A Film Canon

Rebel Without A Cause stands in relation to cinema as The Catcher In The Rye does to literature, introducing the adolescent as a new species, replete with its own vocabulary, rituals and sacrosanct spaces, all of which are attributed to a crisis in fatherhood's ability to achieve a satisfactory compromise between authority and affection, requiring a new combination of policeman and psychologist for proper diagnosis. On the one hand, Jim Stark's (James Dean) father only wants to be his friend, thereby forcing Jim to bear the burden of his emasculated shame, borne of constant submission to a wife and mother who have gradually fused into a single figure. On the other hand, Judy's (Natalie Wood) father refuses to let her kiss him after her sixteenth birthday, forcing her to take refuge in a whole host of surrogates, of whom Jim is the most compelling. Yet this respective embodiment of and search for a satisfactory father-figure is by no means restricted to relationships, as the intimate friendship between Jim and young 'Plato' (Sal Mineo) suggests - and, from this perspective, the film's romance is ultimately less enduring than its nascent vision of a new homosociality, extrapolated from its nascent vision of high school as a subversion of suburbia. That said, suburbia is still very much the province of the action - and, like The Day The Earth Stood Still, the slight generic distance from melodrama allows Ray to both explicate its oscillation between the domestic and the cosmic, and to translate it into a more explicitly exisistential register, as evinced in the series of epic, sky-bound promontories around which the action revolves, as well as a trip to the local observatory that reminds the students of "the shortness of time between our planet's birth and demise".