I’ve never understood the big whoop-dee-do about Rebel Without a Cause. Besides the subtle mysogyny, the movie seems unrealistic, not to say stupid for several reasons.
One of those reasons was the Chicken game the gang played with stolen cars. I mean WTF? Jumping out of speeding cars as they race towards a cliff? Who the hell does that? Besides, the real way to play Car Chicken is to face off on a stretch of road and race towards each other, and the first to swerve out of the way is the chicken. Everybody knows that.
Sure, everybody knows that, but did anybody really do that sort of thing? Of course, there’s plenty of joyriding and drag racing in real life. But what about these sort of chicken games with cars? Not demolition derby, but flirting with car crashes for kicks? Or what the hell, driving them off cliffs? Or is this the automotive answer to the elusive snuff film?
I’m firmly of the belief that if James Dean had lived, people would look at Rebel Without a Cause the same way people look at the shit all actors have to do before they make it big.
That scene was one of the major reasons why as I agree with you, no one does that!
ETA: What’s subtle about little Jimmy wailing and crying that his old man had the nerve to wear an apron once? Christ, if I were a teenager in the 50s I would be embarassed that this is what adults thought of me.
I’ve never understood why people apply today’s values to something from the past and try to make out like the thing being analyzed was a bad thing. Such applications are revisionist in nature and take those things out of the context of the times in which they were produced. Maybe our society wasn’t as “enlightened” fifty years ago as people would have you believe it is today, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was “wrong”; rather, it was the norm then if anything.
Accept the past for what it was and learn from it, if you like, but on no condition should one insist that it was “wrong”; it’s just “who we were” then.
It may have been the norm, but that doesn’t make the movie any better.
Actually, this movie was part of a reactionary backlash against women in the media that occurred in the post-war era. During World War II, many women worked the jobs that had been previously exclusively for men, and with the money earned enjoyed much more freedom than they had previously experienced. But once the war was over, the men came back, and the women were expected to get back into the kitchen without even a “Thanks, girlie!”
There was a lot of simmering resentment among women, and the reflection of the media was a lot of clueless “the woman’s place is in the home,” type of stuff. An early movie of this type was 1945’s Mildred Pierce. Thankfully, that movie is still entertaining. But there were others such as 1952’s The Star, where Bette Davis gives up Hollywood for her man, and 1950’s Caged, a movie set in a women’s prison. One of the long term inmates gives a speech about women’s foolishness in wanting more than what they have, and ends with the immortal line “I’d sell my soul for a sinkful of dishes!”
This sort of outlook is prominent in Rebel Without a Cause. James Dean’s character is a delinquent because Mommy wants Daddy to do the dishes. I chose the term subtle because of the whole apron scene. When I first saw this movie, I couldn’t understand what the fuck was the kid’s problem was in that scene. I had to read somewhere that he was upset at his father wearing an apron. Jesus, how far we have come.
Maybe I didn’t get it because my mom never wore aprons. I dunno. In my house, aprons were for dirndls. I had two of those growing up…
Where the hell was I? Oh yes, playing chicken with cars. Did anyone actually do that?
Not a direct answer, but one of the other characters had to explain the “chickie run” to Jim. It wasn’t portrayed as something that every teenager did, or even knew about.
And Jim did not blow up because his dad wore an apron once. If you reduce something to absurdity, of course it’s going to seem absurd.
This webpage makes the best guess, which is that the game of Chicken could obviously never have been very common:
It was more likely to be the sort of thing that teenagers talked about in awe, although they had never seen such a thing nor met anyone who had seen such a thing. It was thus like an urban legend. There probably had been a few such games, but their reputation was spread mostly by tenth-hand stories.
I was only aware of that there was a lot of talk about “chicken” back in that era among the high school guys. And it was the driving head on towards each other kind too.
I was puzzled when I saw the race towards a cliff type in pop culture later. So, if the other guy chickens out and you don’t, you go over the cliff and die. This is winning?
With the head on type, it’s the losing guy that might end up in the ditch and getting hurt. Makes a lot more sense.
Maybe the guy with hook hand knows more about this but I think he’s at a Crisco party tonight.
No, both drivers were supposed to jump out, but the one who did so first would lose. The object was to be as close to the edge as possible – “brinkmanship” at its most literal. In the movie, the other driver died because his sleeve got caught and he couldn’t get out.
Anyway, this seems to be an extreme example of the Casablanca Syndrome. The scene has been imitated so many times that the original not only looks a cliche, it looks like they got it wrong.