Thoughts on Rebel Without A Cause (1955)
“You’re tearing me apart!” Jim Stark shouts in one of Rebel Without a Cause’s most famous moments.
His mother, father and grandmother are all arguing about Jim’s incident: he got drunk wandering about the streets of Los Angeles and taken into the juvenile division at the police station. Who is Jim yelling at? All of them, perhaps, but it is important to note that he is in the midst of the only male authority figure in his life getting emasculated every time he opens his mouth. He has no one to look up to. Nicholas Ray places James Dean’s broken face in the center of the frame, emphasizing the centrality of paternal absence both in Jim’s life and in the film.
Rebel Without a Cause was subversive for its time in that it highlighted the emotional confusion of adolescents through multiple angles and revealed how all of them play into one another. Judy, a young student who has a troubled relationship with her father, feels degraded and unloved because he calls her such things as a “dirty tramp” and, on top of everything, refuses to kiss her. The subtext here—too ahead of its time to be expressed overtly—is that Judy’s father is struggling with the fact that he has a sexual attraction to his daughter.
Then there is Plato, a mentally damaged, sexually confused loose canon who possesses a certain innocence he never got to live out during his childhood due to his father’s abandonment and his mother’s neglect. He is unafraid to use a gun but he cannot deal with being left alone. His friendship with Jim morphs into a father-son dynamic, and the undertone of his homosexual attraction to him is much more apparent now than it was then (especially considering the casting of Sal Mineo, one of Hollywood’s first openly gay actors).
They all find each other, and though their connection we see their individual struggles with sexuality, adolescent angst and the consequences of parental neglect all come together to paint a broader portrait of troubled, rebellious American youth in the 1950s that is as relevant today as it was then.
His mother, father and grandmother are all arguing about Jim’s incident: he got drunk wandering about the streets of Los Angeles and taken into the juvenile division at the police station. Who is Jim yelling at? All of them, perhaps, but it is important to note that he is in the midst of the only male authority figure in his life getting emasculated every time he opens his mouth. He has no one to look up to. Nicholas Ray places James Dean’s broken face in the center of the frame, emphasizing the centrality of paternal absence both in Jim’s life and in the film.
Rebel Without a Cause was subversive for its time in that it highlighted the emotional confusion of adolescents through multiple angles and revealed how all of them play into one another. Judy, a young student who has a troubled relationship with her father, feels degraded and unloved because he calls her such things as a “dirty tramp” and, on top of everything, refuses to kiss her. The subtext here—too ahead of its time to be expressed overtly—is that Judy’s father is struggling with the fact that he has a sexual attraction to his daughter.
Then there is Plato, a mentally damaged, sexually confused loose canon who possesses a certain innocence he never got to live out during his childhood due to his father’s abandonment and his mother’s neglect. He is unafraid to use a gun but he cannot deal with being left alone. His friendship with Jim morphs into a father-son dynamic, and the undertone of his homosexual attraction to him is much more apparent now than it was then (especially considering the casting of Sal Mineo, one of Hollywood’s first openly gay actors).
They all find each other, and though their connection we see their individual struggles with sexuality, adolescent angst and the consequences of parental neglect all come together to paint a broader portrait of troubled, rebellious American youth in the 1950s that is as relevant today as it was then.