side, saying “You did everything a man could,” and “Stand up, and I’ll stand with you.” < < < < < SPOILERS END
Ugh. It’s the sort of thing that makes you say “Wow, our parents really were stupid,” but of course, soon after one thinks that our generation, or any since, really don’t have to many teen movies one can stand behind. My problem here, aside from the simplistic, schematic nature of the writing—it IS its own Cliff’s Notes—is that the movie is trying to claim all this sympathy for its teenagers, when they are in fact INARTICULATE MORONS. If they want their parents to understand them so badly, maybe they should learn to express a thought in words, you know? Smoke signals? Which wouldn’t be such a big deal if the point of view of the movie had some distance on the phenomenon—like, how sad it is that these kids don’t have the basic education it would take to form complete sentences—but no, it seems to side with the kids, the “sincere” kids, and lay the blame squarely at the parent’s feet. Which I’m fine with as well, but don’t tell me the problem stems from the fact that Dad wears an apron and wants to do the dishes, and the other Dad won’t engage in semi-erotic smooches with his daughter. So fine, it’s a relic, a product of its time and precious exactly as that. Fine. It’s just that, when you think about what a sensation this movie was and recall all the guys who idolized and emulated greaser and looked up to the whole James Dean image, again the thought one keeps coming back to is: “My God, our parents were just so incredibly stupid.”
In terms of filmmaking technique or writing skill or acting artistry, move along folks, nothing to see here. This movie is a “classic” just because it was such a sensation and for no other reason. And again, The Outsiders and all of S.E. Hinton’s fiction, and the films made from them spring intact right from here—I didn’t realize that Ralph Macchio was also a derivative of Sal Mineo. Ultimately it’s all too sad to really even think about. Oh dear, a civilization in decline.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you dare to realize what utter morons the general populous of the 50s were.
