James Dean, The Hero,
The Icon, The Defining Moment of the Silent Generation
Ah, yes, James Dean, who indirectly had more impact on those
growing up in the 1950s than even Elvis. Rebel
Without a Cause was venerated among
teenagers, giving those graduating in the mid-1950s the momentum to begin to
understand the latent yearnings we had felt throughout high school. In some
ways it empowered us and in other ways it made us long for a second chance to
go through school asking more questions and perhaps challenging more of the
adults. Rebel was the stark reminder
of how repressed we had been and how compliant we still were. Mainly, the movie
marked us as being a generation that may have been waiting for an opportunity
to rebel and hadn’t yet verbalized it even to ourselves, but rather had chosen
to remain unresisting and silent because we weren’t sure how many of us felt
the same way.
While Dean’s movies were not released in time for us in my own
class to have seen them prior to high school graduation, when I first saw Rebel Without a Cause in Chicago on November 25, 1955, I recall not being
able to move or speak at the end of the movie. I was stunned by the
performance, the message, and the sudden realization that this was a movie that
was ours, one that defined us and our time. Jim Stark was the first screen
character that we knew for certain was who we were, and a cult (albeit a silent
one) was born. While we didn’t completely understand the epiphany, we knew
something had happened to us. (Perhaps that was our defining moment that
all historians missed.)
For more on James Dean, see the attachment below from my book, Growing Up Silent in the 1950s: Not All Tail
Fins and Rock and Roll (2013).
Reflections on a
Rebel
The memorable teen-age movies with which we most identified
include Pat Boone’s “April Love,” the surprise smash hit “Blackboard Jungle,”
Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” and “Love Me Tender,
“Rock Around the Clock” with Bill Haley and the Comets, “Marjorie
Morningstar,” “Peyton Place,” “A Summer Place,” Brando’s “The Wild One,” “The
Young Stranger,” “The Young Don’t Cry,” and the iconic “Rebel Without a Cause.”
Rebel Without a Cause,
while very different from Blackboard,
was perhaps the most famous and influential of the 1950s juvenile delinquent
films. Its sympathy was completely with the adolescent characters in the film,
making it symbolic of the time and creating a legend of its star, James Dean.
Dean was likely the first manifestation of a youth culture that was just
surfacing. Rod Serling described the story
as “a postwar mystification of the young, a gradual erosion of confidence in
their elders … (and) in the whole litany of moral codes. The young just didn’t
believe in them anymore.”[i]
Miller and Nowak say that Rebel is the film that linked affluent teen-agers and rebellion,
leading us finally to question—at least in our own minds—the authority of our
parents and providing the rationale for any overt, even modest, challenge to
parental authority. More importantly, teens from this time forward began to
understand what power a shared culture could hold, and this realization
strengthened their identity as a group.
Rebel caused such
a stir that the Board of Education in Indiana, Pennsylvania (50 miles west of
Curwensville) made a resolution “deploring the exhibition of moving pictures
such as Rebel Without a Cause.”[ii] This, of course, only called attention
to the movie, drawing even more viewers. What made the movie so startling is
that such edicts demonstrate how wide the gulf had become between parents and
teenagers.
Rebel was
venerated among teenagers, giving those graduating in the mid-1950s the
momentum to begin to understand the latent yearnings we had felt throughout
high school. In some ways it empowered us and in other ways it made us long for
a second chance to go through school asking more questions and perhaps
challenging more of the adults. Rebel
was the stark reminder of how repressed we had been and how compliant we still
were. Mainly, the movie marked us as being a generation that may have been
waiting for an opportunity to rebel and hadn’t yet verbalized it even to
ourselves, but rather had chosen to remain unresisting and silent because we
weren’t sure how many of us felt the same way.
The movie made a hero of James Dean and even in his short
career, Dean impacted mid-1950’s teenagers—both girls and boys—like no one
else. (I likely am not alone in having a nearly life-size portrait of James
Dean in my bedroom, his films on videotape, and a cardboard cutout of his
personage that I carry to our reunions.)
I just came back from seeing
“Giant.” All I can say is that Jimmy
Dean wasn’t in enough scenes. I really
like him. …I was on his side all the way. Tom Ball, January 3, 1957
Wild One, Rebel,
Blackboard, and, later Blue Denim,
broke new ground in the movie industry because they managed to do what every
filmmaker dreams of—generate controversy while at the same time stimulate
enormous interest that, at least with our generation, did not wane.
I just bought the DVD of all James Dean’s movies. Tom Ball, December 2010
Seventeen percent (all female) of our class named Marlon Brando
as their favorite actor and 15 percent (mostly boys) named John Wayne. However,
it was the transcendent James Dean in East
of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause,
and Giant (movies respectively
released March 9, 1955, October 27, 1955, and November 24, 1956, months before
they were shown in small towns) who became our hero.
Judith Thompson
Witmer, Class of 1955 and also author of two recent books about
Curwensville’ s social history, Jebbie,
Vamp to Victim and All the Gentlemen
Callers: Letters Found in a 1920s Steamer Trunk, available at The
Strawberry Tree and on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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