Analysis of the films Rebel Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass
Updated: Jan 5, 2024
From Sexually Driven Woman to Angel in the House: Analysis of Natalie Wood’s
characters in Rebel Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass
source: flickr
In this day and age, coming of age films are an essential genre in Hollywood cinema. However, before the 1950s, this genre did not exist and teenagers were rarely shown on screen. The coming of age film genre grew to popularity during the mid-20th century with the baby boomer generation. Two films in particular that propelled this mainstream genre are Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961), both of which star the actress Natalie Wood as the lead female character; she plays Judy in Rebel and Deanie in Splendor. These films were one of the first to focus on teenagers for the entire film, while also confronting the challenges and pressures adolescents feel while nearing adulthood through a nuanced and realistic portrayal. Wood’s characters are struggling with living up to societal constructs around sexual morality while also addressing their budding sexual desires. Although these films explore female sexuality–something that was not often shown on film–they ultimately reflect a conservative conception of female sexuality and reinforce the idea that women should repress their own sexual desires in order to conform to patriarchal ideas of womanhood.
Coming of age films seem like a radical genre for Hollywood studios to have taken on in the mid-1950s, but at the time it was not viewed this way. These films were a response to a loss of profits at the box office due to World War II and the invention of the television, which made people go to the theatre less often. In order to make money off of their films, studios reluctantly decided to make films directed at teens and young adults creating “so-called target-market films” (Lewis, 254). These emotionally dramatic films were in contrast to television that only offered
unrealistic, wholesome family sitcoms. Studios resorted to this decision because “teenagers appeared to be [...] hungry for a culture of their own [and] getting young people into the habit of going to the movies [...] made good business sense” (Lewis, 254). In order to create a successful coming of age story, the characters have to be relatable and likeable to their audience while also tackling issues that adults rarely talk about or show on screen. In addition, the structure of this genre, “generally features a young character [...] who gets confronted by a mature conflict. This
youth feels alienated, alone and feels no one (adults) understands them. These disengaged teens might feel detached from their home or school life, and through this obstacle, [go] on a quest of self-discovery” (Hestand, np). One example of ‘mature conflicts’ tackled in Splendor and Rebel is female sexuality. These films portray young women who feel misunderstood by the adults and peers in their life as they navigate their desires to have sex while attempting to fit into a patriarchal society.
In Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, three teenagers who meet at a police station bond over the course of a day and experience life changing events. Jim Stark, played by James Dean, is the lead of the film and struggles to fit in at a new town. Plato, played by Sal Mineo, is shy and desperate for love and attention, and finally, Judy “pretty and popular, desperately seeks out fast company to provoke the attentions of her neglectful father” (Bowman et al., 90). This film was the first to showcase teenagers making mistakes and attempting to figure out where
they belong in the world. Furthermore, it was also the first film that “showed teens trying to attract the opposite sex and escape adult control” (Bergan, 117). Similarly, Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass, which takes place during the late 1920s in America, follows Deanie and her boyfriend Bud played by Warren Beatty whose “love escalates to a devastating climax as they are torn from each other to satisfy everyone’s plans but their own, resulting in mental breakdown and the destruction of youthful spirit” (Bowman et al., 143). These films mark a turning point in cinema by showing female adolescents from a more complex point of view and that their needs and desires should be equal to a man’s. Although this is true, Natalie Wood’s
characters shift dramatically from sexually driven women to wholesome women accepted by society by the end of the films.
In Judy’s opening scene in Rebel, the cinematography, dialogue and acting style portrays her as a rebellious teenager who gets sent to a police station for wandering around in the middle of the night. The scene uses close-ups and medium close-ups to show that Judy is the problem in the situation and takes up too much space with her emotions. Her emotional reaction due to her fight with her dad earlier in the evening and being brought into the police station, is shown
through these invasive camera angles. While she is being questioned by the male police officer, she begins to share the fight she had with her dad saying, “he looks at me like I am the ugliest thing in the world. [...] He doesn’t like [anything] about me and he called me a dirty tramp” (3:24). The dialogue continues with Judy saying that after putting makeup on, her father violently “grabbed [her] face and [...] started rubbing off all the lipstick” (4:10). Although viewers feel bad for Judy’s situation, the dialogue ultimately sets up Judy as a ‘dirty tramp’ and that she must be fixed by the end of the film. The dialogue makes Judy seem impure, especially when the male officer asks her why she was “wandering around at 1 o’clock in the morning” and
if she was “looking for company” (4:25). The male officer’s implications of these questions portrays Judy as a promiscuous woman who is just looking to have a good time. Furthermore, Natalie Wood’s naturalistic acting style in this scene portrays Judy as a realistic and relatable young woman. Her sadness and despair are successfully communicated through her facial expressions and intonation. She pauses to cry while saying her dialogue to show viewers that she is distraught, making it look natural to viewers. By expressing herself in a public setting, Judy is
refusing to repress her emotions and desires like a proper woman and ultimately rebels.
Additionally, Judy’s costume and makeup in this scene characterizes her as an indecent woman through the use of the colour red. This colour is a symbolism for her ‘sinful’ behaviour of wandering out at night and disobeying her father. Judy’s red dress and caked on makeup makes her noticeable and sexually appealing, rebelling against how women her age should dress. Her father is attempting to repress her female sexuality by ‘rubbing off all the lipstick’ and asking her to change out of her clothes. Moreover, the lighting in this opening scene emphasizes
her impure side by casting a visually striking shadow of herself behind her. This shadow remains throughout the scene as she is speaking and is a symbol for her repressed female desires. The film itself sets Judy up through these elements of mise-en-scene as a complex character who has issues with her father. Nevertheless, by the end of the film, she becomes a wholesome woman
through her fantasized play of the ideal family with Jim and Plato.
A similarly nuanced female character is shown in an early scene of Splendor when Deanie comes home to her mother after spending the evening with Bud. In the scene, the cinematography, dialogue and social blocking between mother and daughter represent Deanie’s longing to have sex and shows viewers that she is not an innocent young girl. Throughout the scene, Deanie acts sexually naive with her mother while also testing the boundaries by asking bold questions about female sexuality. The scene uses long shots and medium shots to show how Deanie and her mother interact with one another while Deanie is getting ready for bed. The start
of the scene opens with a long shot of Deanie undressing as she walks towards her bedroom while her mother follows close behind her, nervously inquiring if her and Bud have had sex, saying “boys don’t respect a girl they can go all the way with” (5:39). Deanie assures her mother that she is still a virgin, and even though “she has been taught to loathe sex, [by her mother] [...] she clearly has strong sexual desires” (Zucker, 20). At one point in the scene, Deanie leaves the frame and shyly asks her mother if it is “so terrible to have those feelings about a boy?” and her mother replies, “no nice girl does” (6:15). This dialogue demonstrates that Deanie has some
sense of her sexuality, yet by stepping away from the frame when admitting that she has sexual ‘feelings about a boy,’ shows viewers that she is embarrassed of watching her mother’s reaction to the question.
Furthermore, this childlike immaturity that she presents to her mother in this scene conflicts with her mature sexual desire within herself. Deanie is astonished when her mother reveals to her that Deanie’s father “‘never came near me before we were married.’ And then after that it was only for the conception of a child that she ‘let him’ have his way with her” (Zucker, 19). Deanie feels conflicted between pleasing her mother and asserting her desire to have sex with Bud. Deanie’s mother reproduces the idea that “women are to satisfy their men only when the desire to procreate proves too overwhelming to deny. At no time, however, can a woman
entertain even the mere thought of sex as something to be enjoyed, shared, or investigated [...] [and] she expects sweet Deanie to carry [this ideal] on throughout the generations” (Cale, np). Even though she tries to respect her mother’s values, these restrictions make her feel more isolated and do not stop her from wanting to have sex for pleasure. Once her mother leaves and says goodnight, Deanie stops ‘performing’ and acting like a ‘nice girl,’ which is shown through the use of props and her movements. When she is alone, Deanie jumps into bed throwing her teddy bear across the room and begins to sexually rub “her crossed arms across her breast; [...]
hugging her absent partner or feeling the pleasure of her body [...] [and] grinds her pelvis into the furniture, as if stimulating herself” (Zucker, 19). She then runs across the room to where she keeps a shrine of photographs of Bud and begins to kiss them before saying her prayers. These props demonstrate the conflict Deanie feels within herself. Like Deanie, her bedroom is childish with stuffed animals and a mobile, yet it also has a wall filled with photographs of her boyfriend. The movie portrays Deanie as a young woman with sexual drive at the beginning of the film, who only acts sexually naive when her mother is around. However, by the end of the film,
Deanie has become the perfect ‘nice girl’ who has learned to never act on her sexual feelings.
Natalie Wood’s characters undergo a huge transformation at the end of both films. Instead of continuing to rebel against societal norms, both female leads end their narratives by attaining the proper qualities to become a housewife. In Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray shows viewers Judy’s transformation through her playful act as wife and mother to Jim and Plato. In the scene when Judy, Jim and Plato arrive at the abandoned house, they become “‘an idealized family’” (Bowman et al., 90), something they have always wanted to be a part of. Through a satirical tone, Judy and Jim pretend to be newlyweds who are looking to buy a summer home to live in. Through Judy’s dialogue and costume, she is both mocking adulthood and also expressing her desire for family and belonging, which she believes she can only attain through traditional structures of adulthood: husband, wife and child. Judy easily morphs into the role as a wife by calling Jim “darling” (1:19:36) and saying that in order to pay for the house, she will “scrimp, [...] save, [...] [and] work [her] fingers to the bone” (1:19:46) just like a perfect American housewife should do. The scene cuts later to Judy caressing Plato’s hair while he is lying down, and humming him a lullaby. In contrast to her first scene where the police officer implies that Judy is a prostitute, here, she is behaving like a respectable woman through her dialogue. Furthermore, compared to her opening scene in which she is wearing red, in this scene she is wearing baby pink, which visually symbolizes her transformation from a ‘dirty tramp’ to a true woman over the course of the film.
Likewise, Elia Kazan shows Deanie as a dynamic character; by the end of the film, Deanie fills her proper role in society by becoming engaged. After Bud breaks up with Deanie half-way through the film because she will not sleep with him, Deanie experiences a mental breakdown due to “the utter confusion about where she belongs in the world now that Bud is no longer part of it” (Zucker, 20). When she returns to her hometown after getting engaged, Deanie decides to stop by to see Bud and achieve overdue closure. When she arrives at his farm, she meets his wife and their child. Through the costumes, props and facial expressions, Deanie is
portrayed as pure, desirable and unattainable. When Deanie is invited inside, she is immediately out of place; she is dressed in an elegant white dress, hat, gloves and a pearl necklace, in contrast to Bud’s wife who is barefoot, sweating and pregnant in the kitchen. Deanie’s white dress symbolizes her purity and neither Bud nor his wife can keep their eyes away from her. In addition to the costumes, the props emphasize that Deanie made the right choice to remain a virgin; Bud’s wife is holding a fork and pan in this scene, while her son is holding a wooden spoon and sitting on the floor with a chicken. These symbols of poverty are visually meant to show viewers that this would have been Deanie if she had slept with him before marriage. Deanie is at first a bit taken aback by the fact that Bud is a father, but then instantly goes up to the boy and carries him. This shows that Deanie is now maternally driven rather than sexually, seemingly having taken her mother’s earlier advice that she should only have sex in want of a child. Furthermore, through medium close-ups when Deanie picks up the baby, Bud’s brooding gaze constantly goes from his wife to Deanie, as if he were assessing the mistake he made by
breaking up with her. This scene reinforces the fact that denying female sexuality is the ‘right’ choice and women who stay on this path will ultimately have a better life.
Rebel Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass sparked the coming of age film and shaped how the genre is constructed today. Natalie Wood’s characters are aware of their teenage sexuality, which was often not addressed before these films. The portrayal of young women with sexual desire can be understood as to what makes these films subversive. Although this is true for the first half of both films, by the end, Deanie and Judy have succumbed to the societal pressures of what a woman should be. Even though the films portray young women as having sexual feelings like men, the male directors contradict this by telling female audiences that bad things will happen to them if they act on their sexuality. Ultimately, the lesson of both films is that a traditional family structure–with women fulfilling the correct obligations of wife and mother– is presented as a solution to their problems by the end of the films.
Works Cited
Bergan, Ronald. The Film Book: A Complete Guide to the Word of Cinema, London, DK,
2011.
Bowman, Manoah., Wagner, Natasha Gregson. Natalie Wood: Reflections on a
Legendary Life, Philadelphia, Running Press, 2016.
Cale, Matt. Splendor in the Grass, Ruthless Reviews, 21 Jul. 2008,
Hestand, Zac. The Beginner’s Guide: Coming-of-Age, Film Inquiry, 3 Apr. 2018,
Lewis, Jon. American Film: A History. 2nd ed., New York, W.W. Norton and Company,
2019.
Rebel Without a Cause. Directed by Nicholas Ray, performances by James Dean,
Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, Warner Bros, 1955.
Splendor in the Grass. Directed by Elia Kazan, performances by Natalie Wood and
Warren Beatty, Warner Bros, 1961.
Zucker, Carole. Love Hurts: Performance in Elia Kazan’s ‘Splendor in the Grass,’
Cineaste, vol. 31, no. 4, Fall 2006, pp. 18-23,
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