Nicholas Ray is a filmmaker who delves further than most into the tormenting conflict that pervaded through the teen spirit of the 50s. However, in doing so, I believe he expressed an angst and anxiety that was not restricted by youth or sex, but which gave voice to an indiscernible cry. His characters seem unable to restrain the “interior demon” of violence (Cahiers article), but perhaps the problem is not that they cannot restrain themselves, but that their exists no healthy way for them to truly let go. Perhaps restraint is the cause, not the solution, of the delinquent anxiety embodied in Rebel Without a Cause. I’m going to argue that the 50s gave birth to a variety of examples where anxiety and violence ought to have been expressed, but lacked a proper means by which to do so.

There are many instances of angst and violence that seems to be enhanced because there is no justifiable target: In an era where youth rebellion should be [is?] a catharsis for the angst and aggression that builds during teenage years, you also have the role of the patriarchal head under threat as well. For instance:

• Head of families are depicted as bumbling, impotent, or simply out of touch: See for instance the parental figures in Rebel.
  • Frank, as well as Judy and Plato’s father, all seem uncertain of their own role, unable to connect.
• Heads of institutions are equally goofy, often incapable of maintaining order in face of teen spirit (think Grease!)
• The educational films targeted at youths feature another faceless narrator, an imposition of patriarchal power which is both ineffective and invisible.

• Additionally, the new Fordist work mentality places workers like parts in a machine. The head of their enterprise, John Ford, is ultimately only a name to them, a faceless leader.

The lack of an identifiable source or target of angst, anger and violence builds up the 50s as a time of repression and containment.

Nicholas Ray’s instruction to James Dean: “One evening when Jimmy dropped by to see me, I began to discuss the scene [where Jimmy returns to his parents after the traged] with him; I asked him to go into the yard while I played the part of the father in the living-room. I gave Jimmy two contradictory instructions: first to go upstairs without being heard, and then, at the same time, to feel the irresistible need to talk to somebody. I then turned on the television to a channel where the programmes had finished, and pretended to be asleep. So Jimmy comes in and walks past me to go upstairs and it’s then that the contradictory movement gets the better of him: he falls heavily on to the sofa, with a bottle of milk, and waits for me to wake up; at that very moment I exclaimed, ‘Now your mother comes down the stairs!’ And I knew that I’d found the dynamics of my scene” (Bitsch 1958, 122).

What are the primary contrasts between Jim and Frank? Between Jim and his mother Carol?

The film itself seems to embody this brooding foreboding, a sense of violence about to burst. Geoff Andrew notes that “[t]ension - a sense of things being somehow so … unstable … that the whole edifice of a personality, a relationship or a society will fall apart - is virtually sine qua non of Ray’s work” (2004, 13). Is it possible that, like Jimmy himself, Ray finds it difficult to pinpoint a target for the violence which he believes is in all of us? Andrew further notes that characters are torn between this innate potential for violence and the need to repress it in order to function in society. Society, it seems, has little space for the healthy expression of anger, disillusionment, frustration, the components of of Ray’s, Jimmy’s and our own violence.

This tension is manifested in Ray’s films primarily through antagonistic dualisms, think Ray v. Frank/Carol, Carol v. Frank, the instinct for violence v. the need for societal repression, the desire for love v. the need for independence. Even the loneliness of solitude vies with the miserableness of acceptance for Ray’s outsiders. However, there seems to be essentially complementary dualisms, which perhaps provide the hope that there exists a complementary means to the healthy exorcism of violence: see Jim and Judy, Jim and Plato.