Resisting Passivity in Rebel Without a Cause
A snapshot of 1950s America looks different to different people. An idea floats among public discourse even today that the 1950s sitcom Leave It to Beaver accurately represented life in America, but the external polish of suburbia harshly conflicted with the slowly rotting foundation of “traditional” life. The Cold War took up the mantle of global tensions after World War II introduced the atomic bomb.
The Civil Rights Movement kicked off in earnest in 1954 after the Supreme Court overturned segregation as unconstitutional. A new generation of teenagers scrambled to find their identity between the displaced expectations of yesterday and the rapidly shifting tomorrow (Bodnar). Director Nicholas Ray uses a subtle contrast of beige and browns against a bright red motif in the mise-en-scene of his 1955 film, Rebel Without a Cause, to explore this generational unrest in post-war America (Ray, Bordwell).
While the film opens on the primary protagonist, Jim Stark (James Dean), drunk and collapsed on the road (perhaps foreshadowing of Buzz becoming roadkill?), the first character the viewer spends time with is Judy (Natalie Wood). Jim is dragged into the police station, tripping over his own feet, while a long shot pans the area. Judy’s bright red dress and matching lipstick is the sole splash of color in an otherwise drab, subdued aesthetic. Jim’s black suit easily blends into the otherwise unremarkable police station, and the third protagonist, Plato, almost disappears into the walls in his black-and-white costume.
This directorial choice begs the question—if Jim is the protagonist, then why is Judy meant to draw the viewer’s eye in such a spectacular way almost immediately after the opening credits? Judy cries to the officer about how her father gave one look at her new Easter dress and makeup before calling her a “dirty tramp.” Curled up against the corner of the officer’s neutrally-toned office—and against the left frame of the shot—Judy’s dress and position contrasts the setting in a way that reflects the dissonance between her and her father’s views on social propriety. Judy’s means of personal expression doesn’t line up with her father’s perception of morality, and Judy’s dress is shockingly out-of-place in the bright, but bland office.
A siren erupts from outside. The camera cuts away from Judy’s enclosed space and back to Jim in the bullpen of the station imitating the siren sound in a loud yawn while draped over the shoe-shine chair. The camera pulls back even further to include Plato sitting directly on the opposite side of the glass from Judy. While Jim is not wearing his iconic red jacket in this scene, he is wearing a red tie and clutching a monkey toy with a red hat when he offers Plato his coat—an offer Plato shies away from. Screen time is given to each “rebel” (Judy, Plato, Jim) to establish personality and interpersonal context, but each sequence focused on Plato or Judy cuts back to Jim as the primary narrative perspective tying together an overall sense of cohesion between the three. Jim’s angst-stricken conversation with Lieutenant Ray further adds questions regarding his status as a rebel—is he a “bad” kid? Or is he just confused?
Jim’s words to Lieutenant Ray establish one overarching conflict of the story—what
does it even mean to be a man? Jim knows he does not want to be like his dad. He tells the detective about his parents, “She eats him alive, and he takes it” (Ray). The hints of red—the monkey, the tie—foreshadow a greater conflict that will bloom out of Jim’s fear of blending into compliant reservation like his father. He does not want to be a coward, but he also doesn’t want to imitate the boring beige walls that make up his family’s home. As Jim’s frustration continues to build at his own identity, and his own discontent with complacency, he finally asks his father, “Dad, what if you had to go someplace, and it was very dangerous, but it was a matter of honor? What would you do?” (Ray). While Judy’s adolescent confusion stems from a desire for love from her father, Jim’s confusion stems from a desire to admire his father.
The third rebel—Plato—presents the red motif in a much subtler way. At the police
station, he is asked why he shot a group of puppies. The audience learns that he has been largely abandoned by both his parents with only a nanny to care and love him. Mental health research began developing at a much more rapid pace in the 1940s and 1950s due to the increase of emotional and mental damage leftover from World War II (Doroshow), but it still carried a heavy stigma. Plato’s rebellion is hidden—perhaps that is why, at first, he is not associated with any type of red motif. When he does reveal his red motif, it is surprisingly small, holding information for the friends he doesn’t have—a small address book bound in a red cover.
Rebel Without a Cause addresses many subjects and themes: mental illness, generational dysfunction, family dysfunction, social isolation, etc. In a world of beiges and browns and general suppression, Director Nicholas Ray stamps each protagonist with a sign of that societal dissonance. Judy with her dress, Jim with his jacket, and Plato with his hidden notebook and hidden illness all represent real people who had needs no one in their culture were equipped to meet. Jim fights to admire his father, but in the end he has to come to his very own conclusion that “you can’t just go around proving things and pretending like you’re tough” (Ray).
Finally, with the weight of grief as Plato dies from a gunshot, Jim covers him in his red jacket, and zips it up. “He was always cold,” (Ray) he says about this friend he’d known for only two days. And yet, he embraces Judy, finally finding his own loved ones who understand, and moves forward to fight through the adolescent discord of the 1950s another day.
Works Cited
Bodnar, John. “Unruly Adults: Social Change and Mass Culture in the 1950s.” OAH
Magazine of History, vol. 26, no. 4, 2012, pp. 21–23. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23488977. Accessed 11 Feb. 2023.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. McGraw-Hill, 2012.
Doroshow, Deborah Blythe. “Residential Treatment and the Invention of the Emotionally
Disturbed Child in Twentieth-Century America.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine,
vol. 90, no. 1, 2016, pp. 92–123. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26310790.
Accessed 11 Feb. 2023.
Ray, Nicholas, director. Rebel Without a Cause. Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/Rebel-
Without-Cause-James-Dean/dp/B000GONIFO. Accessed 10 Feb. 2023.
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