Juvenile Divorce In Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without A Cause

Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause reflects the youth-obsession of the American public in the 1950s. It also shows the ways in which many Americans viewed the family as a social institution in the Cold War years. James Gilbert has argued that "From the 1940s to the 1960s, Americans looked at the family with double vision: with optimism and despair." While they celebrated the family as the central institution of American life, they feared for its future, worried about its delinquent youth, and wondered why the divorce rate was so high.
At the center of the family crisis, many Americans believed, were children who had been abandoned by their parents. Research, into the causes of juvenile delinquency, blamed parents and their inability to maintain

a traditional pattern of family life in the face of the massive social changes caused by World War II. Children read explicite comic books and pulp fiction, listened to rock & roll, and generally ruined their minds by running wild, drinking Coke, and many other things. Rebel Without a Cause is basically a depiction of these children's problems and an indictment of the parents who caused them.
Jim’s desire, for example, is to see his father stand up to his nagging wife. Although Jim transfers this desire onto his father, however, his father lacks the courage to act upon it. For Jim, even the word “chicken” sends him into violent bursts, as it conjures up negative images of his father, who is “henpecked” by Jim’s mother. “She eats him alive,” Jim tells Juvenile Officer Ray, “and he takes it. He always wants to be my pal…If he had the guts to knock Mom cold once, then maybe she’d be happy…I’d never want to be like him.” According to Vicky Lebeau, there is a “‘palpable desire’ for parental authority, and the alternative family set up by the adolescent rebel, Jimmy (James Dean), can be described as simultaneously an attack upon, and a demand made to, a paternity which is failing through the father who refuses either to ‘stand up’ to the domineering mother or for his son” (83). Emasculated to the brink of caricature, Jim’s father wears an apron over his suit and tie at home and is afraid to challenge his wife on her decisions governing Jim.