On the surface, Nicholas Ray's 1956 film Rebel Without A Cause is postwar American conservatism mixed with a typical high school coming of age plot. James Dean is simply beyond: a true boy-man with guts and swagger. Just below the surface, the movie has a terrifying moral: "We all become our parents." The Oedipal and Electra complexes abound: James Dean's character takes a long gulp from a suggestive milk jar that stands in for his mother's breast; Natalie Wood's character, the ultimate in fertile girlish beauty, spends the first twenty minutes of the movie desperate for her father to give her a kiss and approve of her makeup.Not to mention the obvious homoerotic tensions brought on by Plato, the disgruntled youngster who idolizes James Dean (Plato is aptly named for a certain Greek philosopher given to boy love). My professor blurted out that if 1950s film critics and moviegoers had been privy to this subtext (the familial incest, the homosexuality, the probable child molestation), "They would have created a super black list just for Nicholas Ray."
The above picture is of a Masquerade Headdress in the Yale University Art Gallery's African wing. It is described as possessing "fierce" and "fancy" aesthetics. It seems as traumatized by its parents as James Dean's character, so it consoles itself with plastic daisies.
1 comment:
how funny you picked this mask...because I picked it about a year ago, fell in love with it and wrote the label :) - KDW
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