ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, September 27, 1996 TAG: 9609270016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY ASSOCIATED PRESS
They still go for it in high school. They try real hard - try to look as if they're not trying at all. They lean against lockers and hang out in shopping malls, jeans pegged, faces clouded with brooding looks, waiting for girls to come along. And the girls do.
This is cool - an enduring, modern, youthful, collective-unconscious cool embodied in the attractiveness of alienation, the magnetism of vulnerability, the simmering sensuality of self-imposed isolation.
Much of today's cool came from one man - one moody boy, really: James Dean.
He was a man encumbered with the world's weight and an overabundance of sex appeal, a poster boy for the tortured netherworld between child and adult. Eyes deep, hair tousled, body brimming with emotion so obvious, yet so hidden.
That was James Dean: haunted anti-hero, sensitive male of a pre-sensitive age. Tough when provoked, tender when encouraged. Forever adolescent - be it Jim Stark of ``Rebel Without a Cause,'' Cal Trask of ``East of Eden'' or even Jett Rink of ``Giant,'' who was allowed to age but not grow into a man.
Each character was running from something - each desperate to take family, world, friend, loves, and pick them all apart with conflict and heartache, then somehow reassemble them into some newly chiseled sense of belonging.
This weekend, 41 years after Dean died at the age of 24 in a car crash, ``Giant,'' for which he received a posthumous Academy Award nomination, is being re-released to a world filled with people who may never have seen his movies but undoubtedly know of the actor who many believe never really knew himself.
``I gotta know who I am,'' Dean's Cal Trask says. ``I gotta know what I'm like.'' Today he is - like all good, prematurely deceased icons from JFK to Marilyn to Morrison to Hendrix to Lennon to Elvis to Cobain - whatever his public wants.
Dean remains fresh despite a limited oeuvre of bit parts, stage appearances, scattered television shows and, of course, three memorable starring roles in movies he made before death came at a rural California intersection.
Why does he endure? In a word: cool. The iconography of modern cool - white cool, at least - starts, really, with James Dean.
Oh, there was cool before him, but it was different - John Wayne's hold-on-there-pilgrim cowboy and soldier; Humphrey Bogart's haunted, cynical loner; Cary Grant's suave bachelor. Yet when we summon archetypal male cool today, we think this: young, remote, pained, handsome. Blue jeans, T-shirt, jacket, cigarette, dares and one-upmanship.
Youth cool. Youth culture. James Dean arguably was the father of it all, of greasers, of Elvis. And maybe even father of the 1950s' juvenile delinquency obsession - something that proved to be a far wider epidemic of postwar youth discontent that widened into the 1960s.
It was no accident that this image surfaced after World War II. People were returning from battle and having families, and the beginning of the baby boom injected adolescence into the culture like never before - a process that continues unabated today.
Dean tapped into this, probably very consciously; many have said he crafted his public persona as painstakingly as his roles. And his image has endured to the point of parody.
Consider the Fonz. And early Travolta, who parodied Deanness into something almost unrecognizable with Vinnie Barbarino, then pulled back some for a Sha-Na-Naesque interpretation as Danny Zuko in ``Grease.'' Even today, echoes of James Dean resonate in Luke Perry's sulky Dylan McKay character of ``Beverly Hills, 90210,'' Keanu Reeves' distant Gen-X heroes, maybe even some of Nicolas Cage's isolated leading men.
Did Dean's youth cool last because it was the first? Unlikely. You can make the argument that Marlon Brando invented this brand of cool. His definitive cool role, ``On the Waterfront,'' on the heels of ``A Streetcar Named Desire'' and the motorcycle anthem ``The Wild One,'' came out a year before Dean's first movie, ``East of Eden.'' Some criticized Dean then, saying he emulated Brando's style to the point of outright imitation.
This assertion, though, fails on two accounts. First, Brando, more the mumbling rebel, lacked Dean's raw sensitivity and vulnerability.
Second, Dean lived fast, died young, left a good-looking corpse. Brando lived fast, grew old and became a corpulent parody of himself, replacing the memory of strapping youth with an image far less appealing.
The work Dean left behind shows a surprising attempt to control not only the emotion of his films but their actual scenery. He crouched atop trains, frolicked in bean fields and climbed trellises in ``East of Eden''; raced ``chickie runs'' and turned an empty mansion into a playground in ``Rebel Without a Cause''; obsessively paced his land and defiantly soaked up a powerful thunderstorm in ``Giant.''
It was as if maybe, just maybe, he could ignore his tumultuous emotional landscape by controlling the physical one. But it never worked, of course.
Even in ``Giant,'' the epic film for the epic youth, he remained a boy. They put gray in his hair, thinned it, put a mustache on him and made him 50. But the rich, powerful and studiously cool oil tycoon still ended up a drunk, crying, vulnerable boy at what should have been his greatest moment.
``In his portrayal of Jett Rink, Jimmy managed to incorporate his essential persona: the outsider trying to live in a society that does not want him even when he mimics its behavior,'' David Dalton wrote in his 1974 book ``James Dean: The Mutant King.''
Above even acceptance, though, the Dean spirit wanted love. In ``East of Eden,'' Abra (Julie Harris) tells Adam Trask (Raymond Massey), the father who withholds craved affection from Cal Trask (Dean): ``You have to give him some sign that you love him or else he'll never be a man.''
James Dean - the calculated cool James Dean we remember - careened across the proscenium as he did through life - pushing, pulling, climbing, running and pouting his way to iconhood. He died before he could undermine himself, and in his death tricked us into believing that time can stop and myth can endure, frozen in memory's amber.
Death, it turned out, was one ingenious PR move for James Dean. It created the lasting, empty-vessel idol of misguided adolescence that was - and remains - his greatest continuing performance.
LENGTH: Long : 114 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: James Dean was working on "Giant" (above) in 1956 whenby CNBhe was killed in a car crash. The film, a saga of three generations
of a wealthy Texas ranching family, is being re-released in a
restored version on the 40th anniversary of its premiere.