Landlords Versus Tenants in the Land of Teenage Dreams
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Landlords Versus Tenants in the Land of Teenage Dreams
The family in Rebel Without a Cause is square because James Dean blocks them that way. His hysterical, weeping face stamps everything around it as normal and only nominally lifelike. James Dean is an eccentric, but a deeply conservative one. Before Rebel Without a Cause, one could go to the movies and find the type of eccentric who just wanted to be alone, the type who wanted to join the circus or the navy, who quoted from poetry or ratted out his friends but was kind to animals. After Rebel, it seems, there were simply rebels, squares and serial murderers. The rebel recieves women, money, noteriety, life; until finally he's down on his knees, weeping, in front of his brand new car--or in a sandstorm, if you're Nicholson in Five Easy Peices--because he can't have more. The squares gasp in horror, go grey en masse, and applaud near the end. The serial killer--start with Sal Mineo, the Micheal Myers of his day, squeaking with his last voice before the mask goes on and he begins to "represent" things--is everyone who stands outside of this dynamic, any jerkoff who wants something he can't have. The implication is that if you've worked hard enough for what you want, or have fallen kneeward for it, and still can't have it, then what you want must be murder or something like it.
I used to blame this on Nicholas Ray, the director James Dean sort of strutted all over when Rebel was made. After seeing They Live by Night, I'm not as quick to judge. Night is a perfectly balanced teenaged fantasy of us versus them, two lovers on the run from the law in a film that predated the Starkweather murders by ten years, something any teenager, even Charlie himself, could have latched onto to build his or her dreams of transgression and real beauty, and could still, if 1) the thing were available on DVD and 2) they weren't diverted by the big, flashing Rock and Roll road sign Ray erected in front of it seven years later.
Here's what 21st Century non-film-geek teens are missing. Early in They Live by Night, Granger's foot is hurt in a prison break and he has to be left behind by the older men escaping with him. Whether or not they come back for him determines what kind of movie this is going to be. That they send back their accomplice's daughter, Cathy O'Donnell (who appears in a fedora and wet, as from out of a dream), is a roundhouse whollop to what is expected, an underscoring of how loose and unprofessional--how familylike--their organization is. They are all connected, driven by quick desires and vague future needs. That is to say that the family relationships in They Live by Night feel truer than in Rebel. They're contingent. They frame the fantasy of escape with reality, and show what a family is like to leave, and what it's like to (unsucessfully) create one. Where Jim Backus, as James Dean's father, sort of hunches his shoulders and walks back in forth like a mechanical target, Farley Granger's "family"--the toughs who helped break him out of prison--push back and fill up space. They love him, depend on him, need things from him he finds it difficult not to give them. They rob banks together.
Forties-crime-film eccentricity abounds in the first film: Granger's two fathers bicker like the Honeymooners: one is a coolheaded Alice in the body of Dick Butkus, the other a hotheaded, murderous Ralph. The woman who sells Granger out is hotheaded and caring, brittle when conscious-stricken. And Cathy O'Donnell is incredible, at once a teenaged auto mechanic and a siren, dreaming tough and drifting in her own head, always acting and sometimes directing the action. By comparison, Natalie Wood in Rebel appears as a figment of James Dean's imagination, insecure and pliable. She seems as likely to be ignored by him in the future as by her distant father, in which case she might simply disappear in a whiff of smoke and a truncated crying jag.
If Farley Granger had had a little more time, in a different sort of world, he might have been able to set things up (modestly) for everyone, created a family above ground and unhounded by basic illegality. He would have wanted to. The fantasy he lived by was doomed but had love and responsibility for others at its core. My feeling about James Dean is just the opposite: that, after the credits roll, he'll have all the time in the world he needs to become a landlord, or to set himself up nicely in real estate, where he'll never have to be bothered by the "phony" world again.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 10:12 AM,
