Hollywood Rebels (1)

I’ve been thinking further on the endless figurative rebellions of mainstream Hollywood. In many films, rebellion is an explicit and central theme—American Beauty, Office Space, The Breakfast Club, etc.— but even when it is not central, it is almost always present, at a level so deep that I am almost tempted to say that rebellion is the fundamental aesthetic position of Hollywood. It is through his or her rebellion, however trivial— the flouting of uptight manners, of teacher, of parent, of boss, of commanding officer, of social norm— that we recognize the Hollywood hero.

But it is a strange sort of rebellion that Hollywood shows us. For one thing, these rebellions always, as it were, dress up in the jewelry of political resistance, even though in most cases nothing is overturned, no structure dismantled or even threatened. Some middle-aged dad smokes pot and starts working out, some heiress falls for a poor artist but then he drowns, some teenagers write a manifesto and then feel better about themselves. We must ask how it is that these entirely apolitical narratives manage to achieve the edgy aura of political resistance and evoke the righteous joy of justice being done.

What they lack in real political content these rebellions make up for in performance: the rebels do not actually do much, but they strike excellent poses, flout norms with heroic coolness: they embarrass parents, do shocking things at garden parties, leave uptight people apoplectic. It is not the breaking of rules that makes audiences cheer gleefully but the flouting of them.

Flouting rules is exciting, because it suggests a lack of fear of consequences. But such a fearlessness is possible, for the Hollywood rebel, precisely because the rules that she is breaking do not actually have much hold on her. Real rebellion, whether it takes a political or a personal form, is always against constraints in which one is truly caught and enmeshed, against ties that have a real hold on one. To break such rules is terrifying. One expends one’s energy in breaking them; one has none left to flout them and strike poses.

But the type of the Hollywood rebel is not the political rebel but the adolescent. The adolescent’s aim is precisely to perform her independence. She may, in the process, break rules and weaken authority relations, but these actions are incidental: childhood always involves rules and authority relations, these are necessary and good, and their specific form is mostly a matter of culture; the adolescent’s psychological need is not to modify the parenting or pedagogical culture around her but to assert her independence. There is nothing wrong with this move (though we should remember that the very phenomenon of adolescence is a peculiar feature of modern industrialized culture), but we should not confuse it with political resistance.

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