Feel free to take it apart sangrain, I’ll sew it up again. Come on…challenge me.
Yes, yes. Perfect. Right of passage. Well put. Dean spoke (maybe still speaks) to a certain age group who is at that point where they are looking to separate themselves from their parents. This is perpetual. The kids come and go but there’s always the next generation trying to break away from the previous one. Now, in Dean’s case the situation was magnified because never before had there been such a serious generational gap. One needs to consider the time period. We were entering the 60s. It was even more cool to break away.
But in Dean’s case it wasn’t about breaking away in any particular direction, it was just about breaking away. Being cool was being rebellious. Didn’t matter where you were headed or if you were even headed anywhere at all, so long as it wasn’t where “society” or “the system” was headed. Brando’s cool was the same. From The Wild Ones:
What are you rebelling against, Johnny?
Brando: What have you got?
Now there"s nothing wrong with being rebellious. We were a nation founded in rebellion after all. The Founding Fathers were the original cool. Who has ever been cooler than Ben Franklin? And this is what I mean about the American landscape influencing these guys as much as they influenced the American landscape. We’re a nation of rugged individualists. Or maybe it’s more as Bill Murray once put it: “We’re Americans. With a capital “A”. That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts.”
But however one considers it, we like to think we’re different. We revel in individuality. We try to anyway. We fall short of the ideal most of the time. But there’s something deep within us. Something that makes us turn up our noses at politicians who are willing to appease anybody to get elected, even as we promise our boss at work that we’ll be a good “team player” from now on and not take so much initiative without first getting it approved by the committee in charge of reviewing abnormal initiatives.
And so our heroes are cool, and cool for us (this might be my entire point) is anything that’s true to itself and willing to stand up and be different. Now I don’t mean that this is entirely and uniquely American. My hunch is that it’s a part of the human psyche. Maybe the coolest guy in the past 50 years was the guy who stood up in front of a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. But we were founded on it, and we celebrate it. We can’t always live up to it though, so we need people to live vicariously through.
And there’s something about youth. It’s easier when you’re young. You’re not established. You haven’t been molded yet. But this “right of passage” of yours doesn’t have a life-long effect on most. And this is why Bogey was so much cooler than Dean. Bogey’s was a life-long rugged individuality. Dean’s might have been too, of course. We’ll never know. But in contrast to Dean’s rebellion against something, you always sensed Bogart was moving towards something.
Bogey had places to go.
Rainey,
Mark my words good Sir, I will disagree with you one of these days. I just can’t right now. Well rendered. You were even histo-specific. I’ll ruminate.
Ms. Liquidangel, you are doing just fine … maybe.
Of course I’m fine. Everything is as it should be sangrain.
spam. a lot.