Hollywood Rebels (2)

But, as we have seen, the political element reenters, or seems to reenter, in the form of class: the Hollywood rebel's rebellion is always both against the adult world and against the bourgeoisie, in such a way that the two are almost indistinguishable. (Well, almost always: there is also the rebellion against the “bigoted” working-class parent, but this is much rarer and has an overall different tone and quality; I actually can’t think of a specific movie that depicts it. The target of the Hollywood rebellion is nearly always wealthy and “respectable.”)

Adolescent rebellion bears a peculiar relation to class: the adolescent (in the paradigmatic case) feels herself to be rebelling against everything her parents stand for; but in fact her rebellion is merely a developmental stage, a step on the way to an adulthood which will, in all likelihood, look much like that of her parents. So this sort of “rebellion” is actually a stage in becoming a bourgeois adult.

And this should not be surprising. A wholesale rejection of a value system usually dooms one to recreate precisely those features one thought one was rejecting. It is only when we remember the power and significance of the value system we wish to leave behind, when we in some sense hold onto it, that we can actually find a way away from it— just as it is only when we remember the confusion of not understanding something that we can be said to actually understand it.

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All of this comes into much sharper relief when we consider a film that does not fall into the usual pattern. In Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), Cary Scott, a middle-aged widow falls for the younger man who prunes the trees in her yard, a free-thinker, with a distinctly bohemian lifestyle and philosophy. The match is opposed by Cary’s bourgeois social circle and her preppy college-student children, and Cary must submit to this pressure or rebel against it. She chooses to rebel, but her rebellion is wonderfully quiet. There is no drunkenness, no drugs, no hint of the young or the hip. She does not act out, she does not make any scenes. It is others in her community, in fact, who, resentful of her bid for freedom from the rules that constrain them or hungry for salacious gossip, make scenes.

What drives Cary’s rebellion is not the frustration of a teenager but the real dread of a lonely widowed housewife who can find nothing to look forward to but the company of the fancy new television her son buys her for a Christmas present. What Cary is trapped in is much more complicated and much scarier than what the adolescent is trapped in, and she is bound to it by very real ties. She has no wish to embarrass or hurt her friends and children, nor to renounce her responsibilities, and the choice to reject the value system she lives in is therefore difficult and painful—as it ought to be for a real adult. The gleeful slightly mean-spirited pleasure that we get from watching respectability shocked and embarrassed is not available in All That Heaven Allows. But the joy of liberation is, and in this way we discover what the standard Hollywood narrative has obscured: that that pleasure and this joy are very distinct sensations.