When I think of the 1950s, I think of switchblade knives, loud Rock 'n Roll with obscene lyrics, promiscuous girls with their names tattooed on their tight sweaters. Of course, these are just trite cliques, really, romantic caricatures. Though, somewhere out there, to be sure, was a real Jim and Judy breaking into a derelict mansion in the hills. "Life can be beautiful."
Adolescence is tough. It's part of what renders, Rebel Without a Cause such a readily compelling film. We all identify with it. Growing up in the 1980s, I certainly did. I bought a 50s-style leather jacket. I kept a Zippo and Marlboro reds in it. It was my security blanket. At night, adrift on a dark, pathetic sea of adolescent loneliness and despair, it kept me warm. I often wore it to bed, the creaking leather a sort of melodramatic lullaby.
The 1950s was, in and of itself, a sort of uncomfortable, selfconscious adolescence. The great American adolescence. It's where we lost our collective, modern innocence as a culture. It's where we can look back pointing with an idyllic finger, saying to ourselves, 'There. That's where we fucked up.' Fucking up makes us what we are. It's the primary mechanism of adolescence. It's what makes the 50s so romantic.
Un-miraculously, I still have my jacket. The satin liner is torn and tattered just like the upholstery of my '56 Bel Air, but both are essentially stalwart. One way or another, our armor, our garments of rebellion become more elaborate and more mechanized as we get older, as time passes us by in a newer, shinier model. Using our blinker, we're supposed to yield politely over to the slow lane.
Fuck that.
"Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion." -- Oscar Wilde
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