Rebel Without a Cause (1955) reveals the 1950s white suburban family unit, seemingly so perfect on the outside, to be completely dysfunctional. The generation gap plays a big role—the adults simply don't understand what their kids need anymore. When Jim needs—and practically begs Frank Stark for—a strong father figure to intervene, his father babbles and stutters out a silly suggestion to make a list. And when Judy craves love from her father, he forsakes her for her younger brother. It makes sense, then, that Judy goes to other places to find the affection she fails to receive from her father—she looks to rough gangs at her school, and the new, dangerous-looking loner.
If James Dean’s character embodies the youth upstart, then he embodies the qualities of rock and roll which made some adults of the time so squeamish. Seen as sexual, vulgar, uncivilized, and musically meritless, in short rock and roll represented an integration of black music and black values into mainstream white society that some people simply could not stomach.
And boy, did the Natalie Woods of the era like the James Deans. As the infamous segregationist Asa Carter wrote in 1956, insidious Nat King Cole—with "his eye-winking style of slyness at morality" and "sly night club technique vulgarity"—and his amoral black compatriots were around to infect the nation with their "Negroid music with its animalism, its degenerate philosophy, its practiced expression of the Communist theory that sex has nothing of the spiritual." Particularly at risk were the naïve young white women, who, due to the growing appeal of rock and roll, "may, with social approval, admire and idolize, worship and openly adore a Negro singer."
Carter was less concerned with articulating why these women were so weak-willed to fall for such supposedly horrible men and music—his main focus was to broadcast his racist ideologies, and I’d hazard a guess that in his mind, the fact that women could be less rational and more easily hoodwinked was simply a given. However, Rebel offers a plausible reason: these women were missing something crucial and essential in their lives, and rock and roll filled in those holes. Maybe the blame shouldn't lie with the rebels offering an escape, as Carter would contend a year later, or with women and their inherent silliness, but because something was really and truly wrong with American society.
