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INTRODUCTION The Rebel Icon Icons are the most significant and ambivalently, the most unintelligible of images. —david gerald orr “the icon in the time tunnel” O ne of the legacies of American films of the fifties is their introduction of an internationally recognizable shorthand for dissent. The angry, alienated teen rebel who sneered at Eisenhower -era complacency from the big screen provided the world with a larger-than-life embodiment of the idea of nonconformity. At the time, there were Americans engaged in protracted struggles against Cold War politics and racial segregation, but their acts of rebellion failed to fire the public’s imagination as dramatically as did Hollywood’s sullen teens. The teen rebel transcended its origins in iconoclasm—in the rejection of the status quo—and was itself elevated to iconic status, becoming a revered object of devotion. Over the decades that followed, the rebel figure permeated the globe, and its charismatic presence is still felt in the twenty-first century. But the rebel is a particularly ambiguous icon, with meanings that contradict each other and an extraordinary ability to conform to any purpose. On the one hand, the teen rebel icon is a supremely commercial product used to sell cars and jeans and the complete array of capitalism’s flotsam and jetsam; but, on the other hand, it still has the power to surprise when used in innovative, provocative ways. Understanding the parameters of the rebel icon’s contradictory appearances can illuminate popular iconography’s contemporary functions. Long detached from its original spiritual and religious functions, most iconography is now secular but 2 James Dean Transfigured nonetheless deeply embedded in society. It creates the impression of shared identity by inviting its beholders to join its ranks, not just in admiration but in imitation. As such, it is one of the variables in the array of “lifestyle choices” confronting the contemporary consumer, for whom a “new look” can be just a credit-card purchase away. However, its status as a commodity does not diminish its power to be profoundly meaningful for individuals who incorporate it into their own personal and local contexts. As American pop culture iconography has spread throughout the world, it has displaced local icons and contributed to the erasure of unique cultural memory. And yet there are texts from around the world that defy global homogenization and show that American cultural hegemony can be resisted by turning American iconography against itself. This is a study of a variety of texts from the United States and abroad that use the teen rebel icon in disparate ways. Included here are films, advertisements , poems, fiction, and Web sites. Films dominate the analysis because the teen rebel achieved its legendary status on screen, and that is where the presence of the rebel icon is most keenly felt. The huge number of texts that use the rebel figure makes it impossible to even come close to being comprehensive. I have sought diversity and have chosen texts that use contrasting strategies. Countless texts use rebel iconography in interesting ways, and it is my hope that the examples I have chosen to analyze will encourage a reevaluation of other examples that can offer up additional complexities and contradictions. The young rebel figure firmly ingrained in our cultural imagination carries with it traces of Hollywood’s screen rebels of the fifties, and none more than James Dean, a point that film scholar Jon Lewis makes when he writes in his study of teen films, The Road to Romance and Ruin, that “it is safe to say that after 1955, youth’s resort to a kind of mannered anomie —on screen and on the streets—was patterned after James Dean’s performance in Rebel Without a Cause.”1 The generation that came of age in the early fifties is likely to consider Marlon Brando, whose fame preceded Dean’s and who was idolized by him, as the ultimate rebel, but during the following fifty years, before his death in 2004, Brando’s image was repeatedly revised (and reviled) as a result of his complicated public and personal life. Most young people are unfamiliar with the tough-talking young biker Brando; it is Dean, by virtue of his early death, who became a legendary figure of inarticulate teenage angst. Despite its ubiquity, then, the rebel icon is a relatively recent invention with a specific lineage in which James Dean figures prominently. This is not a book about James Dean; it is about...

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