Cause without a rebel

Al Filreis

Jim Backus seems silly - ridiculously weak and indecisive father, henpecked, trying to dole out manly advice to his "rebellious" teenaged son while wearing a frilly kitchen apron ... but in the end, Backus is right and the teens are wrong to rebel. It's all about family problems — mommy and daddy problems — and not about anything larger wrong with society and culture. So get over it, and let me put my arm around you ... and come on back home.

Yes, in my view Rebel without a Cause is among the few greatest anti-political film in American cinema — I mean "great" in the sense of powerful and influential. Perhaps everyone was so busy taking style (leaning, laconic, mumbling) cues from James Dean, a counterforce that almost but not quite undoes the film's relentless p.o.v. against the idea of the efficacy positions one might take against conformity, against the quietistic politics of a generation of parents, against American assumptions about home life and love. The parents are anti-ideal and in the end, waging psychological (psychoanalytic) war, their anti-idealism must be accepted.

Here are some of my favorite lines — along these lines — from the film:

Judy: "Yes. No. I don't know. He doesn't mean it, but he acts like he does."

Plato: "Nobody can help me." Mrs. Crawford "doesn't believe in psychiatrists," whom Plato calls "head-shrinkers."

Jim about his father: "He always wants to be my pal. If he had the guts to knock mom cold, then she's be happy and she wouldn't bother him."

Ray: "Go ahead. Hit the desk. You'll feel better ... It's easier sometimes than talking to your folks."

Frank Stark: "Well, you just get it off your chest, son." Jim: "That's not the point!" Frank: "You can't be idealistic all your life, son."

The scientist: "The universe will be little moved by our demise. We will disappear, destroyed as we began in a burst of gas and fire. In all the immensity of the gallaxy and beyond the earth will not be missed. The problems of man seem trivial and naive indeed, and man, existing alone, seems himself a thing of little consequence."

Jim's father, seeing Jim at the landing: "Hi Jim. You thought I was mom."

Judy's father: "It's just the age."

Frank Stark: "I wouldn't make a hasty decision. Nobody can make a snap decision. We've got to consider the pros and cons, make a list, get advice .... Have I ever stopped you from doing anything?"

Plato: "If only you coulda been my dad. We could have breakfast in the morning.

"What about children?" "We don I t encourage them. So noisy." "Nobody talks to children."

Jim, father-like: "He needs me." Judy, mother-like: "He needs you, but so do I, Jim."

The screenplay was written by Stewart Stern. And here's some good "Rebel" gossip.

February 17, 2008

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.