Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)

Nicholas Ray's most enduring and iconic feature, Rebel Without a Cause resonates not only for its portrait of teenage alienation but its complex and warring thoughts on gender and filial roles in society. We meet Jim Stark (James Dean) not as the defiant image of youth we now see outside context but a drunken, morose boy so desperate for a stable vision of family that he curls up on a filthy street with a toy cymbal monkey, gingerly "tucking it in" with litter. Rent apart by the reversed gender roles of his parents, Jim will eventually craft his own nuclear unit out of equally disaffected friends, finding a human normalcy amid confusing and shifting family life.

Lest one assume, however, that this teen angst film is really a support of basic social conservatism, consider the complexities with which it handles its teenagers' confusion. While Ray presents characters striving toward a family of their own, he also shows that the world that grew out of such a basic social makeup is broken, so rigid it turned brittle and shattered from the force of incongruous modernity. What Rebel Without a Cause is, then, is something of an emotional "return to zero," to take a phrase from perhaps Ray's most noted admirer. By bringing its pariahs together to make their own funhouse reflection of conventional society, Ray offers a chance to begin anew, to take the basic building blocks of family, gender and normalcy to find new avenues to happiness. But even then, fate has other plans.