This moment is essentially the same as the moment when Anthony stares eternally into the camera in "Four Hundred Under". It is also hopeless, the farewell style of gray youth. Here, James Dean turned around helplessly, and Anthony still stared at you with his persistent black eyes-empty, questioning, unable to hide and disappear.
The end of "Rebellion Without a Cause" ends with the death of Plato. This is an interesting place. Narratives in the classical sense, especially tragic narratives, often end with the death of an important person. At first glance, Plato's death was nothing special. However, the special thing is that this role is not the focus of the main contradiction in the play. The contradiction in the play is the separation and gap between the two generations, the lack of patriarchy or the overstepping of maternal authority. And plato, the fateful death of a character who is not the focus of the main contradiction, does not mean that the contradiction in the film is resolved, at best, it is only a break in the intricate thread. And it ends with only one thread off. Such an ending is ambiguous and ambiguous. I think that here, the death of Plato is not just the disappearance of a foot in a tripod that bears the narrative frame structure, but the collapse of the entire film structure, and also a certain style mutation. The original radical rebellion turned into a sad and helpless grand reconciliation, mixed with something bitter. It thus reflects a more complicated question-why should the disappearance of this support point be the end of the movie? Does this have a deeper social mechanism?
If we think deeply about the role of social mechanisms, it will inevitably reflect some classic Hollywood traditional values. It can be guessed that under the classic Hollywood moral order, deviant behavior is not allowed, and adolescent mania must always be disciplined and unified. Death, as a punishment, ostensibly completes the reunion of compromise and reconciliation, but in fact it is an incomplete answer to the "behavior of individuals hitting social mechanisms".
The dispelled rebellion
rebel, rebel, means the denial of traditional authority and the free and open-minded will to survive. At this point, Nicholas Ray did not get rid of the shackles of traditional morality, and because he would not let the locomotive soar to the end of the road like "Easy Rider", nor could he be shot like "Bonnie and Clyde". He's riddled with holes and doesn't say a compromise with the power. At the end of "Rebellion Without a Cause", Jim and Judy supported each other and left, as if they had reached the point of communicating with their parents.
This is a temperate film, calm, rational, without restlessness, and without the color of arrogance and rebellion in the true sense. Jim is not a bad boy. He has not done any behavior that harms society or violates morals. The most obvious thing is that when the teacher asked him why he stepped on the school badge, he said that he didn't know when he first came, and he kept apologizing. This would not be an act of a rebel at all.
Of course, Jim, like Nicholas Ray’s film, seems to be constantly performing anti-social behaviors on the surface, but he is actually one of the many poor good boys in Hollywood. In contrast, Alex in "A Clockwork Orange" is an example of a bad embryo: he beats poor old beggars, fights with the Billy gang in an abandoned casino, drives a speeding car on the highway, and breaks into the writer. Alexander’s home raped his wife, but Kubrick’s moral judgment made time for him, but the image of evil was easily subverted.
Here, it is necessary to make a comparison between jim and plato. I tend to think that plato and jim are the core characters that make up the story (judy is just a dispensable female symbol, and the contradiction between her and her father is even in the end. There is no shadow, let alone solved.) If you think of this play as a magnet, then Jim and Plato are the positive and negative poles of this magnet, or in other words, the positive and negative positions of the same card. At first glance, Jim and Plato are very different: Jim’s parents are around, Plato is always alone; Jim is strong, Plato is weak; Jim has strong mental power, Plato is fragile and helpless. However, they actually have many things in common. For example, they both have solitary personalities, come from a family lacking patriarchy, are full of dissatisfaction with reality, and look forward to a free world-they are actually facing common pain The common problems, the confusion and desire they embodied are so similar. However, their destiny went to two extremes: Jim's liberation, and Plato's destruction. So the two appear as two completely different oppositions between "recognition" and "permanent destruction." This story first suppresses everything it wants to express to the lowest point, pulling the starting point and ending point apart, forming a huge tension.
In the film, both Buzz and Plato were "executed" during their rebellion. One of them was played by fate, and the other was sanctioned by the state machinery. Their deaths seem to be accidental on the surface, but in fact there is an absolute inevitability. Their fate is the fate of the negative rebellion that the director wants to tell us. Because the "rebellion" they perceive is negative. One of them despised life and regarded youth as a ritual of excess energy; the other was distorted by their strong self-loathing, and then deteriorated to the point that they wanted to destroy everything. Their endings are likely to be Jim's. In other words, they went to death as "substitutes."
Here, I want to re-examine my initial definition of "rebellion". Here, rebel, its meaning is deeper than what was expressed at the beginning. "Rebellion" is not a single dimension of opposition to authority. It has both positive and negative sides. The pure pursuit of self-inflation and indulgence is not affirmed. The positive "rebellion" is based on rationality, and it is said in terms of rethinking the meaning of individual life. What Nicholas Ray affirmed is a rational and compromised rebellion, a rebellion finally chosen by James Dean. This upright rebellion can also explain why James Dean has become the idol of a generation of young people, because popular culture cannot accept excessively radical benchmarks.
However, this also leads to some negative elements. The film seems to be preaching the truth that "everyone has flesh and blood, life, and value", seems to shout out "Go rebel, it's very simple". In fact, it is disciplining the world not to pursue self-dominance excessively, so as not to go astray.
Here, what makes me dissatisfied is that the director gave a very ostrich vague attitude towards the state machine’s "death penalty" to the rebels—a cold gun that didn’t know where it came from quickly took one. The boy was killed, but after he died, no one asked where the bullet came from and what was the ultimate cause of his death. It is like buzz falling off a cliff, let us grieve for his death, but not let us find the object of anger, as if just an invisible hand took his life, let us admit that this is just a coincidence of fate ( Or a narrative coincidence), while ignoring the problems of social mechanisms that should be condemned.
The missing father The
father is the spiritual guide and the emotional sustenance. This is a kind of "original father" plot, which is deeply rooted in every character. If the father himself is majestic, it constitutes the suppression of the children, and the next generation strives to break through the shackles of the previous generation, so from Greek mythology to Kafka, they all discuss the proposition of paternal killing; on the contrary, the patriarchy is weak. If they are unable to take responsibility, their children will fall into confusion and loneliness, and they will not find their home in spirit.
The lack of patriarchy is a key to the story. There are three main characters in the story, just like the tripods that take on the frame structure of the film's narrative-Jim, Plato, and Judy. The family of the three of them is essentially without a "father"-Jim's father is weak and incompetent, Judy's father rejected her deformed love, and Plato's father has nowhere to go. Through these three absent father roles, the film fully leveled the platform for plot development. In other words, these three absent fathers enriched the characters of the three main characters, completed their prehistoric fullness, and provided a powerful footnote for their subsequent behaviors. But the father did not "return" at the end, so "Rebellion Without a Cause" has forever become a movie with an vacant "father".
At the beginning of the film, a drunk Jim was lying on the street shivering, surrounded by scattered rubbish. There was an old teddy bear lying in front of him. Jim looked at it and thought it might be cold, so he covered it with old newspapers. . This is a very vivid stroke that directly penetrates the motif of "lack of warmth". The characters in the play are always in a cold state, lacking love and understanding. The "cold" always envelops them. They are extremely lonely. The story continues to explore the possibility of the keyword "loneliness", and even becomes the action of the characters. The main power of the line. The loneliness can explain why Jim wants to fight, why he wants to go to the cliff to play the speed car, and finally escape from reality in the abandoned villa. It's all because of extreme loneliness. Lonely is an introduction. It was revealed at the moment when Jim put a newspaper on the teddy bear, and found his way home at the end. Later in the police station, Jim felt that Plato would be cold too, so he offered his coat to Plato, but he bluntly refused. Until the end of the film, Plato's body was carried on a stretcher wearing Jim's red coat. The "coat" is designed as a lock here, and it has become a kind of passer-by of love—perhaps a long-lost patriarchy and paternal love.
In the film, the one who is more like his father than his father is police officer ray (same name as the director, which is also an interesting place). In the beginning, police officer ray gave Jim an old punch and taught him a lesson to make him obey immediately, and Jim's cowardly father would never do it anyway. Later, he asked Jim to punch and kick the table so that Jim could dispel his desperate anger. Ray is a person who really knows Jim. He makes Jim admire and convince him, and he gives him a manly specimen and belief, which is exactly what he needs in particular.
What's more interesting is that at the beginning, officer ray appeared to solve the problem; at the end, he walked into the empty planetarium silently. In fact, ray is a "knocked out" character in the entire play. He only really appears at the beginning and at the end (excluding the functional appearance that promotes the narrative, such as when Jim's father calls the police). It only appears at the beginning and end of the story. The entire film seems to be between the witnesses of this character. In other words, he assumes the role of a viewer, both inside and outside—that is, he exists in the play, is watched by us, and like us, looks at the face of all beings.
This is a movie that involves growth, maturity, and transformation. And in the process of growing up, the father's dereliction of duty in upbringing (so to some extent, "adopted sons do not teach the father's fault" is also an appropriate translation). The spiritual worlds of father and son are seriously out of touch. Jim has grown from a boy to a man. At this important point, the spiritual father is missing. He is like a desperate person who can’t find his way, slamming towards his father. Pounced, knocked him to the ground, pinched his neck fiercely, and roared loudly and painfully. The irony is that the object of his rant does not actually exist.
Style and type
of scenes in the
police station The presence and rebellion of the police station constitutes a tension of confrontation. The confrontation requires freedom, and the police station is a place for discipline and punishment of rebellious behavior.
The first encounter of the three characters in the police station is a famous segment in movie history. There, the camera followed the three main characters in the fixed place of the police station, and each paragraph was a fragment of a person in the police station. Through the special structure in the police station and the orderly arrangement of the action lines of each character, the three people's segments appear in each other's segments. Although they are all in different spaces, the three people often appear in the same frame at the same time, so the segments experienced by the three individuals become each other's experience segments. Here, the director's control over the camera, the mastery of space, the use of sound and images, and the use of lens language have all reached the point of proficiency. ——Jim and Plato met in the camera for the first time. In the police station, Plato occupies the foreground of the camera. He was being asked by a policeman at the registration counter. As the camera slowly moved to the left, in the rear, the drunken Jim was dragged to the registration desk by two policemen, when Plato moved out of the screen. Then, the camera moved to Jim's whole body. At the back, there was a bright red judy sitting there. The police began to search for Jim's clothes, and he begged the police to leave the teddy bear to him.
The spatial layout of the police station provides a large degree of development space for the expansion and staggering of the lines of action of the three people: the two interrogation rooms of the police station are separated by glass windows, and you can see each other in the two interrogation rooms. There is also a large glass window on the wall, and the interrogation room and the hall can also see each other. So, when Judy and the chief were just sitting in the room, we could see through the glass, far away, drunk Jim was lying on a chair in the hall. After Judy's conversation with the police officer was over, the sound of Jim's whistle in the police car outside came over, and the person in his chair was still in a small corner of the screen. The next shot cut to his close-up, and then zoomed out, showing a panoramic view of the entire hall. Plato was also sitting in the hall, and Judy was sitting in it across the glass of the interrogation room. At this moment, the three people appeared in the same frame, and the three thread ends gathered here for the first time.
Through the transparent glass, we seem to see a real police station. Nicholas Ray is not simply using a long lens to establish this feeling, but also interspersed with various functional lenses such as front and back shots, close-ups, etc. But it also constitutes a high degree of realism in the fictional story. Here comes a new question, what is the relationship between the artistic fiction of the film and the authenticity of reality? I think all these can be reduced to an image quality problem.
Although Nicolas Ray did not, like Fellini or Jacques Tati, stuffed countless other people's small movements behind the main characters' movements. He didn't let every character on the stage, even a small person in the depth of field who had no dialogue and flashed by, have so rich body language and so meticulously carved body language. His purpose is different from Jacques Tati (to build a game field carefully so that you have to find Mr. Hu Luo among a large group of people). His purpose is to use the least number of shots and keep a few shots. Set the action lines of different characters to cut into the plot in the fastest time, and at the same time satisfy the appetite for wide-screen composition with strong tolerance.
Contrary to the police station, the old house is a free place. The section where three people pretend to be a group of middle-class newlyweds and house salesmen in the abandoned castle is always a big perspective looking down at the camera, as the characters move around. , The structure of the entire building gradually extends to the space. The castle is also the castle in "Sunset Boulevard", but under different shots, it completely presents a different look.
2. The type
"Rebellion without a Cause" was filmed in 1955. 1955 should be the last period of film noir. Before filming "Rebellion Without a Cause", Nicholas Ray directed "Lonely Place" in 1950. It was a noir film. In the film, Bogart played an alcoholic writer who was mistaken for a murderer. An emotion of anger and despair filled "Rebellion Without a Cause" like a thick black fog.
In fact, I tend to think that "Rebellion Without a Cause" has inherited and involved every type. In 1955, it happened that every type under the Hollywood studio system was perfect and mature, and it flourished for a while. Time. Each genre has experienced its most glorious era. Police and gangster films were in the early and mid 1930s, crazy comedies were in the mid to late 1930s, tough detective films were in the 1940s, and musical films were in the late 1940s and early 150s. The popular drama is from the mid to late 1950s, and the western film spans the entire studio period.
"Rebellion Without a Cause" appeared in the police station from the very beginning, involving the topic of juvenile delinquency, which can be regarded as the lineage of a police film. Nicholas Ray has always been famous for making western films. In the image of James Dean, there are obvious shadows of Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart. Certain collective episodes, such as the conflict in front of the planetarium and cliff racing, obviously have the temperament of a musical (or stage play), somewhat similar to the scenes of gang fights in "West Side Story". However, in the exploration of family conflicts, it can be regarded as a popular drama.
Peter Cowie in "Revolution! "What's wrong with the movies in the 1950s? No matter how valuable the emotions they want to express, they always reveal falsehood." The "Rebellion without a Cause" completed in 1955 could not escape that. The shackles of ethical middle-class values.
But at the same time, this movie still has parts that sway outside of the routine. It directly called the hippie movement, rock fever, youth rebellion, anti-war movement and avant-garde art in the 1960s, and gave them a rebellious one. reason. The benchmark of James
Dean and Nicholas Ray’s
generation of rebellious youths is James Dean. His red leather jacket, worn-out jeans, and the plane head combed backwards, the face of vicissitudes of youth and old age, and the wild and wild desire of youth. The two contradictory qualities of gentleness happen to be the classic veteran style of the "generation that has passed away" in the United States.
Compared to other Hollywood male stars, James Dean is not like the roughness of the cowboy John Weiss, the tough temperament of the detective Humphrey Bogart and the brutality of the bandit Kegney, James Dean is just a drift away from the crowd. The decadence outside is nothing more than that. You can say that he is completely different from Hollywood's past genre stars, but you can't deny that he is still a Hollywood genre star. James Dean's rebellious image and temperament are in line with the needs of social consumption at the time. In fact, the film "Youth Rebellion" is also in line with the social background at that time.
The types are mostly based on a large audience/market demand. When a generation of young people need a rebellious image, James Dean has become the most sought after idol in the 1950s and 1960s. Whether it is the rebellious youth in "East of Eden" or the oil king in "Giant", James Dean has been interpreting a lonely marginal man. What he reflects is a generation of young people who are truly desperate and sad. They are emotionally idealistic, but they are weak in action. Everything is fragile and too fragile. They are a generation depressed and ruined by the environment. I would rather choose a generation that resists passively, a generation that was born in the middle class and rebelled against the middle class, a generation that hates institutional society, and condones all its own faults. They have empty eyes, breathing the air brought by industrial civilization, eating eutrophic junk food, high fat and milk, and their bodies are full of excess hormones, just like the young man named buzz who blindly expresses his own through self-destruction. declaration.
I think Nicholas Ray is an important point of American cinema. In terms of performance, he is bolder and more radical than Eli Kazan, more rebellious than Hitchcock, and more traditional than Orson Wells. In terms of style, Nicholas Ray is a deviant from classical Hollywood, and undoubtedly has a rebellious spiritual heritage for New Hollywood. From John Ford to Hitchcock, Billy Wilder to Elijah Kazan, Orson Wells, Nicholas Ray to New Hollywood, we can just change the genre/style of American movies A complete summary. With the 70s, these classical styles slowly evaporate from the superficial layer of current affairs into rebellious nihilism, or internalized into the background color of the collage temperament of contemporary movies, and become the insurmountable spiritual supply of contemporary filmmakers. .
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