TY - JOUR
AU1 - Goldberg, Michael Lewis
AB - The two teenagers sit together in the darkened theater, a tub of popcorn strategically lodged between them in a no-man's/woman's land of aching desire and uncertainty. For their third date, they have decided to catch Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the new movie that everyone is talking about since its young star, James Dean, died in car crash on a California highway. They have just watched as “Jim,” James Dean, the “rebel without a cause” of the film's title, hurtles towards a cliff in a stolen car, narrowly escaping the fate on screen that befell him in real life. They stare up at the screen as Jim and Judy, Natalie Wood, two cra2y kids from “good” but thoroughly messed-up families, perform their own maneuvers in the dark. The scene is shot in close-up using a blurred and indistinct, increasing a sense of intimacy—or is it claustrophobia? Jim is in a red jacket, which somehow throws a reddish light on his face, while Judy wears a white coat, her face shining with an alabaster glow. At the film's beginning, it was Judy who was in red, including glaringly red lipstick, when the police had picked her up for “looking for company late at night.” The couple in the seats probably know someone that has happened to—maybe the girl has experienced it herself—but Judy is just a mixed-up girl trying to rattle her uncaring father. Jim makes his moves slowly, leaning his head forward, then offering a sweet kiss on the forehead before popping the question: “I know a place … wanna go there with me?” Judy has been alternatively offering encouragement—“Your lips are soft”—and gently parrying advances, turning away at decisive moments. Now she turns to Jim, and the couple in the seats see the same glowing profile as before, now shot with their full bodies set against a more distinct background, the rest of the world looming behind them. The boy in the seats extends his arm slowly, casually, and drapes it over the back of his date's seat, a strategic inch away from her shoulder. Back on the screen, Judy hesitates, and Jim assures her, “You can trust me Judy.” She nods, accepting his word, and in the seats, the girl sighs happily and eases her shoulder over the minimum amount of space necessary to make contact. She trusts Jim—and why not, she has been given all the necessary cues to react the way she does. Her date trusts Jim, too, though perhaps his trust is in a different outcome. And then … well, the rest is history. One cannot understand this imagined moment using only a historian's standard set of analytical tools. But, without too much additional preparation, a history instructor can learn and integrate a particular method from film studies—“neoformalist” analysis—that can create wonderfully rich teaching and learning experiences. Neoformalist analysis emphasizes the way a film's form, with its intertwined narrative and stylistic elements, functions to create emotional, intellectual, and subconscious effects. Hollywood cinema, in particular, draws on a set of conventions that are intended to cue audiences to react in certain ways to create an emotional or intellectual effect. In Hollywood movies like Rebel Without a Cause, most of these elements are “motivated,” with a clear function determined by the demands of the narrative. Unmotivated elements are there because the director has made a mistake, or she or he is intentionally violating a key convention in order to create an effect. This approach demands that all elements operating within the film's formal structure be considered as evidence, not simply those parts that fit a particular theory or existing cultural, social, or political reality (1). But films function differently for different audiences—a perspective that many neoformalist scholars resist. Most cinematic elements and cues are culturally-specific—a universal meaning is not inherent in any film. Hollywood films rarely contain single, coherent messages that are accepted unthinkingly by a “mainstream” audience. Rather, different audiences bring a great variety of cultural backgrounds and interpretive resources to the same physical text. Their reception can range from complete agreement with what might be identified as the most likely, or “preferred,” message to one that either rejects it outright or bends it to their own purposes. In order to understand the way the girl and boy in the theater—or the boy and boy, or the girl and girl, or a homosocial or heterosocial gathering—reacted emotionally and intellectually to the film, we need to know at least three things: the historical context, the historically-constructed spectators, and the formalist structure of the film. As a supplement, it is helpful to know the background and intentions of the filmmakers. By combing this knowledge with neoformalist analysis, students are empowered to wrestle with complex questions about the often contradictory values, assumptions, ideals, hopes, fears, and desires that drive Hollywood narratives and, more importantly, shape audiences' responses. Films that feature dating rituals as a central narrative strand are especially well-suited to this approach. Indeed, it may be the only type of film-going experience where the action on the screen is reflecting, commenting, or challenging the action in the seats. Dating and cinema have been intertwined since the first nickelodeons, with key moments in the history of American film content and exhibition dovetailing with transformations in youth culture to create progressively greater opportunities for intimacy between the sexes. The widespread creation of movie palaces during the 1920s, complete with balconies that were larger, darker, and more anonymous, corresponded with the growth of a new teen culture. After an economic depression and war, a renewed, consumer-oriented teen culture provided the economic basis for the success of the drive-in, originally intended as a family-oriented space. These changes also helped spur the development of a new genre of teen-oriented films, most of which took heterosexual romance as its primary or secondary plot focus. The 1950s preceded the coming of the sexual revolution and coincided with an especially vigorous attempt to keep the sexual cultural waters from overwhelming the dam of societal control while the many leaks were already undermining the foundation. Many Hollywood films portrayed a fantasy world of barely repressed desire in which sexual innuendo and symbolism ran rampant, intending to stay a step ahead of the censors who were beginning to lose their grip on the regulatory apparatus. Rebel Without a Cause is a wonderful example of this kind of film. Released in 1955, the film generated widespread and widely varying reactions, ranging from condemnation to adulation and imitation. It helped spark the “teenpic” genre, provided ammunition for social critics and congressmen who railed against its supposed glorification of violence and denigration of the American middle-class family, and served as a touchstone for later incarnations of media-based middle-class youth rebellion. Rebel can be used in any number of history teaching situations, of course. But by focusing on Rebel's dating theme, students can consider gender relations on both sides of the screen, and their mutual relationship. Using Rebel to get at the rituals and assumptions of middle-class dating puts the focus on the central narrative thrust of the film—heterosexual romance and homoerotic attraction—in order to consider how this personal, psychologically driven phenomena is given social and political relevance. The multilayered meanings and historical importance of the film provides an opportunity to link dating to a variety of other issues, enriching students' understanding of each. Rebel Without a Cause at first may not seem to be a film primarily about dating, but a consideration of its formal structure and narrative choices points to the theme's centrality. The film follows a classic pattern: boy meets girl, girl rejects boy for an established, inappropriate boy, boy gets girl through an act of daring, boy proves his moral worth through a selfless act of bravery. The cause-and-effect relationships and the cues they provide all point receptive audiences to a conclusion that neatly satisfies their expectations. This is not true for the other narrative thread that drives the film: a young man's struggle with his family—an overbearing mother and grandmother, a weak father—to establish a strong, balanced masculine identity in order to become a responsible, middle-class member of society. A viewer “trained” in Hollywood conventions is led to expect that Jim will help his family transform themselves into a functioning, socially acceptable unit, or that they will be proven fully inadequate and he will triumph on his own and in a sense replace them. In either case, the film's ending should provide the “answer” to the opening problem that generates the narrative's central conflict. But the conclusion offers only a solution on paper, some quick dialogue to provide the censors with the appearance of a morally acceptable ending. While the film's narrative strand about teen rebellion subverts the Hollywood formula of providing a sense of final unity and order, the narrative strand about heterosexual romance supports it. The ending provides a possible answer to the problem of teen rebellion: successful, heterosexual romance. My schematic presentation of the two narrative strands does not provide a sufficient understanding of the complexity of the film's structure and potential impact for at least two reasons. First, the film includes several subplots containing homoerotic undertones that complicate the heterosexual romance narrative. Critics have noted the unspoken sexual tension in Jim's encounters with Buzz, Judy's soon-to-be-deceased boyfriend and leader of the youth gang, and with the diminutive, dark-complected Plato, who Jim is unable to save from being gunned down by the police in the final scene. Some critics have claimed that the death of both objects of Jim's homoerotic interest points to the conservatism of the film's narrative about sexuality and gender relations. That argument, however, reveals the problems of not considering specific audiences and not paying attention to all the formal evidence. While there are similarities in the two homoerotic scenes involving each pair, there are also clear differences—a device known as “parallelism.” Further, each character would appeal to different types of audiences. Rather than connecting one possible interpretation to a contemporaneous mainstream discourse—the demonization and suppression of homosexuality—it is historically more accurate to connect all of the evidence in the film to contextualized audiences. A more complex formalist analysis of Jim's and Judy's relationship also points to possible subversive features of the romantic narrative strand. In the scene described at the beginning of this lesson plan, director Nicholas Ray shoots the couple from an “objective” point of view. He eschews the normal convention of using a “shot-reverse shot” set-up and does not privilege the male lead's perspective over the female lead's perspective (the “subjective” shot). While Jim's actions and dialogue fit with convention—he is the active subject, advancing his romantic/sexual agenda; she gets to say “yes” or “no”—Ray uses cinematic elements to work against them. In order to provide students with the necessary background to enable this type of analysis, an instructor can use one of two strategies, or something in between: create a fairly extensive research project to generate a great deal of background, or provide most of the background yourself and have students read a much more limited amount. I have organized this lesson plan as the latter approach. In order to provide students with enough information to create historically-specific viewers, I recommend using William Graebner's Coming of Age in Buffalo: Youth and Authority in Postwar America (1990) as the central text of the project. Graebner's nuanced integration of youth and adult attitudes and actions and his sensitivity to differences of race, gender, ethnicity, and class make the book an excellent resource for this project. Instructors may choose from a variety of audience types or perhaps they can leave that up to their students—the possibilities and permutations are many. …by focusing on Rebel's dating theme, students can consider gender relations on both sides of the screen, and their mutual relationship. Using Rebel to get at the rituals and assumptions of middle-class dating puts the focus on the central narrative thrust of the film—heterosexual romance and homoerotic attraction—in order to consider how this personal, psychologically driven phenomena is given social and political relevance. The multilayered meanings and historical importance of the film provides an opportunity to link dating to a variety of other issues, enriching students' understanding of each. National Standards This lesson will help students achieve the following National Standards: Era 9: Postwar United States Standard 1B: Demonstrate understanding of how the social changes of the postwar period affected various Americans Also, it will fulfill the following Standards in Historical Thinking: Standard 2: Historical Comprehension. G: Draw upon visual, literary, and musical sources. Time This lesson plan calls for a “module” approach that may take several weeks, and thus would work best for a topics or elective course. I am assuming daily blocks of time of fifty minutes to an hour, four days a week. It can also be taught using longer time blocks with less frequent meetings, as I do. The first week is taken up introducing the assignment and establishing the historical background, while the second week focuses on learning and applying film analysis. Students should then be given time to complete a paper interpreting the film from a chosen audience “type.” An alternative assignment would be to have groups of students prepare an oral presentation on the same perspective, using film clips from Rebel as examples. Teachers not willing or able to invest in such a long instructional period can trim the plan in several ways. You might aim for less command of film analysis. I have taught film analysis skills in as little as two one-hour sessions, using supplemental web material, noted below, with a positive outcome. You might also condense the amount of historical background by deleting it altogether or condensing it in a lecture. Finally, you can “stretch” classroom time by using an online discussion board. I use the one provided by the Blackboard course management system, as I note below. Objectives This lesson plan stresses complex problem solving, asking students to combine historical content with the application of an analytical framework. The National History Standards calls for students to “Explore the influence of popular culture and analyze the role of the mass media in homogenizing American culture. [Analyze cause-and-effect relationships].” Students will be well-equipped to explain the cause-and-effect relationships between the texts and the viewers, although their investigation might reveal that, when examined closely, “American culture”—even a national institution like Hollywood cinema—was not truly “homogenous.” Students will also be able to master another content area that does not appear in the National History Standards: the continued development of a distinctive set of youth cultures and a national discourse about youth tied to consumerism, cultural rebellion, and sexuality, and about perceived generational conflict. The practices and prescriptions of dating were at the heart of these issues. This approach also introduces students to some of the tools of media literacy. The most common comment on student evaluations in my film-oriented courses is some version of “I will never look at film the same way again.” Many of the narrative, audio, and visual strategies used by Hollywood cinema are shared by other mediums as well. Students should gain a better understanding of how contemporary films, television, including advertisements, animations, and even video games function and shape emotional and intellectual responses, along with the degree to which individuals control the process of meaning making. Preparation There are two parts to the preparation for this course: film analysis and historical reading. For learning how to use neoformalist film analysis to interpret Hollywood cinema, the only real choice is Film Art (1979) by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, either the 6th or current 7th edition—there is little difference. Other introductory film texts do not provide the same rigorous understanding of narrative structure, and thus are more applicable to analyzing film as a text and not as an event. Simply reading the textbook, however, can be somewhat daunting without additional support. It is intended, after all, to be used in an introductory film studies course. To aid instructors, I have created a web page that contains useful support material. It can be found at: <http://faculty.uwb.edu/mgoldberg/dating/>. One of the links on the page is to a handout I provide my students about learning styles and film analysis. Instructors might use it to think about learning strategies for both themselves and their students. Reading and applying the learning from Film Art requires a strategy as well. I suggest reading chapters two and three and six through ten, with chapters one and five being optional, depending on specific need. Chapters two and three are the most important and provide the foundation for understanding how films function to create emotion and meaning. Focus on the specifics of film analysis and gloss the references to individual films, except where the text notes common rather than uncommon uses. I have listed the film terms I found the most useful for analyzing Hollywood cinema on the web site. I would suggest applying your learning in chunks—chapters two and three first (“Film Form” and “Narrative”), then chapters six and seven (“Mise-en-Scene” and “Cinematography”), and finally chapters eight and nine (“Editing” and “Sound”). The last two are different enough that you may want to apply the information separately. After reading chapters two and three, watch the entire film twice, taking notes the second time through. Examples of film notes may be found on the web page. Then, select a specific scene—or scenes, when analyzing a concept like parallelism—and stop the film whenever necessary to take notes or examine a shot more carefully—the DVD control allowing for a simulated frame-by-frame analysis can be useful here. Repeat the exercise, analyzing at least one scene after completing each chunk. You might also try cutting off the sound at times when analyzing mise-en-scene and cinematography, or turning off the video when analyzing sound. On the web page, I have chosen a sample scene for each conceptual chunk. Each scene contains a complete shot-by-shot analysis within the formal structure of the film, along with some examples from frame enlargements. After you analyze the scene, return to the key and compare your response with my analysis. You may also find this resource useful when teaching your students film analysis. For the historical background, instructors should gain a basic understanding of youth culture, dating, and sexuality during the 1950s to teach this module. Knowledge of James Dean's iconic status and the cinematic viewing habits of teenagers is also important. I have noted useful background readings in the bibliography below, including those readings I consider central to teaching this lesson effectively. Also important is the way the film was marketed: the DVD and laser disk versions of the film contain several revealing trailers. My web page contains links to Rebel Without a Cause advertising posters that are available online. Knowing the motivations, assumptions, intentions, and pressures of the film makers is not essential to this exercise, unless they were made public to the audience and had an effect on their reception of the film. However, you can use the background information on the filmmaking process to alert students to the ways that different “authorial voices” shaped the final product. For example, knowing that censors were concerned about the homoerotic elements of the script, that Sal Mineo was gay and James Dean was bisexual, and that Nicholas Ray consciously exploited the sexual energy between them can make it easier for students to accept the possibility of homoerotic content. If gathering all of this information on your own seems overwhelming, you might consider one advantage of the larger group-project approach. With student-directed group research, the students generate much of the data on their own and then share it, and you benefit from their knowledge production. There are a number of excellent sites on the web that feature material related to the 1950s, including some strong bibliographies. Procedure For the first part of the module, students gain the necessary background information on their film audiences, the specific historical context of youth culture, dating, sexuality, and teen films, and whatever information on the film's background you have chosen to include. Graebner's Coming of Age in Buffalo is relatively short, with many illustrations, although there is some theoretical language that might require your assistance. You may want to select an audience type or types in advance or have your students chose one or more. Graebner's book provides adequate background on a number of audience types specific to Buffalo—working and middle-class, young women and men, blacks, whites, and white “ethnics,” those who accepted adult prescriptions about proper behavior and those who rejected them. Graebner's focus on youth's relationship with authority, and the question of youth's ability to challenge or negotiate adult social control, gets at a central question about Rebel: how is dating used as a metaphor for resistance to adults, and is general resistance to adults the same thing as resistance about specific discourses and institutions? As noted above, Rebel's narrative structure suggests a fairly conservative message about heterosexual gender relations. Did sexually active boys and girls respond the same to this message as those who were not? And Graebner's attention to struggles over the control of space—autonomous vs. supervised—is also at the heart of Rebel's dating narrative. How might a teen who readily accepted the need for supervised space respond to the film compared to someone who aggressively rejected these spaces and sought out or yearned for that “place” Jim knows about? And finally, the book's insights about the symbolism of style—clothes, hair, cars, music, etc.—can shed light on the reception of a film where the main characters are affluent teens who have borrowed, or even stolen, the look of working class kids. Once students have established their understanding of their audience types, they can now move on to learning neoformalist analysis. Before viewing the film, students should read my web page, which runs about six printed pages, “How to Read a Film.” After the students view the film, use the same approach recommended in the “preparation” section. If you use or have access to a web discussion board, you can have them analyze different scenes, which creates more work for you but also greatly increases their learning efficiency. Students learn by reading each other's analysis and especially from any comments you make. They are more likely to have their misconceptions about film analysis corrected before their final paper is assessed. This approach creates a teaching efficiency as well, since you will find that you only need to provide feedback on a particular misconception a few times, rather than over and over again. Support documentation for this approach can be found on my web page. Although students should eventually analyze the film from a historically specific audience type, you might want to start by having them generate their own personal “audience type” by doing an inventory of their own background—class, gender, education, race and ethnicity, social group, religion, etc. They can then use their response to the film's formal structure to compare to their historical counterparts'. For audience types, you may also want to go beyond what is available in 1950s Buffalo. For an excellent study of northern middle-class white teens, Wini Breines's Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (1992) offers great insights into sexuality and gender during the period. Despite its title, it has much useful material about young men as well as women. James T. Sears's “Growing Up as a Jewish Lesbian in South Florida” offers material on another, far less traditional audience type. One might even consider certain chapters from a memoir like Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) to provide background on how a historically-placed individual might have reacted to a film like Rebel. Readers of the memoir will realize the match-up is not so far-fetched—much of the book deals with a teenagers' experiences in high school. One important outcome of such a non-traditional interpretation is to decenter the perceived “mainstream” interpretation. After interpreting a film like Rebel Without a Cause from the viewpoint of a sensitive, educated, working-class Southern black woman, a historian may be forever cured of the temptation of claiming a single perspective and meaning of a film. Handouts: All handouts are available online at: <http://faculty.uwb.edu/mgoldberg/moh/> Endnotes 1. The preceding description of neoformalism is incredibly condensed and does not reflect the complexity of the theory or its critics. For a more complete discussion, see Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers: 2000), 229–47. Bibliography Film analysis Bordwell David,  Thompson Kristin. ,  Film Art: An Introduction ,  2004 Boston McGraw-Hill Bordwell David. ,  Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema ,  1989 Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press Hill John,  Gibson Pamela Church. ,  The Oxford Guide to Film Studies ,  1998 New York Oxford University Press Stam Robert. ,  Film Theory: An Introduction ,  2000 Maiden, MA Blackwell Publishers Thompson Kristin. ,  Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique ,  1999 Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press Historical Context Bailey Beth. ,  From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America ,  1988 Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press Doherry Thomas Patrick. ,  Teenagers and Teenpics:The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s ,  2002 Philadelphia Temple University Press Gilbert James. A. ,  Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s ,  1986 New York Oxford University Press Sears James T..  Austin Joe,  Willard Michael Nevin.  “Growing Up as a Jewish Lesbian in South Florida.”,  Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America ,  1998 New York New York University Press May Elaine Tyler. ,  Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era ,  1988 New York Basic Books Moody Anne. ,  Coming of Age in Mississippi ,  1968 New York Dell Solinger Rickie. ,  Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade ,  1992 New York Routledge Breines Wini. ,  Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties ,  2001 Chicago University of Chicago Press Figures and Tables View largeDownload slide Natalie Wood and James Dean starred in the 1955 film, Rebel Without a Cause (Image donated by Corbis-Bettman.) View largeDownload slide Natalie Wood and James Dean starred in the 1955 film, Rebel Without a Cause (Image donated by Corbis-Bettman.) View largeDownload slide Sal Mineo and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. (Image donated by Corbis-Bettman) View largeDownload slide Sal Mineo and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. (Image donated by Corbis-Bettman) Copyright © 2004, Organization of American Historians
TI - Rebel Without a Cause: Using Film to Teach about Dating in the 1950s
JF - OAH Magazine of History
DO - 10.1093/maghis/18.4.38
DA - 2004-07-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/rebel-without-a-cause-using-film-to-teach-about-dating-in-the-1950s-h2XEayI2Q4
SP - 38
EP - 42
VL - 18
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -