The Life of James Dean

James Dean, strange you know the name before the man, indeed many film buffs I know never even seen the movies he made and many are startled on discovering that he only starred in three movies. Yet, everyone knows James Dean, his ubiquitous image charms us from all kinds of angles, you would have to live on the moon to not recognise his face, and indeed it appears that to know him is to be seduced by him. The enigma that he is though is still somewhat of a riddle, how can one man, no matter how attractive he is and no matter how impressive his duds, how can he capture the imagination of people born decades after his death who have never seen any of his movies?

The 1950s in America were an era of unprecedented growth, people were beginning to have extra cash to spend on luxuries, people were beginning to realise that they could enjoy life, it was the beginning of a lifestyle that would make America the envy of the world. This was a golden era for a America that was reeling from the deprivations of the 1930s and the horrors of the 1940s. The children of the fifties were a blessed bunch or at least they were supposed to be, that was what was preached to them. They had everything that their parents had not, times were good, children could stay in school, unbelievably some could even drive there, they had countless options, college was on the horizon and everyone was beaming. Except perhaps their parents and well, also their children, so in fact does that mean that nobody was beaming at all? Why not? Life is not that simple, the consciousness of the country would not allow everybody to move on, there existed a shared memory of the brutality and inhumanity of the Second World War and the humiliation and constant yearning of the decade before that. Those who had lived through it were not going to be overjoyed that their children had the keys of the kingdom in their back pocket. Of course there was envy involved but more importantly there was an overriding fear that addled their minds. It had been drilled into their heads that life was not supposed to be easy and so they maintained a heavy feeling of dread, drifting around like harbingers of doom. Obviously, to their children’s bright eyes and light hearts their parents were gloom merchants who refused to enjoy in the frivolity that was life, there was going to be friction, there was going to be a lot of friction. The older generations knew the dangers of the world and therefore did their utmost to maintain the most moderate course possible, anything extreme was stamped out immediately. There were still lingering dangers in the world like the Korean War, Castro’s Cuba and the Suez Crisis to ensure that they remained vigilant. Cinema was to mirror this mass paranoia, this mass holding back; the ravages of the past had taken hold, the country was scarred. Bette Davis starred as an ageing Broadway star in Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), Gloria Swanson was a troubling symbol of living in a faded past in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) and  old Bogie never looked so wracked in John Huston’s The African Queen (1951). The great stars were aging, and Hollywood was up to other tricks - scaremongering the already suspicious populace with the brazenly analogous The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) or the desperate escapism that Gene Kelly was peddling in Singin’ in the Rain (1952). James Dean grew up in the midst of this overbearing conservatism, or rather existed through it as he put it, on his uncle’s farm in Fairmount, Indiana. He landed in the eye of the storm, California in 1949, studying drama in UCLA and it appeared to all intensive purposes grasping for the American Dream. And it seemed like he would gain it as he starred in a Pepsi-Cola television commercial, landed a few walk on parts in movies and got to say a few lines in Sailor Beware (1952) starring Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. On moving to New York he gained admission to America’s most prestigious acting school, the Actors Studio to study Method Acting under the legendary Lee Strasberg. The world was opening up for the young Dean, he caught the eye of Elia Kazan who wished to cast him in his adaptation of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Kazan sent Dean to see Steinbeck, the novelist viewed him as something of an upstart, he and Kazan were sold, Dean would be perfect for the main role of Cal Trask. Indeed, the character was pure Dean - disaffected Cal railing against the stuffy conventions that attempt to bind him, exposing the unholy truths that lie beneath the charade of modern living and of course looking mighty fine and attracting all the girls. And it ain’t all straight forward, it’s muddy and confused, hard to tell exactly whether Cal is good or bad, Dean had arrived, he keeps us guessing to this day. It got him the Oscar but tragically he wouldn’t be around to receive it. The guessing game would become all the more compelling in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), in which he played THE rebellious teenager Jim Stark. In retrospect it’s a strange portrayal, Dean like an overgrown teenager, a little man in the Edwardian style of the word. Impossible to understand just like adolescence. Shot in little over a month, the movie would change everything at the time, Dean was a megastar, no doubt. Giant (1956) was tragically to be Dean’s final movie, it’s so alluring, unnervingly offering us glimpses of an aged Dean - a washed up drunkard with busted ego, lonely and wretched. Dean was dead before the film was edited, pointedly he would not live to even see himself old on screen. The ultimate young rebel would remain forever young, and the hordes lapped it up, raising him to messianic proportions. Each year that passes, Dean becomes younger than us, trapped in teen angst forever, unattainable forever.