Newscoma

“Rebel Without A Cause” is on the television and it reminds me of my family when I was growing up. Back in the day of three channels on the tube (yeah, I walked up hill 22 miles in the snow to get to school. Just hush, there is a point.) it was an event for my mom who loved this movie. She told stories of how after James Dean died how she wore black for months.

My mom the Emo goth. Who knew.

She told me all the guys wanted one of Dean’s red jackets to wear around the school to make them cool because James Dean was the epitome of the cool hipster and everyone wanted to be him. And sometimes she’d get this dreamy look on her face when we’d watch the film. There was just something about this film she identified with. Now, I have no idea what it was like to grow up in the era of Elvis’ in-your -face-sexuality with his hips swerving around making girls pass out from delightful innocent lust or what it was like to see James Dean’s portrayal of Jim Stark play the misguided youth who is only seeking love and value in a world that doesn’t accept him who cried on the film because life and his parents were letting him down. Or Sal Mineo’s Plato, who the movie never says is gay, but you know he is (and of course he dies due to a sad misunderstanding because gay people never used to survive in the movies. It must have been a rule or something.) The look Plato gives Jim when he is given the infamous red jacket is one of the most amazing gazes ever given on celluloid. It says so much without a word. Good stuff.

And of course, Natalie Wood’s Judy. The bad girl who really isn’t bad at all but isn’t that the way this movie goes. How these young people seek value and need to feel welcome in a world that doesn’t want to understand them.

The movie was revolutionary in 1955 and when I watch it, I feel this bit of nostalgia about things that came before my time that I sorta got through osmosis of watching it with my mother, who loved the movie, and for some reason, I think it changed her way of thinking. Just imagine growing up in the late ’50’s when the world stood on the brink of so many things.

I sometimes watch the nieces who are knee-deep in “High School Musical” and “The Suite Life of Drake And Zack” and wonder if they will ever experience something like my mother did fifty years ago, growing up in rural America and seeing images played on a screen that resonated within her that life was bigger than what she saw on the dusty roads around her in northwest Tennessee. The feelings that she had were validated by the pretty face of James Dean twenty feet high on the screen provied to her that her feelings of needing something more than what was in her line of vision was important.

I remember her face and wondered as a child what I was missing that she was reliving in her mind.

That’s what I think about when I see “Rebel Without A Cause.”