the coat off his
back
by Douglas Messerli
Stewart
Stern (adapted from a book by Irving Shulman and a story by Nicholas Ray),
Nicholas Ray (director) Rebel without a
Cause / 1955
Unlike the missing parents of West
Side Story—a work which shares many tropes with Rebel without a Cause—most of the parents are very much at home in
their Los Angeles homesteads, trying their hardest to cope with their
children's problems. If they all seem a bit "dopey" and self-deluded
in this film, they are, nonetheless, well-meaning. Judy's father (William
Hooper), given her suddenly radiant sexuality, has backed away from showing his
daughter the affection he once did; if only he could explain to her and himself
why that sexuality is bothersome to him, he might help her to understand and
still feel a part of the family (at one point, when Jim Stark asks her "Is
that where you live?" she answers "Who lives?).
Jim Stark's father (Jim Backus) might today be seen as a supportive
husband instead of the 1950s presentation of him as a hen-pecked man who
doesn't have "the guts to knock Mom cold." And even Jim might today
be less fearful of failing to play the macho games which characterize anyone
refraining from them as a "chicken." Given the bullying described
today in schools, perhaps not.
You don't even need have taken Psych 101 to perceive that Plato's (Sal
Mineo's) problem has to do with a father who has left and mother who is never
home—on top of his being gay. These are basically good kids who play out, in
Ray's pageant-like play, all parents' worst fears, their children's lives
leading to drunkenness, overt sexual behavior, robbery, and death.
The problem here is not good parenting, accordingly, but the fact that
despite their nice homes, these young people feel homeless, unable to express
anything to the adults around, or, particularly in Jim's case, the fear that
any truth he does express will be met with hypocrisy, particularly in his
mother's case, who determines to move to a different city every time he gets
into trouble.
The dramatic encounters in the artificial world which young teenagers
must live—a world defined by the walls of a classroom filled with people of
their same age with similar problems—are dramatically portrayed in Ray's movie:
a knife fight (right out of Romeo and
Juliet), a "chickie-run" in which young men in automobiles
literally put their lives at the edge, and, finally, a shoot-out with dangerous
fellow students and police. That Ray chooses the iconic Griffith Planetarium (a
place of stars and—as the students have learned from the Planetarium lecturer—the
end of the universe) as a backdrop to the knife fight, a Malibu-like cliff for
the car race, and an empty Bel-Air-like mansion for the final shoot-out creates
even more dramatic tension. These are or were very public places of wealth and
power, locales in which these kids without homes are forced to act out their angst.
Fortunately, in James Dean, Ray found the perfect embodiment of all
their desires, a quiet pretty boy with a pouting mouth, the director
brilliantly positioning Dean between the two as their faces light up with joy
and desire as he turns to each. So beautiful is his face and body, Dean need
hardly speak.

Legend also has it that Wood was having a relationship with Dean during
the shooting—as well as with director Ray.*
Obviously, the character Jim cannot share his love equally with both
Judy and Plato, and it is that underlying reality that determines, in part, the
end of this larger-than-life work. The meekest of all the film's figures comes
alive as a kind of Western shoot-'em-up hero in the last few scenes, protecting
not only his life but attempting to warn and protect Jim and Judy, now
elsewhere in the mansion.
Yet in those acts, he has crossed the line. While Jim has been partly
responsible for Buzz's death, he has not intentionally attempted to kill him,
and it was Buzz who demanded the symbolic "show-down." In actually
taking up a gun, Plato symbolically becomes a killer (he has previously killed
puppies), whose acts, dramatically speaking, must be punished. Ray ameliorates
this seemingly unfair inevitability, however, by having Jim attempt to save his
life, removing the clip from Plato's gun and brokering their exit from the
Planetarium where Plato has holed up, and, more importantly, by allowing Jim to
finally share his "skin" in the form of his coat—a gesture Plato
refused in the first scene of the film—that represents the protective grace and
warmth of familial and sexual love, an act that redeems the society and, at
least temporarily, allows the two remaining youths to return "home."
When, after Plato's death, Jim zips up the coat embracing Plato—despite the
perversity it implies—he is clearly consummating his sexual act.
Finally, Ray's great film typifies what I am describing as the "Los
Angeles film genre." In these films an outsider comes to the city (Jim
Stark is new to Los Angeles and is a born "outsider," dressing
differently from everyone else except for Plato) seeking acceptance and love,
but finding the former hard to come by unless he or she behaves in often
perverse behavior demanded by others in the community. Ultimately, the hero
comes to comprehend that there is no one
kind of behavior in the vast spaces of the California city, and, embracing his
own "outsider" self, is transformed into an Angeleno who discovers
love.
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