The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

Dean may have been one of these Xeroxes, but he had a profound effect on American culture and its view of the Method nonetheless. His performances, his “own personal rebellions,” shifted the Method subject from adulthood to late adolescence. In all three of Dean’s films, he rebels against a father figure who is incapable of loving him properly. From the vantage point of today, all three are odd symbols of nonconformity. Cal in East of Eden wants to fit in but is incapable of doing so. Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause states his cause explicitly within the film: He wants his father to be a traditional, firm-handed patriarch. Jim is the enforcer of cultural norms, not their destroyer. In Giant, Dean’s best film and performance, he’s a side character, and he spends much of the film as the drunken butt of everyone’s jokes.