James Dean Transfigured: The Many Faces of Rebel Iconography

CHAPTER 2: Disney’s Dean

CHAPTER 2 Disney’s Dean 1955: James Dean died and Disneyland came into existence. Demolition derby cars crisscross the screen as the film opens, at first cruising in an orderly pattern through a dirt-track intersection but then starting to careen wildly. Accompanied by the lilting strains of Strauss waltzes, they smash into each other with increasing abandon, surrounded by clouds of swirling dust. The choreographed mayhem is rendered light and amusing by Strauss’ dance tunes, with each crash comically punctuating the repetitive Viennese rhythm. By the time car 4B collides with a dirt bank and rolls over, viewers have already been assured by the film’s playful tone that no harm will come to its driver. And indeed, he crawls out from underneath his overturned car, removes his helmet, and walks away unscathed with nothing more than a comic look of exasperation. The character is Jim Douglas, the actor is Dean Jones, and we have just witnessed the metaphorical resurrection of James Dean in the 1969 Disney film, The Love Bug (Robert Stevenson, 1969). Fourteen years earlier, on September 30, 1955, James Dean did not escape unscathed from the collision of his Porsche Spyder with a Ford sedan. His death triggered fanatical devotion among young people in the middle fifties, for whom he symbolized the consummate doomed rebel, and although he died that day, his spirit lived on in the form of the iconic teen rebel he helped forge. Rebellion was simmering just beneath the hard surface of the fifties, a decade with a shellacked veneer covering seething discontent. When the rebelliousness of the sixties exploded through the nation’s surface complacency, the teen rebel icon was poised to represent youthful rage. It did not matter that James Dean had not been concerned withpolitics,excepttoexpressdisgustwiththenarrow-mindedintolerance Disney’s Dean 51 of his hometown.1 The rebel figure from the fifties and James Dean himself were adopted as countercultural mascots. As biographer Paul Alexander puts it: Because Dean symbolized rebelliousness and discontent, radicals from the sixties could embrace him. They did too, especially toward the end of the decade. Some observers felt Dean probably even inspired Easy Rider, one of the most influential cultural documents of the sixties. If so, it wouldn’t be surprising since Dennis Hopper, the picture’s director, made no qualms about his admiration for Dean.2 In January 1971, Elroy Hamilton wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that the climax of Rebel Without a Cause, when the L.A. police shoot Plato despite Jim Stark’s protests, “somehow seems to be an early version of the deaths of Easy Rider and, perhaps, of those at Kent State, though the intervening years seem to have added the extra ingredient of hatred.”3 Dean’s screen portrayals of wounded fury served as powerful symbols for sixties countercultural rage, lending an aura of romanticism exploited by Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), and other sixties youth films. Jim Douglas crawls out from under the wreckage of his demo derby car in The Love Bug. 52 James Dean Transfigured But despite the counterculture, the civil rights movement, the black power movement, the gay rights movement, and the women’s movement, the nation’s most successful film of 1969 was Disney’s The Love Bug.4 During the same year as Woodstock and Easy Rider, Americans turned out in droves to see a live-action comedy about a lovable Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of its own. A madcap adventure, the film joined other liveaction comedies released by the Disney studio during the 1960s following the success of The Shaggy Dog in 1959. The Love Bug was 1969’s highest grossing film; it was so successful that the Disney studio didn’t have a bigger hit until it released Splash in 1984.5 In The Love Bug we see the sterilization of dissent, from the opening sequence in which the automobile crash ends not in death or injury, but in the introduction of the uninjured protagonist, who crawls out from under the wreckage. His handsome intensity and passion for racing recall James Dean, but Disney resurrected a “safe” James Dean: Dean Jones. Unlike James Dean, The Love Bug’s protagonist—Jim Douglas—played by actor Dean Jones, is inoffensive and nonthreatening. While there is no evidence that anyone associated with the production of The Love Bug chose to make the film...