Rebel Without a Cause

Depictions of youth culture onscreen are notoriously tricky for two reasons. First, teenagers are all about the new. The latest slang, the newest styles, the most current cultural references are paramount in their world. Second, teens are ruthlessly intolerant of anything they see as artificial. I’m the father of two teenage daughters, and I recently tried to make a joke about leaving someone “on read” and their withering looks were so powerful, I think they singed off some of my eyebrows. So movies meant to depict “authentic” teen culture usually just don’t age well. The references are outdated in a matter of months, and teenagers sniff out and reject anything they see as phoney.

So it shouldn’t surprise me that Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause doesn’t quite carry the same power it probably did when it was released in 1955. The 1950s often get generalized as this happy, utopian time in America. The war was over, business was booming, and everyone had a house in the suburbs with a car in the garage and a tv set in the den. But of course, like every other time in our country’s history, it was also a period of dysfunction and adjustment as gang violence was a legitimate problem and families with more money and leisure time than ever before struggled with how to function now that they weren’t all working on the farm together. It was also a time of repression, paranoia, and profound civil unrest.

This was the world Rebel Without a Cause sought to explore. James Dean, in this, his second of only three films and the only one for which he received top billing, stars as Jim Stark, a teenager recently moved to town. The film begins with him being arrested for public drunkenness, and as he is interviewed by an exceptionally compassionate police officer, it becomes apparent that Jim struggles because of the dysfunction in his family. His parents fight constantly and use their wealth to move from town to town to avoid responsibility for their unhappiness. In the same police station that night is Judy, played by Natalie Wood, who was brought in for curfew violation and who is also estranged from her cold and distant parents. The third juvenile in custody is a disturbed young man nicknamed Plato, played by Sal Mineo. He got brought in for killing a litter of newborn puppies, but there are no parents to call for him, so the housekeeper his mother hired comes to pick him up. The three of them form the story’s core that eventually leads to a violent shootout.

The film works to show young people striving to find their own identity amongst each other and to reconcile the seemingly impassable gap between teens and adults. It was undoubtedly edgy and maybe even somewhat groundbreaking for its time, and I respect that. And certainly, its iconography is indelible – James Dean in that red jacket, the knife fight at the Griffith Observatory above Los Angeles, the game of chicken at the seaside cliff. It’s potent, memorable stuff that has influenced hundreds of films after it.

But for all that, I had a hard time not laughing throughout. The script is downright silly at times with dialogue so corny you could pop it, and the performances which were meant to be visceral and off-kilter come across as mannered and trying way, way too hard. In my jaded, 21^st century eyes, Rebel Without a Cause seems more like an ABC after school special about the dangers of wearing a leather jacket and sassing mom at the dinner table than an important, relevant document about the human condition and the difficulties of being not quite a child and not quite an adult.

I’m glad I’ve seen it so I can now more fully appreciate its resonance in other films, but it’s definitely not one I’ll be returning to any time soon. I’m just going to leave it on “read.”