Wait a minute. Are people saying that Rebel Without a Cause is poorly aged because of the “if he had the guts to knock mom cold, once” line?
What?
I swear it’s like people don’t know how to watch movies anymore.
Or listen to stories in general. Or converse. There’s no grasp of nuance anymore. Let me help those of you who took offense at that line to break it down.
1. The character of Jim is a kid. 2. The character of Jim’s emotions are out of control in this scene. He just finished screaming at his parents in front of everyone despite his later establishment as a cool, quiet kid, then finished assaulting a cop and then beating up a desk. 3. The character of Jim is drunk in this scene, and it is 3am.
Meaning: the line “if he had the guts to knock mom cold, once” is not the motto of the movie. The writer (Stewart Stern) is not trying to say to the audience “Jim’s dad’s whole problem is he won’t physically overpower his wife.” Because if he were, at the end of the movie, Jim’s mom would have said something insensitive to Jim during Plato’s death and the dad would’ve turned around and smacked her or something. That didn’t happen.
Jim is a character who is representative of teenagers: and teenagers OVERCOMMUNICATE what they’re feeling. This character, in particular, overcommunicates what he’s thinking because he doesn’t feel understood, so why would he talk like a rational person? What he means, OBVIOUSLY, is, “if only dad would take the lead.” But what he says is born out of the long bottled-up extreme emotions he has about the situation: “if he had the guts to knock mom cold, once!”
Honestly. By the end of the movie, the dad puts his arm around his wife and gently hushes her up when she wants to snip at Jim. In the climactic love scene, Judy tells Jim she likes him because he’s gentle. Plato trusts Jim because he acts gentle and kind toward him, not because he busts into the Observatory, fists flying, angry with Plato.
The movie condemns the kind of man that is too weak to stand up to his wife, and it ALSO condemns the kind of kid that thinks strength means tests of courage like knife fights and chickie runs and gang fights. Which of those two categories of actions that the movie warns against do you think “domestic violence” falls under? IT’S THE SECOND ONE
Jeez. Honestly. Zoom into one tiny, in-character, realistically-humanly-messy line and you can say that ANY piece of media is toxic.
In closing, JAMES DEAN:
