Film 🎥: Teen Culture & Rebellion In Popular Films Of The Midcentury Era

Welcome to the second part of the discussion about teen culture, rebellion and how film was an integral part of that during the 1950s and 60s.

Teen rebellion has been the prominent theme of our course studies as we analyzed several films that delved into the subject over two decades. However, as we have examined the superior – or least exploitative examples (as the case may be) of the youth “rebellion” sub-genre; all have revealed considerably more differences rather than points of comparison. Rebel Without A Cause (1955) and Easy Rider (1969) offer two worthy instances of Hollywood productions which deal with teen angst and revolt in rather different manners. Besides the obvious fact that both films were created nearly fifteen years and a generation apart, the narratives are quite different as well.

To one degree Rebel Without A Cause appears as the more convincing case of teen-oriented entertainment as the story is actually about the trials and travails of the three main high school protagonists portrayed by James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo. It’s also important to note here that Wood and Mineo were seventeen and sixteen respectively at the time Rebel was released (real teens portraying such) and Dean who was actually twenty-four, was still blessed with youthful looks and easily passed for a seventeen year old high school junior. By contrast, our three main characters of Easy Rider are clearly adult despite the youth mantra of the late 1960s which constantly stressed “never trust anyone over thirty” a saying attributed to various counterculture icons of the age such as Bob Dylan and Abbie Hoffman.

Nevertheless, the stars of Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and Peter Fonda) were thirty-three, thirty-two, and twenty-nine respectively. More importantly, the narrative of Easy Rider has nothing to do with actual teen concerns as these single adult men are well past high school or even typical college age. While Rebel Without A Cause deals largely with the strife between confused, emotionally troubled teens and their overbearing or ineffectual parents, there are no parents featured in Easy Rider nor are any referred to. For Hopper and Fonda in particular, rebellion and alternative lifestyles are much broader than the account of Rebel – As they oppose the larger establishment and its “oppressive” authority.

On the other hand, our protagonist’s concerns in Rebel are fairly narrow as the conflicts involve the typical generational issues between parents and adolescents and/or personality and turf clashes with other teens. The geographic and temporal world of Rebel is also as restricted as the narrative since all the action occurs at high school, Griffith Observatory, and a couple of other Los Angeles residential neighborhoods within a twenty-four hour time span. By sharp contrast, Easy Rider is the quintessential “open road movie” of the 1960s era – or perhaps any period.

The cross-country motorcycle cycle odyssey of Hopper and Fonda spans a good chunk of the continent and several days from Los Angeles to New Orleans where they intend to spend time as Mardi Gras revelers before eventually retiring to Florida. The two initially deal in illicit narcotics between Mexico and the U.S. before even beginning the trek which brings them into contact with free-wheeling commune hippies, ranchers, hitch-hikers, prostitutes, shady law-enforcement, and violent rednecks.

The form and function of Easy Rider and the circumstances of the time it was produced were all conducive to teen and young adult movie audiences of the time, who were interested in – and disillusioned by the larger society around them and who were beguiled by the “freedoms” (or at least the possibilities of) that Easy Rider seemed to offer. The pervasive drug and alcohol use along with the nudity and freer sexuality of this film were all activities highly enticing to the teens of this era.

They increasingly resented and chafed under the domination of old-fashioned parental, government, and other uptight, controlling authority figures. While East Rider and it’s stars meshed perfectly with the prevailing times of upheaval and general protests against the Vietnam War, suspicion of government, and revolt against other contentious social issues, Rebel Without A Cause operates entirely within the framework of its own era.

As stated earlier, the characters from Rebel are restricted on several levels – by the constraints of locale, time frame, and the prevailing attitudes (and actual censorship of film) as it existed in 1955. The very title Rebel Without A Cause suggests a shallow story of spoiled, self-absorbed types who cannot articulate just what their troubles really are – and it takes some time for our three disturbed protagonists to be more clearly revealed.

However, viewers of this film can still easily recognize how constrained the concerns of the characters are – such as Wood and Mineo being picked up by the local cops for “breaking curfew” or Dean hauled in because of a relatively mild case of public intoxication. Compared to later periods, films dealing with maladjusted teens in the 1950s have pretty much revolved around familial and/or fairly trivial events since there was little open, mass rebellion or even much strong criticism against the state of society and authority figures during those times.

The repressive Motion Picture Code which restricted controversial content and thematic elements was still strong in 1955 – but had almost totally disappeared by 1969…opening the floodgates for all kinds of permissiveness in subject matter and increasingly graphic portrayals of previously restricted or utterly banned subjects. In 1955, teens engaging in drug use, nude frolicking at the local waterhole, engaging in sexual conduct at a cemetery while hallucinating (as in Easy Rider) would have been impossible and outrageous subject matter for Rebel Without A Cause.

Curiously, in the endings of both films there are tragic deaths – but the untimely endings of a protagonist (Sal Mineo) in a police shootout and the plunge over a cliff for gang leader/chief antagonist (Corey Allen) to James Dean in a harrowing, I’ll-advised car race strongly suggest the price to be paid for youths rebelling against proper societal conventions. This is also where Rebel Without A Cause and Easy Rider veer off sharply. The utterly cold-blooded murders of Hopper and Fonda who are shot to death point blank by red neck thugs on a lonely stretch of Louisiana highway gives the distinct impression that they are the hapless, targeted victims of the larger, sinister, and cruelly repressive society.