When you choose to classify teenagers in the 1950’s, whether by class or gender, each groups are different than one another but some individuals have the same struggle that can make them similar to each other. Each group, no matter how dissimilar they were in backgrounds and behavior, each contained the same struggle that they had to deal within that time. In the film Rebel Without a Cause, we are exposed to three different teens who each had a different struggle they were dealing with that unified them to one another. In the beginning of the movie we get an idea of how teens were portrayed in the time period as rebellious and troublesome. As the story line continues we are taken from the portrayal that the teens were given and go into the teen’s perspective and how they reacted to the world. The film achieves this by following the lives of Jim, Judy, and Plato, three teens that are each struggling with a personal issue at home and are trying to find methods to cope with them. Through their experiences the watcher is showed the struggles teens faced in society and at home and how they were being forced to act a certain way when they wanted to break free. With each new scene the viewer is forced to see life from a teen’s point of view, where everything in their life is exaggerated and unrealistic, and what it meant for them to a teenager. Rebel Without a Cause, is a movie based on three teens Jim, Judy, and Plato who are all from middle class families but are perceived as hoodlums to the eyes of many around them and takes place within a 24 hour time span. The movie starts at a jail where the three of them had their first encounter with each other. Jim was arrested for underage drunken disorderly in public, while Judy is arrested ... ... middle of paper ... ...s feeds into its vision of a teenage perspective perfectly. For teens, everything is exaggerated, loaded with drama, and of magnified significance. The bad seeds that cross Jim’s path seem tame today, but their kind posed a genuine threat in the 50s. As Thomas Hine’s The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager explains, the 1950s saw a rise in imagined concern about juvenile delinquency. Of course, their later game of “chicken” is anything but tame. Making believe they are adults helps them feel good. They believe they can do a better job than their parents. Interestingly, they act out the roles of life in suburbia while also mocking it. But here is a revealing moment. Judy says she wants a man “who can be gentle and kind”. This runs contrary to Jim’s idea of what a man is. When Jim considers this, Plato begins to feel as if Jim abandoned him, just as his father did.
Rebel Without a Cause is an unconventional story with a conventional, classical approach to storytelling. The film follows the seven traits of Classical Hollywood Cinema and is adapted to the hybridization of film noir, which was primarily a style of B movies, and teen drama films, which was newly emerging in the 50s.
Can you recall the very last night that you spent with your high school buddies before packing your bags and leaving for college? The films American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused bring you back to that through the recreation of those great experiences. American Graffiti is based on a closely-knit group of teenagers who will all be leaving each other the next day for new adventures. This gang of teenagers, despite their differences, all goes out together and share their last memorable evening. Throughout the night, friendships are strengthened, conflicting struggles arise, and romances are created and disrupted. Dazed and Confused dealt about life during wartime – the wartime of high school, where the faculty is irrational, the parents are
Palladino creates a historical background of the thirties in order to show how history related to and effected the personal experiences early teenagers were having. When Palladino wanted to talk about the challenges and repercussions faced by teens of the 1930s, how they were beginning to go to high school and develop a social group of their own, she first had to explain the historical context teens of the thirties were living in which was the Great Depression. Describing the historical context without directly bringing in teenagedom shows Palladino uses sociological imagination by implying a relationship between the Great Depression and the personal experiences of early teenagers. Palladino explains, “But the realities of economic depression, severe and unrelenting by the mid 1930s, altered their plans. Between 1929 and 1933, professional incomes dropped 40 percent, and the supply of white-collar workers dangerously exceeded demand...During the great depression there were 4 million young Americans sixteen to twenty-four who were looking for work, and about 40 percent of them--1 million boys and 750,000 girls--were high school age” (Palladino, 35-36). Later she elaborates to explain that much of teenage life was affected by this historical occurrence, showing that she understands history connects to the personal lives of the early teenage societal group. Palladino does this again when analyzing teens of the forties, “Although the nation had been gearing up for war ever since the fall of France in 1940…” (Palladino, 63), Palladino creates a fuller awareness of the historical context teenagers were living in, in order to examine the group by showing their relation to societal forces as a whole and the history being made around
Protected by a cocoon of naiveté, Holden Caulfield, the principal character in the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, therapeutically relates his lonely 24 hour stay in downtown New York city, experiencing the "phony" adult world while dealing with the death of his innocent younger brother. Through this well-developed teenage character, JD Salinger, uses simple language and dialogue to outline many of the complex underlying problems haunting adolescents. With a unique beginning and ending, and an original look at our new society, The Catcher in the Rye is understood and appreciated on multiple levels of comprehension. The book provides new insights and a fresh view of the world in which adolescents live.
A Rebel Without A Cause is a movie directed at the young adults of the 1950s. Teenager, a new term for young adults, is brought about within this film as a way to describe the character of the young adults. The movie was directed towards the teenagers because of their growing population and use of money for fashion and entertainment. However, within this movie, some of the most important understandings about family life during the decade are manifested. The issues of teenagers erupt because of family and school life, and as a result, the teens took drastic actions. The use of tobacco cigarettes and dangerous car races are two of the evident examples within the film.
The movie The Breakfast Club is a perfect example of peer relationships in the adolescent society. It shows the viewer some of the main stereotypes of students in high school you have a jock, a nerd, the weirdo, a rebel, and a prep. Over the course of a Saturday detention the different types of peers learn a lot about one another by hearing what each one has done to get into Saturday detention as well as why they chose to do it.
What do Marlon Brando, James Dean and Henry Winkler all have in common? Well, besides the fact that they are all from the 50’s, they have all portrayed characters that epitomized the American teenager’s rebellion. At one point in time, teens in the United States drew inspiration from these actors to figuratively say “Screw You Mom and Dad.” These men undoubtedly changed the youth culture in America. Further along in time, we watched “hippie” teen’s rebel against their conformists’ parents in the 60’s and “Grunge head”, Nirvana-listeners sneak out of the house to go do illicit narcotics in the 90’s. One must admit that there is something quite perplexing about this sweet American air, that makes teens disobey their parents. While the American teenage rebellion is a natural part of maturity and is an accepted cultural “norm”, there is a lesser acknowledged insurgence.
Youths had a great number of opportunities in the twentires. They could achieve economic, moral, and intellectual independence. Adults were trying to get the US. to regain its political and social footing. However the youth were rebelling against old principles. They did not want to have any responsibilities. Life became pleasure oriented. Activities were performed in order to maintain happiness. The values of moral responsibi...
The book Jake Reinvented accurately portrays today’s high school teenager life, due to the levels of social ‘coolness’ the collection of diverse people, and the truth behind high school life. An ambitious teen analogue of The Great Gatsby, Gordon Korman’s new novel, Jake, Reinvented, makes explicit its literary antecedents: Jay and Daisy have been replaced by Jake and Didi; Tom and Nick by Todd and Rick. Affluent Long Island in the 1920s has been relocated to a contemporary suburban high school called F. Scott Fitzgerald High. Korman even opens the novel with a portentous epigraph from Gatsby, and playfully dedicates it “For Jay and Daisy.” In Korman’s retelling, the beautiful people all play on the football team. Rick Paradis, the story’s dyspeptic narrator, succinctly defines his social ranking: “I was the kicker and backup QB. Second fiddle to Todd. Story of my life.” But Jake Garrett, a new student who manages to win a coveted position on the football team, and within days establish himself as the Zeus of Cool with his unrivalled house parties, threatens Todd’s Olympian position. As one character puts it: “The guy is like a walking zone of happening “Each year, the young salmon swim up stream, figh...
In Rebel Without a Cause, the main characters, Jim, Judy, and Plato face the troubles of complicated, dysfunctional family lives and the intense social peers of their mid-1950’s, suburban high school. As they deal with existing social pressures and must cope with their family situations, all three of them have different yet similarly formed actions. According to Harry Kuperstein, the mid-1950’s, when Rebel Without a Cause was released, was the height of the juvenile delinquency era up until that time. As post-war, family, and social issues created a perfect storm of non acceptance for adolescent students, characters like Jim, Judy, and Plato resembled the lives of many teenagers during this time. Ultimately, as these differing yet linked issues
Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause reflects the youth-obsession of the American public in the 1950s. It also shows the ways in which many Americans viewed the family as a social institution in the Cold War years. James Gilbert has argued that "From the 1940s to the 1960s, Americans looked at the family with double vision: with optimism and despair." While they celebrated the family as the central institution of American life, they feared for its future, worried about its delinquent youth, and wondered why the divorce rate was so high.
Throughout the introduction, we are informed of how through his era of life, Updike wrote his books inspired on memories of his childhood and growing up in Pennsylvania. In the 50’s the number of cars in the U.S. nearly doubled from 39 million to 74 million, making moving around from place to place much easier. The term "teenager" was rarely used before the 1950s. Most young people began to see themselves as a distinct group. Earlier in American history, young people often had to work full-time jobs to help support their families' basic survival. By the 50s, that was usually no longer the case. Teens instead worked part-time jobs or received allowances from their parents, giving them money to spend on fun non-essentials. And that’s exactly what Sammy did. Sammy, a dynamic character, who grows and changes in the course of this story, and Lengal, a static character, who remains unchanged throughout the story take this story to a whole other level.
The 1960s formed one of the most culturally complex periods in America’s history, and the analysis of this era is just as problematic. During this time, American society experienced an outpouring of filmic, literary and musical texts that challenged traditional institutions such as the Christian church, the government and the family unit. It would be naïve to argue that this period witnessed the first or the last instance of subversive propaganda targeted at young people, for the many dissenting voices herein did not emerge by random chance. The formulation of a more politically aware youth culture in America and, to a lesser but still important extent, Great Britain, was a gradual process that had been taking hold for considerable time, not one that exploded into being when Bob Dylan or John Lennon began writing protest songs.
...restrictions in the forms of laws or minor regulations. So too does Alex express this interest. Although among today’s youth it is not common to be rioting or embarking on a homicide spree, Alex feels this is his way of living a carefree life. However, as a result of his liberty being “denied,” he attempts to vent his anger by committing suicide. Again, today’s teens do not generally veer towards those extremes. The parallel reaction in today’s youth to Alex’s reaction would be the excessive usage of innuendo, free use of the vernacular, indulgence in pleasure of any and all kinds, and the exhibition of mock violence to alleviate angst. It is interesting that there is such a shocking similarity between our world and that of the novel because the novel was written in 1963, at which time there were certainly many differences between teens’ views then and those of today.
Carroll, Jamuna. America's Youth. New York: The Gale Group, 2008. Dryfoos, Joy G. Safe Passage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.