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Iconography is a powerful thing. Iconography sticks with us even when we’re not really sure why. Iconography sticks us with years after an icon is created, but it lasts. When my wife was in college, I’d go visit her and, one time, when looking at the posters adorning the room she shared with a friend, I saw one of her friend’s posters. It was a black-and-white photo of James Dean, in the leather jacket that seems like it was custom-fitted from the moment he left the womb. James Dean is one of the most American icons we have, certainly one of the biggest of the 20th century next to Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Jimi Hendrix. James Dean died at 24 (and for context, I’m only a year older). His image lives on today, as someone who rebelled against authority, no matter what the cost. He lived fast and died young.

But I fear that people put James Dean on a pedestal he’s not deserving of. Consider this: Dean is possibly the quintessential American male sex symbol, in that he was one of the first and one of the most influential. Yes, I appreciate that there were plenty of male sex symbols in American cinema before Dean, but were there any like him before 1955? There were certainly men like Clark Gable and Cary Grant, but they were older. Dean was the kind of good-looking guy that teenage girls went crazy for; we’d see it again when the Beatles first hit the United States in 1964, it happened with Luke Perry (remember him?) at the advent of Beverly Hills, 90210, and it’s happening right now with some kid named Justin Bieber. But it started with Dean, or the legend of the young actor.

Despite all the hoopla, and all the praise, Dean only starred in three movies (when you don’t count the handful of films in which he appeared as an extra): East of Eden, Giant (which was released the year after he died), and this week’s classic movie, Rebel Without A Cause. Rebel Without A Cause was released on October 27, 1955. James Dean died on September 30, 1955. I learned this after I watched Rebel Without A Cause, and it explains a lot. Anyone who’s read my work on Box Office Prophets knows that one of my recent favorite films, a movie that I love as unequivocally as you can love a movie, is The Dark Knight. In one very important way, the two movies are similar. Some people wondered if Heath Ledger, who died as the film was going through post-production, would have been as lauded or if the box office would have been as high had he lived.

The same goes for Rebel Without A Cause, a movie that garnered three Oscar nominations in 1955. Though Dean was not given a nomination (unlike Ledger, who was nominated for and won a well-deserved Oscar for his role as The Joker), the movie struck a chord, I imagine mostly because it was already tainted by tragedy. That has to be the main reason, because it can’t be the movie, which is dated at best, and an overbaked Afterschool Special at worst. I know what you’re thinking, reader (I do, seriously; I can read your mind as you read the article. We have powers at this site.): didn’t Rebel Without A Cause land on the American Film Institute top 100 list in 1998? Didn’t it top movies like Fargo, Duck Soup, Vertigo, and Raiders of the Lost Ark? How can it be bad? Very easily, believe me; also, seriously, American Film Institute? Vertigo is in the bottom half of the list? Yikes.

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