James Dean Transfigured: The Many Faces of Rebel Iconography

CHAPTER 4: The Teen Rebel

CHAPTER 4 The Teen Rebel T eenagers” were a relatively recent phenomenon in the fifties, having emerged as a separate and unique sector as recently as the middle forties at the dawn of the postwar age. The postwar economic boom made it possible for many young people in the U.S. to prolong their youth and avoid entering their parents’ serious world of work and responsibility for as long as possible. Adolescent leisure time fit in well with the needs of the burgeoning corporate empire in the U.S., for teenagers were a lucrative new market. James Dean came along at just the right time for a segment of the population whose members were still in the process of defining themselves and eager to latch on to shared symbols to distinguish themselves from their parents. With the release of Rebel Without a Cause, “the Teen Dream was born, and Jimmy was speaking for all of us.”1 Rebel’s Jim Stark was wracked with pain over the adult idiocy surrounding him, and his misery spoke for every cringing, unhappy teenager. Becoming a James Dean fan allowed teens to symbolically escape from their parents and create a new extended family for themselves, just as Jim, Judy, and Plato briefly form a substitute family in Rebel Without a Cause. But even better than becoming a James Dean fan was becoming James Dean. With the right jacket and a sullen demeanor, countless teenagers attempted to do just that. In a 1958 poem-like essay published in Esquire magazine, John Dos Passos took note of the phenomenon and contemplated teen veneration of Dean: There is nothing much deader than a dead motion picture actor, and yet, even after James Dean had been some years dead, when they filed out of the close darkness and the breathedout “ 100 James Dean Transfigured air of the second and third and fourth run motion picture theatres where they’d been seeing James Dean’s old films, they still lined up: the boys in the jackboots and the leather jackets, the boys in the skin-tight jeans, the boys in broad motorbike belts, before the mirrors in the restroom to look at themselves and see James Dean; the resentful hair, the deep eyes floating in lonesomeness, the bitter beat look, the scorn on the lip. Their pocket combs were out; they tousled up their hair and patted it down just so; made big eyes at their eyes in the mirror pouted their lips in a sneer, the lost cats in love with themselves, just like James Dean.2 Dos Passos beautifully captures the imitators’ masquerade, with their reliance on mirrors to externalize their deep-felt wounds. But postwar anxiety was more than just a pose; it was easy to become disillusioned in the U.S. in the fifties, when the air itself seemed saturated with hypocrisy. The Eisenhower era brought a self-congratulatory mood to those benefiting from upward mobility and affluence, while shocks to the system—the not-so-distant Depression, World War II and Nazi atrocities, the ongoing anti-Communist inquisition, racist injustice and segregation, the Korean War, and the threat of nuclear annihilation —were mostly repressed. Social drinking was a way for suburban Moms and Dads to anaesthetize themselves and avoid confronting the emptiness at the heart of materialism. Teen disillusionment was a logical response to the insincere platitudes and paranoid ramblings of politicians in the sanctimonious social order of the American fifties. “Perhaps there has not been a failure of communication,” wrote Paul Goodman, author of Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, in 1960. “Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly . . . and is unacceptable.”3 James Dean’s sneer, his every gesture and mannerism expressing the utmost scorn for phoniness, and his early death— interpreted as a decision to opt out—crystalized widespread disillusionment into one symbolic image: the rebel icon. The Teen Rebel 101 In the half-century since the emergence of rebel iconography, it has becomeclearthatteenagershavemoreseriousconcernsthansimplydonning an outfit and affecting an attitude. With the difficulties they face and their lousy reputation, teens are living in tense times. They have become scapegoats for many social ills, blamed for urban violence, crime, drug abuse, drunkenness, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and the spread of AIDS. Antiyouth rhetoric, however, fails to acknowledge that adolescents are victims of staggeringly high rates of poverty, and...