Two American Actors

Possible Opening #1: Defensive Apologies--They'll tell you that art imitates life and that popular art reflects popular life. They'll tell you that we create our own heroes according to our needs. With the doggedness of archaeologists. film scholars sift through the remains on the cutting room floor and try to figure out just how that celluoid reflects us.

This is not an option. The problem is that a nagging realization keeps creeping into things, and that realization is a simple one: nobody lives like that.

Possible Opening #2: Damn the Torpedoes--But even if nobody lives like that, you can still try. Better to have a two-dimensional hero than no hero at all. Maybe all we've lacked so far is nerve. Urged on by a million beer commercials, we can still dare to be great. We can turn the tables on cinema verite. They won't be able to imitate us, because we'll be too busy imitating them. Maybe.

Long Shot #1: The Theater--If you stand across the street, you see the back wall of the Brattle Theater. It is 9:30 on a Friday night and the number of pedestrians crossing the shot is high. They barely register except as flashes light and movement under the neon and flourescent lights.

If you could see through the wall of the Brattle, there are some 200 people seated in parallel rows facing the far wall. Three people are in the back row, closest to the street. On the far wall, they are projecting "Rebel Without a Cause."

Long Shot #2: Overhead--Directly over the Brattle Theater, at an altitude of some 15,000 feet, is an American Airlines L-1011 banking Northeast toward the Atlantic. From below there is nothing but silent, blinking red lights. The passengers are also seated in rows, banked at an angle of close to 25 degrees to port, travelling at a velocity close to 400 miles per hour.

From Brattle Street it is impossible to tell whether they are showing a movie aboard the plane or not in the airliner above.

Cut #1: To airliner--Looking down, all an American Airlines passenger can see is a clustering of lights winding, presumable, along a river.

Background #1: James Dean--James Dean was born in 1931 in Fairmount, Indiana, a town which even today had a population of less than 4000 people. It was something of the quintessential small farm town; there was one school there were clapboard farm houses, a few stocky rebuilt motorcycles kept in the backs of barns.

Live Fast. Die Young [A Minor Retrospective]--Dean only made three movies, all of them differing grades of terrible. Giant is a movie that seems to run for at least six hours for no reason at all. East of Eden is an embarrassment; a heavy handed and unsophisticated piece of moviemaking. Rebel Without A Cause is almost unbelievably lame.

Cause and Effect--And yet, Rebel Without A Cause sent a shockwave through the 1950s--to the point where the movie was banned in Japan. To the point where red barracuda jackets were becoming an epidemic. To the point where a cult of Dean emerged complete with teenagers who tried to contact his spirit and were convinced that somehow he'd come back. It was one of those weird flashes of fusion, where some source, regardless of its quality, taps into some undercurrent that everyone else has ignored. Witness Kerouac. Witness Kesey. Witness Presley.

Long Shot #2--Three of the pedestrians walk by on the way to the Brattle. One in a heavy wool sweater, one in a black jacket with an upturned collar, one in a windbreaker. Two are men. The pedestrian in the windbreaker is a woman. They are talking about Rebel, though no words can be made out. The pedestrian in the heavy wool sweater looks overhead and sees the jetliner. The other two scan the crowd for familiar faces.

Flashback #1; Strategies and Schemes--It is earlier that day in a restaurant. The pedestrian in the heavy sweater and the pedestrian in the black coat are drinking coffee and reading the newspapers. Discussion centers on various errands proposed and various errands accomplished. It has been a rather unmemorable day. Nothing terribly exciting, nothing terribly dull. Just, you know, a what-the-hell kind of day. Coffees have been drunk and books have been read. Nothing pressing.

The papers don't promise any excitement. Ther are no big movies opening. No music worth travelling to. A night for improv. They decide to start with Rebel Without A Cause because the pedestrian in the heavy wool sweater has never seen it yet somehow feels like he ought to.

When pressed he'll say it's because he's heard a lot about James Dean. Cultural rubbernecking, 26 years after the fact he wants to know what all the fuss was about. They would both rather be somewhere else.

Backround #2; James Dean--After James Dean left Fairmount, he went to UCLA and then to New York to try to make an acting career New York in the '50s was friendlier to actors. There were lots of theaters, and television (not yet abstracted to Los Angeles) was serving as a new outlet. Dean joined the ranks of young actors at Strassburg's Actor's Studio and began getting small parts in televised plays. All of these shows were live.

During this thime he made East of Eden,for which Elia Kazan tapped Dean for the role of Cal. He flew out to California, made the film and returned to New York. By the time the movie was released and Dean was becoming well-know, Dean skipped the opening party for Eden to fly back to California to make Rebel Without A Cause. He was 24, a promising though not terribly popular actor. Brando was all the rage, and had created such an aura about himself, that almost anyone else was sucked into the vaccuum.

In an interview in The New York Times dated March 13, 1955, Dean explains that he got into acting by accident. That when he left Indiana he went to UCLA, joined a fraternity, started studying to be a lawyer, and then ended up getting himself kicked out.

He said he felt lost there. He said he felt less lost in New York when he was acting He said the single hardest thing about Hollywood was that he was afraid he was going to get lost again.

In September of that year, Dean drove his new Porsche Speedster into a Ford Station Wagon making an illegal entrance to a highway and was decapitated.

One month after Dean died Rebel was released and the cult of Dean began.

Dean had written in a journal: "There isn't an opportunity for greatness in this world. A fish that is in water has no choice that he is. Genius would have it that he swim in sand...We are fish and we drown."

Not much to build your life around, but then, he was only 22 when he wrote it.

Rebelwas immediately panned by all the critics.

We never asked him to be eloquent.

Flashback #2; Strategies and Schemas via wires and words--The pedestrian in the black coat receives a phone call from the woman in the windbreaker. She feels shitty since a friend has been detained by the police by accident and is unreachable. The incident had something to do with a bar and a fight and a lot of things like that about which the woman knows little since she is attending school. The pedestrian in the black coat suggests she see Rebel for something to do instead of thinking about everything. Twenty-six years after it opened, she, too, thinks it might be fun. "One of these days I'm just going to go to Europe," he says An operant fantasy.

Tracking Shot #1--A checker Marathon rolls down the Mass Pike Extension toward the Brattle. In it is the pedestrian in the heavy wool sweater. Most of the traffic is headed toward Boston. At the toll the pedestrian in the sweater hands a quarter to a toll collector who barely acknowledges him.

Tracking Shot #2--The pedestrian in the black coat walks out of a dormitory, passing a group of students in front. All nod, seemingly out of habit. The pedestrian walks over to the checker Marathon which has now pulled up in front of the dorm. The car is parked and they walk to another dormitory where the woman in the windbreaker is waiting, and then they continue until they reach the point where they are again walking past the Brattle, talking, with one looking up at the airliner.

Close Up #1; Opening--The screen suddenly lights up with an opening cartoon at the Brattle. It is a Daffy Duck cartoon. In 1955 the Brattle was a real theater, staging a lot of "classics" for the college crowd. Live actors. Live audiences. It has diminished somewhat.

Pull-back #1; Brattle--Seated next to the three is an old man. He watches the cartoon uninterestedly. Suddenly he turns to the woman in the windbreaker and says; "Fuck you anyway," and then walks down the aisle. This would not have happened in 1955.

Close-Up #2; Rebel--In the beginning of the movie, James Dean is drunk in a police station. He looks remarkably young, but has an undeniable aura of cool. Sometimes, though, it's embarrassing to watch him. During one scene he punches a desk and yells that no one understands him. More adolescence. The audience laughs.

Possible Segue #1--If James Dean were alive today he'd be 50 years old. No one knows what he would be doing at that age on any given Friday night.

Close-Up; Brattle--The pedestrian in the black coat and the woman in the windbreaker are having a whispered argument over the '50s. He thinks it was the most dismal decade ever. She thinks it was glorious. She says, there would be no trash in the streets and everyone would live in neighborhoods. All the women would wear skirts.

Funniest Line on Film--At the end of the film, after two deaths in less that a day, a succession of blasted cars, various broken windows and more scenes of cinematic head-banging that any modern director could ever conceive, Dean turns to his father and introduces the woman he has also fallen in love with during this 22-hour timespan. Says Dean: "Mom and Dad, this is Judy." So much for pathos--all you need is the right partner.

Possible Segue #2--How is it possible that an entire decade, and one only twenty years gone, seem so impossibly dated and silly?

Backround #4; The role of the scriptwriter--Rebel Without A Causeis set in California and is ostensibly about the problems of juvenile delinquents. Dean plays an adolescent, whom his family does not understand, who is driven to various deeds of honor. The entire movie takes place during one 22-hour period--Dean's first day at a new high school. During this day, Dean will have to try to win acceptance into a gang at school and solve the problems of alienation. This is accomplished by driving a car vary fast toward a cliff in a game of chicken with the leader of the gang. This kills the gang leader. Dean, however, inherits his girlfriend. He and she then run off to a deserted mansion. Peace, however, does not last. Within hours the gang is after them, and another student goes crazy with a gun. Having shot one member of the gang, he then takes refuge in a planetarium, shoots at the police, and is eventually killed by the officers. Throughout this whole day, Dean is trying to live a good American life.

Close-Up #3; A '50s kind of girl--Natalie Wood is falling in love with Dean. She lies on his chest and asks him a lot of very stupid questions. She asks; "What does a girl want in a person?" Dean responds: "A man."

Close-Up #4; An '80s kind of audience--Everyone is smirking and laughing. Everyone hates Natalie Wood. She is incredibly cloying.

Close-Up #5; Totems and heroes--When Wood asks Dean more questions, he just shrugs. There's something about the way he shrugs and tenses away from the action in the scene. He's never approaching anything directly. He's always turned away from the person he's talking to. He never says much. He just shrugs. God knows what the word "cool" embodied back then, but he seems to embody a lot of it.

Possible Segue #3;--Better that heroes be ineloquent. What could Dean say to someone as ridiculous as Natalie Wood. The fact that he says nothing, however, saves him immense embarrassment, and somehow he seems to transcend.

Long-shot #3; Brattle--People are coming out of the Brattle, walking up an alleyway next to a cafe. The three pedestrians seen earlier are talking about Dean. They can barely believe how bad the movie was. The pedestrian in the black coat says he's glad he saw it: "Sort of a relic thing." The jet, previously seen, is now some 600 miles out to sea, heading presumably for Europe. A passenger looking down now would see nothing but black water in the moonlight.

Backround; Dean--Dean wrote shortly before he drove his Porsche into the Ford: "If a choice is in order, I'd rather have people hiss than yawn."

He wrote this as an American Airlines jet heading west to California to make more movies. He never liked going to movies as much as he like to make them. Not that it matters. Nobody lives like that.

Obvious Conclusion: James Dean was a dead end. Not a memorable line. Not a memorable movie. Just the memorable sensibility.

New Directions; Other Possible Openings--Nobody lives like that. Heros. Name two. Name one. We'll give you DeNiro