Rebel without Applause

"Yoah tearin me apaht!"

The other night a friend and I caught “Rebel without a Cause” on Turner Classic Movies. It made us both think the same thing: this film brought up serious problems, and these problems have not been addressed since. They have just been swept under the cultural tapestry and forgotten.

The film, obviously, confronted the problems of disaffected youth. In the Fifties, and even more in the Sixties, disaffected youth mattered; there were so many of them. Now, we just snort at the idea and ignore them. Spoiled brats.

The movie is also quite psychologically aware; despite the title, it makes a serious attempt to examine and diagnose the causes. Problems that were relatively new at the time. Perhaps it was the sheer volume of young people, but we seem hardly to have even heard of teenagers before the fifties. Nor is it an important concept even now in other cultures. There are no teenagers, in the North American sense, in Korea, or weren’t in the 90s. There are still no teenagers in the Philippines. People segue fairly smoothly there from childhood to adulthood.

The movie gives different specific causes of disaffection for each of its three main characters. James Dean’s character, to begin with, is disturbed by his father’s domesticity, his lack of command of the family.

If this is a cause of young men’s disaffection, as it surely is, it has been made far worse, not better, by the intervening years and the rise of feminism. Men are pushed hard now to be more feminine, women to be more masculine. It took a while to understand, with 21st century presuppositions, why James was so upset with his father, a model of modern domesticity. 

Sal Mineo’s character is disturbed by his parents’ separation, in which both of them seem to have forgotten him. This was my uncle’s explanation, years ago, for the discord of the Sixties. He suggested that his generation, the “Great Generation,” was in no mood to parent responsibly after weathering the Depression and the War. It was time to party, and parenting considerations came a distant second. Playboy and James Bond were products of that generation, not the hippies.

If so, the problem has again become far worse. Far more families now split up, far more mothers are working outside the home, and farming out child care. Far more kids are being comparatively neglected. Even without the old advantage of an extended family nearby.

Natalie Woods’ character, in turn, is disturbed by her father’s withdrawal of affection. He clearly withdraws it because she is too old for it not to seem sexual; it smacks to him of incest. But she does not accept this, and is hurt.

Amazingly, here again the intervening years have only made this problem worse. Since then, the public outcry against pedophilia and especially against males as supposed practitioners of pedophilia has become hysterical. If Natalie’s father did not dare kiss her before supper in 1954, he surely would not now.

Aside from these specific problems, the film also suggests a general cause or two affecting all of them equally. When they move into an abandoned mansion for the evening, tellingly, they automatically fall into the pretense of being a family: Dean the father, Woods the mother, Mineo the son. Why?

The ultimate cause for teenage angst, perhaps, is the painful delay of adulthood. In traditional societies, there is a rite of passage at about puberty. Then one gets married, goes to work, and has children.

It is still the same at least for large portions of the population in places like the Philippines and Korea. But in fairly recent generations—about the fifties, really—North American society began artificially delaying adulthood. And this has left teenagers in a limbo of frustrations. Isn’t this what the radicals of the sixties were saying with their “old enough to fight, old enough to vote” and “we want the world and we want it now”? The transition is so recent that, according to something I was reading yesterday elsewhere on the web, as late as 1970, something like (this is from memory, I’m not inclined to look it up) 35% of the population of Montreal, an advanced major urban centre, had only a grade 5 education. We now expect essentially all teenagers to stay in school and be dependent in one way or another at least into their twenties.

Why wouldn’t they be frustrated and disaffected? At sixteen, George Washington was out on the frontier, with his own money and an established trade. No need for “chicky rides” or drugs for excitement.

But there is a final reason for disaffection given in the movie, and in the end it is the biggie. The film begins, more or less, with all three characters watching a planetarium exhibition featuring the end of the world. A show within a show—the perfect place to suggest a general theme for the film.

That’s it, isn’t it? I’ve long thought that the spectre of nuclear war and sudden end of everything was a major reason for the Sixties. People acted as though there were no tomorrow, because they had been brought up believing there would be no tomorrow.

Especially galling, of course, to those caught in the seemingly endless education treadmill.

Stark's problem: woman on top.

This fear has not really gone. Instead, the fear of nuclear holocaust has been overshadowed by the fear of environmental holocaust, of global warming, of death by overpopulation, by exhaustion of resources, and so on. Most kids today probably still fear the world will end one way or another in their lifetimes.

But the movie does not emphasize the immanence of the end of the world; its hypothesis is some celestial event. The point is not so much the immanence, as the clinical scientific nature of it. And this may be right. The real problem is not just that the end of the world has for so long looked immanent, but that it has, since the scientism of the Fifties, looked meaningless. We will all go up in a puff of smoke, and it simply would not matter to the universe that we had ever existed.

This is the problem of a materialist world view. Nothing matters.

Sadly, this too has gotten worse, far worse, since the movie was made. Church attendance, and the role of religion in mainstream society and culture, have obviously declined rapidly since the fifties, albeit there seems to be a recent revival growing in the US.

It looks now as though “Rebel without a Cause,” like all true art, was a prophecy, and it was a prophecy that was not listened to.

Perhaps it’s time we did.