Riots and Ineloquence

In Nich­olas Ray’s 1955 Rebel without a cause¹ we fol­low the prot­ag­on­ist Jim Stark (James Dean) into delin­quency. In this film, Nich­olas Ray and the scriptwriter, Stew­art Stern, set out to por­tray the life of the con­tem­por­ary Amer­ican teen­ager. The story is organ­ized around Jim, recently arrived with his par­ents in a Los Angeles sub­urb in the hope that their son will con­form and lose his rebel­li­ous streak and take ‘a right step in the right dir­ec­tion’. But Jim man­ages to get into trouble quickly. After being chal­lenged by Buzz, the pop­u­lar Kid in town, to a ‘chickie run’ (two drivers of stolen vehicles drive toward a cliff; the one that jumps out first is con­sidered to be a chicken i.e., a cow­ard and not a man), Jim finds him­self sur­viv­ing, while Buzz plunges off the cliff and dies. Against his par­ents’ advice, Jim goes to the police to report the event, but, not find­ing Ray, the sym­path­etic officer he knows, he leaves. At the same time, Buzz’s friends fear that Jim has repor­ted the event to the police and pur­sue him. Jim hides in a deser­ted man­sion with Judy (Nat­alie Wood) –– who has been Buzz’s girl, but couples with Jim after the chickie run –– and Plato (Sal Mineo), a younger mar­gin­al­ized teen. Run­ning toward the safe haven turns out badly. When Buzz’s friends and the police dis­cover the three, Plato shoots and injures one of Buzz’s friends before run­ning to the plan­et­arium to hide, fear­ing that the police will shoot him. Jim and Judy run after him, and the police sur­round the plan­et­arium. Jim con­vinces Plato to walk out and also nego­ti­ates with the police for a peace­ful ‘arrest’ of his friend Plato. Des­pite this, Plato pan­ics and, hold­ing his bul­let­less gun, runs out and is shot dead by the police. The film ends with Jim and his par­ents mourn­ing this loss and recon­cil­ing their differences.

Why am I remem­ber­ing this film as I watch and hear the news report­ing on youth riots in Lon­don, Liv­er­pool, Manchester and the West-​Midlands, you may ask? After all, as I argued else­where (Loiz­idou, 2005:191 – 208), this film is not about a group rebel­lion. Rebel without a cause is a study in the sub­ject­ive exper­i­ence of one youth, the afflu­ent youth Jim Stark, who grows up in an afflu­ent Post-​World War II US, who wages rebel­lion against ‘the suf­foc­at­ing web of fam­ily ties, school, sub­urban respect­ab­il­ity and labour dis­cip­line that the new “mass soci­ety” imposed’² and his des­per­ate attempt to com­mu­nic­ate his need for love and sup­port from his par­ents rather than the good mater­ial life that they were offer­ing him. The scenes below cap­ture this point aptly, and I encour­age you to watch them:

http://​www​.you​tube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​f​t​Q​L​g​O​D​o​LFE

http://​www​.you​tube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​A​r​_​h​0​l​O​V​ovQ

At the time of the mak­ing of the film, the US saw a rise in youth gangs and dis­con­tent. Nich­olas Ray, influ­enced by Albert Camus’ The Rebel (2001) and want­ing to cap­ture the psyche of youth dis­con­tent in the US, along with Stew­art Stern, the scriptwriter, provide us with a por­trayal of rebel­lion that goes bey­ond the usual crim­in­o­lo­gical depic­tions of the kids that rep­res­en­ted delin­quency: as either a response to a sys­tem that could not provide them with mater­ial recog­ni­tion (Shaw and McKay, 1941) or as a reac­tion against status form­a­tion that res­ults in the form­a­tion of youth gangs (Cohen, 1955). The film­maker and scriptwriter provide us with a dif­fer­ent gate­way: Jim Stark’s actions are an inelo­quent per­haps and counter-​normative attempt to pro­ject to his sur­round­ings, fam­ily, friends, the State (rep­res­en­ted by the police and the school) his own desires and under­stand­ing of how he wants his world to be shaped. It is a demand for youth cit­izen­ship to be recog­nized by pre­vail­ing social and polit­ical structures.

So why does this film keep com­ing back to me? As an example, is it some­how incom­pat­ible with our con­tem­por­ary con­di­tions? As Wil­liam Wall argues, we are liv­ing in neo­lib­eral times, in which struc­tural inequal­it­ies are at their highest since the 19^th Cen­tury, and we should begin to artic­u­late these riots in this con­text; as Zyg­munt Bau­man poin­ted out ‘these are riots of defect­ive and dis­qual­i­fied con­sumers’; or as Laurie Penny aptly argues, they are about grasp­ing some power or rebal­an­cing the bal­ance of power. These are all thought­ful reflec­tions to artic­u­late the riots. They are all com­mend­able, as are the videos of the Hack­ney Afro-​Caribbean woman and the Dar­cus Howe inter­view. I am cer­tain that, in times of dis­con­tent, we all gather our know­ledge and exper­i­ence to address the present, and expert­ise is not neces­sar­ily a required skill.

We have all heard strangers on the tube or the bus open­ing up to each other, try­ing to share their exper­i­ences and under­stand­ing of these days. All of these could be an attempt to grasp our real­ity, to share our vul­ner­ab­il­ity, con­cerns and hope – an attempt to address and share the present. I haven’t got the exper­i­ence and his­tor­ical know­ledge of the UK that Howe has or, Penny’s on the ground journ­al­istic facti­city, or Bauman’s the­or­et­ical know­ledge, but I have a mov­ing image play­ing on my mind and the inter­view with that woman from Eal­ing given to the Sky reporter yes­ter­day morn­ing to go by. Let’s see what I can make of them. Let’s just turn to the woman from Eal­ing first.

Here is an approx­im­a­tion of the story. The woman from Eal­ing was telling the Sky reporter that a group of rioters, three or four, she could not be pre­cise on either the num­ber or their gender as they were wear­ing black masks and hood­ies, broke into the front room of her house. Her voice was shak­ing when she was reit­er­at­ing the story. As they were stand­ing around look­ing into the house, she some­how asked them ‘What do you want?’, to which they did not reply. They just said to each other ‘let’s go’. ‘What do you want?’ ‘Let’s go’. What can we make of these utter­ances? Could the rush to leave be a sign that these rioters, pro­spect­ive loot­ers, did not know what they wanted? Could it be that the addressor of the ques­tion, the woman from Eal­ing with the shak­ing ques­tion, gave them what they wanted? Gave them a ques­tion and along with that the pos­sib­il­ity of recog­ni­tion and the space for artic­u­la­tion, the space to even say ‘Let’s go’? Both of these scen­arios are pos­sible, as well as the more cyn­ical account that the ‘Let’s go’ artic­u­lated a savvy sur­veil­lance of the house where noth­ing was worth tak­ing. I must admit I did not look care­fully and I don’t recall the décor of the house. I can’t say much about the cyn­ical pos­sib­il­ity. If we or if I, though, look into these sen­tences that are now well engraved in my memory, I see Rebel without a Cause and its les­sons played out in the Sky inter­view. I see the riots as an attempt by a gen­er­a­tion of kids to artic­u­late and com­mu­nic­ate, no mat­ter how inelo­quently, what they want. They may not even know what they want, they may find it along the way, on their riot­ing spree, or they may never find out what they want

Tags: UK-Riots-2011

This entry was posted on 11 August 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Film, Radical Politics. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.