Confessions of St Augustine (a 21st Century James Dean)

Confessions of St Augustine (a 21st Century James Dean)

A special tribute to James Dean.

In the history of film – who better than Dean typified the troubled teen? Certainly not Brando. In fact, in The Wild One – we don’t see him as a teen. Or any of Newman’s. Or Nicholson’s. Granted there were a lot of good ones long after Dean already paved the way for the rebellious – but troubled? – who remembers them in the same way? John Bender, The Breakfast Club? (I’ll dismiss Easy Rider and The Graduate because we don’t see them as teens) Ferris Bueller? Rebellious? – yes – but hardly troubled – in fact, so likable, no one, except Rooney, has anything against him or, for that matter, for him to really rebel against. Granted, he breaks all the rules, but no one (other than a jealous sister [initially]) cares! Not really. Even his parents seem to want to turn a blind eye, and we suspect that even if they did find out, they would find some excuse not to find fault. Even Rooney’s spokeswoman says he is “one righteous dude.”

So, there is one last digression before we get back to Dean. Literature: too many to mention other than at this point to pick out obvious icons that, in some cases, are more remembered by their book titles but nevertheless, in their time, had a profound influence: Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Tom Jones, The Red and the Black (Julian Soral – the epitome of the brilliant), Portrait of the Artist, Sorrows of Young Werther (so popular his suicide set off a wave of suicides), etc., etc. – but other than in their time frame, today most of them would go unrecognized in non-literary circles. Besides, I AM talking about film at the moment; the beauty of that is we’re limited to 100 years. And the fact film is accessible to everybody today.

So. Back to Dean. Three performances. Overrated? I don’t think so. If anything – it’s underrated because of overkill. Like a song we’ve heard too many times. I read a review on “Bye-bye Miss American Pie” by a guy who said he’d heard it thousands of times and why he hated it so much. Thousands of times! Doesn’t that alone explain it? Anyway, you get the point. All cliches at one time had relevance.

I watched his three performances again the other day, albeit not anywhere close to thousands of times – more like three or four and had a renewed respect for all three and for East of Eden in particular. First of all, there’s the age factor. That can only come at a certain time. So, we’ll eliminate Jet Rink, other than to say the child-like quality that makes us (me anyway) root for him and loved it when, right after he struck oil, he decked Rock Hudson. So we’re back to two whose ages in those movies are similar to our heroes, and how much they share in common comes down to the parental relationship – particularly in Rebel. The weak, ineffectual father figure and the controlling mother (Portrait of an American Wise Guy – pgs. 1-105. First part of The Mendicant, which is the first novel in the trilogy).

Which can’t be emphasized enough. That’s part of America’s problem. The fact that it is often missed is the problem. In 1971, when The French Connection came out, my peace-loving, anti-everything related to authority students loved the movie and Hackman’s Popeye Doyle. All of whom were male and upper-middle class. Other movies like Godfather, Patton, Full Metal Jacket, Taxi Driver, all of your Clint Eastwood movies, Black Exploitation, etc., had a similar reaction – right on up to the 90s with your classic Goodfellas. A friend of mine, a Mennonite missionary to the Hopi (both of whom are noted for pacifism), mentioned how one of her coworkers, a fellow Mennonite, watched Goodfellas almost every night (not to minimize their conviction against war and violence of any sort – they even went so far as to condemn any reaction to 9/11). And yet here’s this guy, who later went to Africa to be a missionary – loved the movie! So. Whatever’s missing in the American male, Jim Stark, as well as Augustine Schmitt (our hero), saw it too. Somehow, in his mind, this can only be replaced by the image of the American Indian warrior, which explains his initial obsession with wanting to be one and later wanting to paint them (see pgs. 1-666).