James Dean endures, crosses endless highway of generational divide
Still a young man is gone
Yet his legend lingers on
For he died without a cause
And they say that he’ll
Be known for evermore
As the Rebel Without A Cause
(The Beach Boys)
On September 30th, 1955, Dean met his untimely end on California Highway 466 during a near-head-on collision between his brand new Porsche Spyder and a 1950 Ford Tudor (could two car models be any more different from each other?), driven by a young man named Donald Turnupseed.
While Turnupseed and Dean’s passenger, Rolf Wuetherich, survived—the latter sustained a serious head injury and broken leg—24-year-old Dean died on impact.
Less than a month later, on October 27th, Dean’s landmark film, Rebel Without A Cause, was released to theatres. His final screen appearance, the sprawling Texan epic, Giant, would be released the following year. Both movies earned him Academy Award nominations. He remains the only actor in history to receive two posthumous Academy nominations.
Five decades later, James Dean became my hero.
I related to him. We were both small-town Hoosier boys with a Midwestern restlessness. I related to his burning desire to be understood. I too experienced isolated feelings of angst and confusion. I often resigned myself to my bedroom where I turned the music up, shut my eyes and imagined a freedom rarely found.
I first saw Rebel Without A Cause when I was 15. Dean stood casually against a brick wall, cigarette between fingers, with a cold gaze that said “I just don’t give a damn.”
Watching the film on my small bedroom television, I empathized and ached inside as Dean (in the role of teenage newcomer to town, Jim Stark) placed both hands upon his head, as if to cover himself from some unseen avalanche, and shouted at his family: “You’re tearing me apart!”
I sat frozen, yet filled with adrenalin, as Jim accepted the “chickie run” challenge from the school bully, Buzz, who was also the boyfriend of Jim’s newly-discovered love interest. I place particular importance on the scene in which Jim and Buzz speed toward the edge of Miller’s Bluff, racing to see who would roll out of the car first just before driving over the edge and into the crashing Pacific below. Buzz meets his end here. His jacket gets caught in the car door before he can escape. His car speeds over the edge and into the darkness. Death suddenly becomes real in a teen world in which inhabitants believe they will live forever.
When Jim and Judy (a teenaged Natalie Wood) declare their love for each other while lying together in a large, abandoned mansion in the California hills, I felt my own heart flutter. I wanted to know how that felt!
When the troubled “Plato” Crawford, portrayed by a baby-faced Sal Mineo, draws a handgun, shooting a boy who is part of a vengeful mob seeking to terrorize Jim and Judy as retaliation for Buzz’s death, I was stunned.
By the time the credits rolled, I had found a hero in James Dean. Always the new boy in town, an outsider, his essence defied every aspect of “square” society. He was handsome, articulate, and dressed like a true matinee idol. I wanted so badly to be this, a striking bad boy in a hotrod who got the girl, who changed the game, who wasn’t ashamed to cry, and who didn’t view romanticized vision as “patsy” stuff.
This, to me, defined what it was like to be a real man.
Before his death, Dean once said, “If a man can bridge the gap between life and death, if he can live on after death, then maybe he was a great man.”
Dean defined himself with those words.
Though Dean died young, to this day, he still offers a shoulder to lean on for the lost boys like me of each new generation.
Older now, I still feel the ghost of the boy I once was. No matter where I go, there will always be a part of myself that never had to grow up; he stands on the corner, dressed in leather and denim, flicking cigarette ashes onto the sidewalk, waiting to ride off with the girl. We’ll ride off together on an endless highway in a summer that lasts forever.
We will live.
We will die.
We will live on.
The author, Austin C. Morgan, Jasper, is an avid outdoorsman and often finds inspiration within the nature around him. When not writing, he divides his time between extensive, cross-country travel and his personal research.
