Dean, James

1931–1955

American Actor

After a brief television and stage career, James Dean made only three movies before his death at age twenty-four in 1955. He nonetheless became one of the twentieth century's prime symbols of restless young manhood. Transcending nationality, time, and sexual orientation, Dean has remained a popular icon, and for some a cult figure. Before two of his films had even premiered, Dean died when his speeding Porsche crashed on a California highway, making his death as open to conflicting interpretations as was much of his life: What some might see as romantic recklessness others could characterize as self-destructive compulsion. Combining vulnerability, simmering rage, and sexual allure, Dean—particularly through his film characters and early death—represented a new model of American masculinity.

Like Allen Ginsberg in poetry and Elvis Presley in music, Dean seemed the antithesis of 1950s conformity. In contrast to the stiflingly conformist “man in the gray flannel suit,” a phrase made famous by Sloan Wilson's 1955 novel with that title, Dean is commonly remembered wearing boots, jeans, a white t-shirt, and a black leather jacket. In East of Eden (1955) as Cal Trask and in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) as Jim Stark, Dean played vulnerable young men hungry for love. He portrayed both resentment and tenderness, an unusual combination for an American leading man in the 1950s. His characters' search for masculine identity was particularly apparent in Jim Stark's attack on his apron-clad father (Jim Backus) in Rebel Without a Cause. His last role, as Jett Rink in Giant, also released in 1955, was that of a melancholy man to whom even sudden wealth brings little satisfaction. In all of these roles, Dean played the rebellious loner, embodying the individualism, independence, and detachment long associated with masculinity in American film and literature. Dean died before he could play a part he had already signed for, the outlaw Billy the Kid.

There had not been a male role model quite like him before. “He is not a muscle-flexing hunk of beefcake” (DeAngelis, 95), wrote one columnist, while the novelist John Dos Passos wrote of all the American boys who stood “before the mirrors in the restroom/to look at themselves/and [Page 126]see/James Dean” (Dalton, 328). More prosaically, a psychiatrist remarked in 1956 that Dean was “a remarkably vivid and compelling symbol of the confusion and tumults experienced in adolescence and early maturity” (Dalton, 327). Biographies and new movies about him (and even a U.S. postage stamp with Dean's image) continued to appear decades after his death.

James Dean, seen here in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), represented a model of masculinity emphasizing rebelliousness, detachment, and sexuality that was embraced by many young American men during and after the 1950s. This image also suggests the homoeroticism and androgyny that some commentators have seen in Dean. (© Hulton/Archive)

Cultural critics and other observers have pointed to a certain sexual ambiguity and androgynous demeanor in Dean to help explain his wide appeal. Thanks to some biographers' accounts of his love affairs with men—and Jim Stark's friendship with the homosexual Plato in Rebel Without a Cause— many gay males have embraced him as one of their own. In his love of race cars, his adoption of Western garb and lingo while making Giant, and his adolescent fondness for sports, others have seen something more conventional. Similarly, his continuing appeal has both reflected and, to some extent, shaped the shifting and sometimes contradictory definitions of American manhood.

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