REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE & PLEASANTVILLE
The image from these two films based on life in 1950s America is constructed around a complacent, adult society where teenagers are often rebellious and are shut off from real communication with adults. In Pleasantville, two teenagers discover themselves in a 1950s sitcom. In Rebel Without a Cause, a troubled young man comes to a new town. In both films the teenagers and the rebellious young man will have an impact on the complacent environment. Yet, in Pleasantville we see a complacent, black-and-white reality with few wrinkles on the surface. In Rebel, we get violent gangs, tough-talking hoods, and dysfunctional family dynamics. While Pleasantville attempts to demonstrate that 1950s America may have been complacent but unfulfilling, Rebel demonstrates that the real 1950s America was every bit as violent and fraught with social ills as modern society. Thus, in looking back at the period during which Rebel was filmed, Pleasantville only focuses on the complacent, chicken-in-every-pot perspective of 1950s existence. In Pleasantville the two teens transform the adults. In Rebel, the adults take the kids to therapy and the children say:
Jim Stark: Nobody talks to children.
The constructed image in these two films that deal with the paranoia, fear, and violence associated with the Cold War during 1960s America. While Dr. Strangelove is a black comedy and Thirteen Days is a drama, both of them construct the era of 1960s Cold War America as one fraught with fear, paranoia, nuclear annihilation, and one or two cool heads that kept the world from nuclear destruction. While the nuclear precipice event remains anonymous in Dr. Strangelove, the Bay of Pigs fiasco is the subject of Thirteen Days. Even so, we see that both show how some war hawks of the era brought America to the brink o
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