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Rebel Without a Cause
James Dean
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There's a scene in the beginning of Rebel Without a Cause in which James Dean howls in pain and fear at his bickering parents, "Stop it! You are tearing me apart!" His grief, loneliness, and torment are palpable. When I played Rebel for a Dartmouth College freshman seminar titled "Beatniks, Hot Rods, and the Feminine Mystique: Sex and Gender in 1950s Films," the students engaged in a collective wince, so completely did they feel Dean's choking ache.

So what is it that makes James Dean-- who died a full half-century ago this week in a car wreck on September 30, 1955-- such a potent icon? It wasn't just that my students related to some sense of "cool" style-- Dean images and look-alikes frequently appear in Gap ads-- but to the immediacy and the power of his performance as well. Fifty years later, Rebel Without a Cause, and Dean himself, speak to them in a way that characters from "The OC" and Napoleon Dynamite simply cannot. What gives Dean this lasting power to speak to young people across the generations?

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Watching a Dean film now-- there are only three-- I think the answer is, in part, because the great, magnetic Dean reads as gay. Indeed, to a large degree he read as gay in the 1950s as well.

There's no doubt that Dean changed the face of American masculinity. In his short career-- three major films, two posthumously released over a period of 18 months-- James Dean was simply riveting. This was due, in part, to the simple fact that Dean-- along with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift-- had essentially reinvented the very concept of the "American man." With their highly emotional screen presence and their Actors' Studio emotionalism, they showed post-war Americans that men could have feelings. Hell, between Clift hysterically shouting outside of Olivia de Havilland's door in William Wyler's The Heiress, Brando sobbing and screaming "Stella" in Elia Kazan's 1951 film Streetcar Named Desire, and Dean, curled up in a fetal position and drunkenly weeping during the opening credits of Rebel Without a Cause, the message was clear: real men cried, sexy men cried; the days of the strong, silent American hero-- John Wayne, Gary Cooper-- were over. Without Clift, Brando, and Dean, there would be no Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, Johnny Depp, or Brad Pitt. And it's no surprise that all of these men were outside of the sexual mainstream. Clift was homosexual, Brando was bisexual, and Dean-- from what we can gather from various memoirs was probably bisexual with a strong predisposition to men.

Ambiguities of victory

But Dean, more than Brando and Clift, embodied more than a new masculinity-- he also marked out the beauty and emotional contours of a new social type: the teenager. Dean was born in 1931, making him seven years younger than Brando and 11 years younger than Clift. He was part of that first generation of adolescents who epitomized the fears and confusions of post-war America. The US may have won World War II, but it was also thrown into a shocking transition-- nothing was the same: the post-war economic boom radically transformed how and where people lived and worked, society was both sex-possessed and family-obsessed, and sex and gender roles shifted. These changes led the way for the first gay rights groups such as the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis as well as the nascent women's movement. These were, not youth movements per se, but they certainly created clear spaces in the cluttered forest of popular culture to allow young people to have new identities.

Meanwhile, clothing retailers and the new medium of TV asserted a squeaky-clean, sanitized version of "teens," even as the emerging popularity of rock and roll and the rise of "juvenile delinquency" contradicted all that. James Dean managed to capture all the pain young men and women on the cusp of modern adulthood felt as they faced a world whose traditional moral and ethical moorings had become dislodged. And, excruciatingly, the whole world seemed to be watching. And a great deal of this pain-- and exploration and understanding how the world might work in a new way-- was about sexuality.

While other 50s-era movie teens-- Troy Donahue, Tab Hunter, and Frankie Avalon-- now look like processed, undigested Hollywood studio fodder, Dean's portrayal of teenagers remains fresh and very sexy. Then as now, Dean is a weird juxtaposition of "hot" and "cool"-- sexy and distant. With his heavily-lidded eyes and yielding body language, he's a gorgeous sexual object. In East of Eden, Abra (played by Julie Harris) frantically confides to her lover Aaron (Richard Davalos) about Dean's troubled character Cal: "He has animal eyes, he's like an animal watching us." And it's true-- even now, watching Dean 50 years after his death, we can feel an urgency in his gaze, a demand that we watch him and deal with his sexuality. And his sexuality-- then, and certainly now-- has the look and feel of "gay": it isn't macho, it's narcissistic in a self-reflective way that makes us both aware of it and drawn to it; open to viewers and inviting them in-- so very different from the masculine sexiness of more straight stars.

Dean's sexual heat is in large part, a result of a glorious passivity on his part. Dean's persona is a vessel, a slate upon which we can project our own longings and the culture's shifting identities. In the 1950s-- and now-- Dean resides in some liminal space between straight and gay, between black "cool" and white propriety, between working-class punk and rich-boy-gone-bad, between urban hip and heartland wholesomeness. (Film critic and historian Molly Haskell has noted that Greta Garbo works the same way: she is a screen upon which we project our own fantasies and desires.)

In many ways Dean's complete vulnerability-- which forms a succinct and clear bridge of emotional androgyny between the repressive 1950s and our own time-- remains the quintessence of teen angst and of a specific social form of gay maleness. Dean is, in some ways, the first metrosexual, or maybe the first postwar, proto-gay, image. Dressed in his jeans and red jacket and slouched against the hood of a car Dean still communicates the essence of "cool"-- but beneath that pose we can also see the complete rejection of a prior code of American masculinity.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com