Rebel Without A Cause Homosexuality

Rebel Without A Cause Homosexuality
Photo by Warner Bros/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
Women and their allies are taking bold steps towards achieving gender equality in the workplace. Here’s how they’re moving us forward.
Published May 15, 2019 Last updated June 5, 2019 This article is more than 2 years old.
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In this mini-series, we look again at media we have loved to consider how it depicted gender. How does it look to a person with a 2019 perspective on gender roles and norms? Warning: Contains spoilers.
How does it hold up? Terribly—and thank goodness!
You know the image: James Dean with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, looking like the archetype of a teenager deep in angst. Rebel Without a Cause is iconic, even today, though the emotional punch of its melodrama has faded with the years.
It’s not just time that makes the movie’s emotional core feel outdated. The progress American society has made in those years subverts the supposed profundity of Dean’s empty rebellion. Dean’s hyper-masculine posturing and rage against his father’s sensitivity are anachronistic to watch in 2019.
When I first watched Rebel Without a Cause, I was expecting a cool, sophisticated movie—the kind that makes you wonder why we don’t make them like that any more. Instead, I couldn’t help laughing at the stilted script and confused character development. I decided to rewatch the film precisely to enjoy its flaws: In an era of #metoo and toxic masculinity, it’s comforting to remember that, actually, we have made some progress.
All too often, decades-old movies depict female characters that far surpass contemporary equivalents. Katharine Hepburn will forever be shockingly cool and non-conforming in every role she plays (and her co-star’s refusal to take advantage of her when she passes out drunk in 1940’s The Philadelphia Story is still an all-too-relevant counter to conventional male behavior.) Leading ladies of earlier decades, from investigative reporter Hildy Johnson in 1940’s His Girl Friday, to Sally Albright in the 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally, are far more unconventional and richly-developed than so many over-groomed movie stars today. And don’t get me started on 9 to 5, a powerful feminist satire made in 1980, in which characters demand many employment rights that women still haven’t achieved nearly 40 years later. Sometimes, watching the great films of old, it can feel as if gender relations haven’t advanced at all.
Not so with Rebel Without a Cause. Here’s a film that can be enjoyed with the smug satisfaction of knowing that at least some standards have changed for the better. One telling example: Early on in the movie, Dean’s character, Jim Stark, laments his father’s failure to beat his mother. “If he had guts to knock mum cold once, then maybe she’d be happy and then she’d stop picking on him,” he complains to a sympathetic police officer. Ah yes, the soothing virtues of domestic violence.
It’s difficult to describe the plot of Rebel Without a Cause without sounding flippant—because the film’s treatment of sensitive issues, including death, is itself markedly glib. It starts in a police station, where the three leads—Jim, played by Dean; Judy, played by Natalie Wood; and Plato, played by Sal Mineo—who don’t yet know each other, have been brought in for being drunk, curfew violation, and shooting puppies respectively (Plato’s shooting puppies is at odds with his sweet, shy demeanor, but is an early sign of his deep emotional trauma). They’re all soon released by police officers who act far more like counsellors than law enforcers. Jim is new to town and, when he goes to high school the next day, he learns the other two arrested teens are his classmates.
Jim quickly gets into a fight with the cool kids (the leader of the pack, Buzz, is of course dating Judy). This then leads to a highly artificial knife fight, set to climactic music, with Jim reacting with agonized fury whenever his opponent Buzz calls him “chicken.”
The two decide to settle their feud with a “chicken run” later that night. The rules of the game: Buzz and Jim drive their cars towards the edge of a cliff and whoever stops their car first is the “chicken.” But Buzz gets his jacket stuck in the car door, can’t roll out, and so plummets off the cliff and dies. The strangely unaffected teenagers flee the scene. Judy and Jim both go home, where Jim argues with his parents about whether he should tell the police (his parents try to persuade him not to.) Jim goes to the police station but is sent away before he can make a report. He meets up with Judy outside their next-door houses, and the two go to an abandoned mansion Plato told Jim about. There they find Plato himself, and the three play at being a family to replace their inadequate ones. The cool kids follow them there, furious in their belief that Jim has reported them to the police, and Plato, alarmed, shoots at them to scare them away. He then runs to the nearby Griffith Observatory; Jim and Judy, who are falling in love, go with to try to console him. But the police soon arrive and, despite Jim’s best efforts, they ultimately shoot and kill Plato. Jim seems briefly devastated, but pulls it together to proudly introduce Judy to his parents.
As Jim’s praise of domestic violence may suggest, the film paints his parents’ tense marriage as a key cause of his teenage angst. Specifically, Jim thinks his father is too weak. Jim reacts in horror, for example, when he comes home to find his father wearing a yellow apron and clearing up a tray of food that he’s dropped. “Don’t… you shouldn’t,” says Jim, aghast that his father would clean up his own mess. Jim’s mother was wearing the yellow apron, serving up eggs and making Jim a packed lunch in an earlier scene, so it’s not as though she’s rejected all traditionally feminine duties. But apparently any sensitivity from his father is a source of great consternation to Jim. Coupled with Jim’s rage over being called a “chicken,” the film presents an angry young teenager who’s deeply invested in upholding a rigid notion of “strong” masculinity.
The main female character, Judy, has her own disturbing relationship with her father. At the beginning of the film, at the police station, she says she ran away because he father called her a “dirty tramp” and roughly rubbed her lipstick off her face. Judy complains her father doesn’t give her attention now she’s no longer a little girl, and won’t even let her kiss him. On the two occasions when she tries (aiming for the lips), he pushes her away and then slaps her. The second time, he apologizes and tries to appease her by calling her “glamour puss,” which he apparently considers an appropriate nickname for his daughter. The Electra Complex (female equivalent of the Oedipal Complex, where a daughter wants to sleep with her father), isn’t particularly subtle.
While the film is painfully out-of-date in its portrayal of gender, critics have heralded it for being ahead of its time in terms of LGBT issues. It’s implied that Plato, who has a photo of actor Alan Ladd in his locker, is gay. The character is clearly in love with Jim, following him around and gazing at him adoringly. An early version of the script reportedly made this sexual tension more explicit , calling for Jim and Plato to share a kiss, but this did not get past movie censors. Geoffrey Shurlock, in charge of the Production Code that set movie moral guidelines, wrote to studio head Jack Warner: “It is of course vital that there be no inference of a questionable or homosexual relationship between Plato and Jim.” And so the kiss was cut. But director Nicholas Ray managed to heavily imply Plato’s homosexuality, in a manner that got past the largely oblivious 1950s censors, but is evident to a modern viewer.
Rebel Without a Cause displays a striking contrast in its portrayal of gay characters versus female characters. Given the rates of progress the US has made in the decades since the film’s premier, this forwarded-thinking approach towards LGBT characters, compared to its markedly backwards stance on gender, goes against what we might expect to see in an old film. After all, LGBT rights have progressed rapidly in the span of just a few decades (homosexuality was illegal in many US states in 2003, but same-sex marriage was legal in the US by 2015), and so we might well expect a 1950s film to be painfully outdated on that front. Meanwhile, women have been demanding fair pay at work and equal responsibility at home for decades. Taking stock today, when several states are rolling back abortion access , it can feel like the conversation around women’s rights has barely advanced. And so it’s impressive to find a movie from more than six decades ago that’s markedly ahead of the curve on gay rights, but so lacking in progressive thought on gender.
Rebel Without a Cause is a comforting reminder that, though experts predict it will take 75 years from now until men do equal amounts of work in the home, and around a century from today until we have gender parity in the C-suite, at least we no longer glorify domestic violence. When it comes to gender, this film is horribly retro—and thank goodness for that.
This story is part of How We’ll Win in 2019, a year-long exploration of workplace gender equality. Read more stories here .
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1955 American film directed by Nicholas Ray

October 27, 1955 ( 1955-10-27 ) [1]

James Dean as Jim Stark
Natalie Wood as Judy
Sal Mineo as John "Plato" Crawford
Jim Backus as Frank Stark
Ann Doran as Carol Stark
Corey Allen as Buzz Gunderson
William Hopper as Judy's father
Rochelle Hudson as Judy's mother
Edward Platt as Inspector Ray Fremick
Marietta Canty as the Crawford family maid
Virginia Brissac as Grandma Stark
Dennis Hopper as Goon
Jack Grinnage as Moose
Frank Mazzola as Crunch
Ian Wolfe as Dr. Minton, lecturer at planetarium
Beverly Long as Helen
Robert Foulk as Gene
Jack Simmons as Cookie
Tom Bernard as Harry
Nick Adams as Chick
Steffi Sidney as Mil
Clifford Morris as Cliff

^ Alan Bisbort (2010). Beatniks: A Guide to an American Subculture . Greenwood Press/ABC-CLIO. p. xxi. ISBN 978-0-313-36574-4 .

^ 'The Top Box-Office Hits of 1956', Variety Weekly , January 2, 1957

^ Variety film review; October 26, 1955, page 6.

^ Harrison's Reports film review; October 22, 1955, page 170.

^ "Complete National Film Registry Listing" . Library of Congress . Retrieved 2020-05-08 .

^ Gamarekian, Barbara (1990-10-19). "Library of Congress Adds 25 Titles to National Film Registry" . The New York Times . ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-08-06 .

^ Finstead, Susan (2009). Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood . Random House . p. 176. ISBN 9780307428660 . Retrieved July 11, 2014 . Latest Wood biography.

^ Higgins, Bill (24 November 2011). "How Natalie Wood Seduced Her Way Into 'Rebel Without a Cause' " . The Hollywood Reporter . Retrieved July 11, 2014 . Tells of the quote being from 1974 interview.

^ Lawrence Frascella; Al Weisel (4 October 2005). Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause . Simon and Schuster. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-7432-9118-7 .

^ "Boze Hadleigh interview with Sal Mineo, 1972" . Archived from the original on September 24, 2015 . Retrieved November 26, 2021 .

^ "DVD Playback: Rebel Without a Cause (1955)". American Cinematographer . 86 (10). October 2005.

^ Jump up to: a b c Graydon Carter (2008). Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates and the Wild Stories Behind the Making of 13 Iconic Films . Penguin Books. pp. 71–72. ISBN 978-0-14-311471-0 .

^ Bosley Crowther (October 27, 1955). "The Screen: Delinquency; 'Rebel Without Cause' Has Debut at Astor" . The New York Times .

^ Jack Moffitt (October 21, 1955). " 'Rebel Without a Cause': THR's 1955 Review" . The Hollywood Reporter . Archived from the original on 4 May 2019.

^ Robert J. Landry (October 26, 1955). "Rebel Without a Cause" . Variety . Variety Inc.

^ Douglas L. Rathgeb (June 8, 2015). The Making of Rebel Without a Cause . McFarland. p. 186. ISBN 978-0-7864-8750-9 .

^ Douglas L. Rathgeb (2015). The Making of Rebel Without a Cause . McFarland. pp. 189–190. ISBN 978-0-7864-1976-0 .

^ Roya Nikkhah (2009-06-21). "To cut or not to cut – a censor's dilemma" . The Daily Telegraph . Archived from the original on 2022-01-12.

^ John Francis Kreidl (1977). Nicholas Ray . Twayne. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-8057-9250-8 .

^ Ian Conrich; Stuart Murray (September 30, 2008). Contemporary New Zealand Cinema: From New Wave to Blockbuster . I.B.Tauris. p. 73. ISBN 978-0-85771-162-5 .

^ "History of Censorship: 1955 - Rebel Without a Cause" . NZ Office of Film & Literature Classification.

^ "Rebel Without a Cause" . Rotten Tomatoes . Retrieved March 30, 2022 .

^ "Empire's 500 Greatest Movies Of All Time" . Empire (film magazine) . 2006-12-05 . Retrieved 2012-08-13 .

^ Jump up to: a b Hollywood Auction 74 . California: Profiles in History . 2015. p. 434. Lot 1255. James Dean’s switchblade from Rebel Without a Cause. (Warner Bros.,1955) Black-handled switchblade manufactured in Italy by Astor. Engraved with the studio production number “WBM 28730” (Warner Bros. Movies). The spring mechanism currently non-operational, but easily repaired. This knife is used by Dean as "Jim" in the thrilling fight scene at Griffith Observatory, where Jim is confronted by Natalie Wood’s leather-clad hoodlum boyfriend “Buzz” (Corey Allen), who is armed with a similar white-handled knife. . . . The knife is fully 13 in. long when opened, and exhibits some abrasions to one side of the handle, incurred when it was thrown to the ground and then kicked towards James Dean in the scene. The knife is accompanied with a letter of provenance from a previous owner, stating that the knife was originally acquired from Red Turner, the property master on Rebel Without a Cause . . . . Est. US$12,000 - $15,000 (winning bid $12,000.). (Auction took place September 30, 2015. Catalog 83MB PDF and Prices Realized List PDF available at ProfilesinHistory.com Archived 2015-09-06 at the Wayback Machine .)

^ Robert Fontenot. "The 'American Pie' FAQ -- What's the meaning of Verse 3 ("Now for ten years we've been on our own")?" . About . Retrieved 24 October 2014 .

^ Aja Romano (Dec 19, 2017). "The Room: how the worst movie ever became a Hollywood legend as bizarre as its creator" . Vox . Since its cult success, Wiseau has tried to pass his film off as a “black comedy” rather than an inept melodrama that’s unintentionally funny, but he’s not fooling anyone.

Rebel Without a Cause is a 1955 American coming-of-age drama film about emotionally confused suburban , middle-class teenagers . Filmed in the then recently introduced CinemaScope format and directed by Nicholas Ray , it offered both social commentary and an alternative to previous films depicting delinquents in urban slum environments. [3] [4] The film stars James Dean , Sal Mineo , and Natalie Wood .

The film was a groundbreaking attempt to portray the moral decay of American youth, critique parental style, and explore the differences and conflicts between generations . The title was adopted from psychiatrist Robert M. Lindner 's 1944 book, Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath . The film, however, does not make any references to Lindner's book in any way. Warner Bros. released the film on October 27, 1955, nearly a month after Dean's death in a car accident on September 30, 1955.

Over the years the film has achieved landmark status for the performance of Dean, fresh from his Oscar nominated role in East of Eden , in his most celebrated role. This was the only film during Dean's lifetime in which he received top billing. In 1990, Rebel Without a Cause was added to the Library of Congress 's National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant". [5] [6]

In Los Angeles during the mid-1950s, teenager Jim Stark is arrested and taken to the juvenile division of a police station for public intoxication. At the station he crosses paths with John "Plato" Crawford, who was brought in for killing a litter of puppies, and Judy, who was brought in for curfew violation. The three each separately reveal their innermost frustrations to the officers; all three of them suffer from problems at home:

On the way to his first day at Dawson High, Jim again meets Judy and offers her a ride. Seemingly unimpressed by Jim at first, she declines and is instead picked up by her "friends", a gang of delinquents led by Buzz Gunderson. Jim is shunned by the rest of the student body but is befriended by Plato, who comes to idolize Jim as a father figure.

After a field trip to Griffith Observatory , Buzz provokes and challenges Jim to a knife fight. Jim beats Buzz in the knife fight, so to preserve his status as gang leader, Buzz suggests stealing some cars to have a " Chickie Run " at a seaside cliff. At home, Jim ambiguously asks his father for advice about defending one's honor in a dangerous situation, but Frank advises him against confrontation of any kind. That night, during the chickie run, Buzz plunges to his death when the strap on his jacket sleeve becomes entangled with his door-latch lever, preventing him from exiting the car in time. As police approach, the gang flees, leaving Judy behind, but Jim patiently persuades her to leave with him and Plato.

Jim later confides to his parents his involvement in the crash and considers turning himself in. When Carol declares they are moving again, Jim protests and pleads with Frank to stand up for him, but when Frank refuses Jim attacks him in frustration, then storms off to the police station to confess, but he is turned away by the desk sergeant. Jim drives back home, and finds Judy waiting for him. She apologizes for her prior treatment of him due to peer pressure, and the two begin to fall in love. Agreeing that they will never return to their respective homes, Jim suggests they visit an old deserted mansion Plato told him about.

Meanwhile, Plato is intercepted by three members of Buzz's gang, who are convinced that Jim betrayed them to the police. They steal Plato's address book and go off after Jim; Plato retrieves his mother's gun and leaves to warn Jim and Judy, finding them at the mansion. The three new friends act out a fantasy as a family. Plato then falls asleep, and Jim and Judy leave to explore the mansion, where they share their first kiss. Buzz's gang find and wake up Plato, who, frightened and distraught, shoots and wounds one of the gang. When Jim returns, he attempts to restrain Plato, but he flees, accusing Jim of leaving him behind.

Plato runs to the observatory and barricades himself inside as more police converge including Fremick who, with Frank and Carol, have been searching for Jim. Jim and Judy follow Plato into the observatory, where Jim persuades Plato to trade the gun for his red jacket; Jim quietly removes the ammunition before returning it, and then convinces Plato to come outside. But when the police notice that Pla
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