Cabello/Carceller

101 SETTING
Casting *
— Jesús Carrillo —
“They called me chicken, you know? Chicken.”
This quotation from the script of Rebel Without a Cause
condenses the constant conflict and the disorders implied by the
embodiment of the patriarchal ideal of masculinity. By saying so,
the black sheep of an accommodated family, Jim Stark/James Dean
justifies his taking part in a car race, which would trigger the
subsequent events of the film. Despite crossing the line of written
law, he manages to get, in his lonely climbing to the edgy
masculinity, the unconditional support of both the girl, Judy/
Natalie Wood, and young Plato/Sal Mineo, whose attraction to Jim
surpasses the limits of norm. This attraction determines Plato’s
death in the brilliant scene of the observatory. The director,
Nicholas Ray, turns the young and alienated Jim into the dramatic
axis and visual centre of the film, transforming the actor who
impersonates it, James Dean, into the role model and fetish of a
whole generation.
The character of Jim is paradigmatic of the complex mechanism
of phantasmatic identification, which the act of film-watching
triggers. The irresistible and ambivalent drive of identification
and desire caused by his image forces us to follow
vicariously the drama of the construction of masculinity till we
reach the side where contradictions are solved and the model is
fortified. The screen here is just the most obvious materialization
of that other psychic screen on which, according to Lacan,
culturally-established roles are shown; a screen on which we
recognise and model ourselves playing those roles, as if we were
watching ourselves externally by means of the camera.
Laura Mulvey, in her classic text “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema”, originally published in Screen (1975), became a
pioneer in the depiction of the disymmetrical distribution of the
identification roles and the scopophilia – visual pleasure – among
men and women – both as spectators and characters – in Hollywood
films serving the patriarchal order. 1 Years later, Teresa de Lauretis,
in her book Alice doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema,
made Mulvey’s interpretation more precise when mentioning that the
woman spectator is forced to split off between the identification
with the fixed image, passive and framed, typically feminine, and
the identification with the camera, agent of the gaze, mobile and
EN