Rebel Without a Cause

This is Agyness Deyn as photographed by James Franco. He is filming an upcoming remake of Rebel Without a Cause, and his photo project has a strong correlation with the film. Each photo is "meant to tackle a facet of Rebel, from the director’s paternal and, Franco says, abstract psycho-sexual dynamic with his stars, to the film’s imagined lost scenes" (Elle.com). '

When we watched The Celluloid Closet in class, we saw that a character, Plato, in the original Rebel Without a Cause is infatuated with Jim, James Dean's character. I've never seen the movie but from what I've read of it, Plato is the most "love-starved" character and the one without a clear father figure. He changes his story about his father often, and clings to the other two characters, Jim especially.

It might be a bit late to discuss some points made by The Celluloid Closet, but film is powerful in many aspects of culture, and such ambiguous relationships as Jim and Plato's are necessary for a realer, and thus more appealing, film. If attraction cannot be simply put as heterosexual or not, it makes sense for a film to skirt over the labeling of such interest. I think that the reason so many films depict unclear gender relations is that everybody involved in creating such films knew that these are not as clear as the names "homosexual" or "straight" seem to imply.