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Reviews
James Dean
Rebel with a Cause
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By Wes D. Gehring
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(Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 303. Photographs, notes, select bibliography. $19.95.)
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Hoosiers in Hollywood
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By David L. Smith
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(Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 2006. Pp. xix, 596. Photographs, bibliography, index. $59.95.)
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| I'm not sure I can imagine modern masculinity without James Dean. Sure, Marlon Brando had angst. In his films of the first half of the 1950s, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952), The Wild One (1953), and On the Waterfront (1954), Brando visibly suffered on screen, torn by psychological demons and tortured by moral choices. But he suffered in a manly, hairy-chested manner, a mixture of grunts, grimaces, and testosterone. Dean's suffering was somehow womanlier. He cried, whined, moaned, buried his face in his hands, collapsed into a fetal ball, and just fell apart. Brando's angst threatened others. At any moment it might explode into violence. Dean's threatened only himself. Brando's was existential; Dean's nihilistic. Dean's emotional androgyny became one of the pillars of the counterculture and helped to define the sensitive New Age guy. |
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Two questions immediately arise for a biographer. What were the sources of Dean's on-screen presence? And how does one write a biography of a man who had become a fable even before the automobile crash that took his life? Three films transformed Dean into an American icon. In East of Eden (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Giant (1956), Dean played variations of the same role: the lost, confused, suffering, ultimately hopeless man-child. His body was an exposed nerve, his psyche a basket case. Watching the films today, one is struck by how badly he overacts. His inability to make eye contact, childish whining, and cloying emotionalism approach irritating mannerisms. (Which, of course, makes one wonder what it was that so attracted audiences.) But his films, including two released after his death, made Dean into an icon, freezing him in a particular role at a particular cultural moment. |
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In James Dean: Rebel with a Cause, Wes D. Gehring attempts to separate the actor and the person from the icon. In the process, he takes a stab at the central biographical questions. Unlike previous biographers, who either blurred the line between Dean and the roles he inhabited or played fast and loose with psychological theory, Gehring does not see the on-screen Dean as a mirror reflection of the off-screen Dean. Gehring's Dean is remarkably well-adjusted: nice, loving toward his aunt and uncle (Ortense and Marcus Winslow) who raised him in Fairmount, Indiana, respectful toward his leading ladies, humorous around his friends, and delightful in his ability to mimic others. He fits the old Hoosier ideal: "It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice." Yet Dean was also a serious Method actor, trained in the famed Actors Studio under the direction of Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. Method acting demanded total immersion in a role, and it trafficked in the antihero rather than traditional leading man. The Method antihero tended toward dumb inarticulateness and painful vulnerability rather than quick, decisive actions. Dean absorbed the Method style, but in the end, Gehring insists, it was a pose, not who Dean was. |
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