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.
You make some really interesting connections across sources here that I didn’t anticipate. So that’s cool! This essay points towards a current in popular culture that has been present at various points in American history: the “corruption” of young (white) women. I too would hazard the same guess that Carter took it as a given that “women could be less rational and more easily hoodwinked.” As I briefly mentioned in class, people feared that jazz would lead to an epidemic of “fallen” women. In today’s culture, there are also oft-voiced fears that girls are getting the wrong messages from pop culture and it could lead to moral depravation.
ReplyDeleteI’ll add to that there were fears that young men could veer off the right path; as you acknowledge, Jim lacks a strong father figure, and Rebel has him drinking and getting in knife fights. Blackboard Jungle is full of At Risk Male Youth. In this film, poverty and lack of quality parenting (after all ,the film tells us that they had mothers working during WWII and therefore not at home) contributes to their delinquency. That said, there is a difference between our young men and women. The fear is that not that they will be weak-willed and subjugate themselves to the wrong kind of person; the fear is that without proper parental guidance they will become that wrong kind of person themselves.
I think that this is a very interesting integration of Rebel Without a Cause's and Asa Carter's explanations of the causes of juvenile delinquency. Besides your great comparison of the two explanations, I think that it should be notable that Carter actually blames the parents of the current generation for corrupting their children. To paraphrase from memory, having themselves been hoodwinked into listening to black artists, Carter's newsletter wrote, today's parents are incapable of directing their children from further black influence. Carter certainly incorporates a lot of racism in his newsletter, but he also builds upon ideas of parental failure that we see in Rebel Without a Cause.
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