The James Dean Effect

On a break from thesising late this January, I opened my web browser to The New York Times Web site and was greeted by chills running down my spine. Tucked away on the bottom-right corner of the screen, below headlines about flailing financial markets and the South Carolina primaries were the puzzling words: “Heath Ledger Found Dead.”

I think it’s fair to say that many members of my generation who grew up alongside “10 Things I Hate About You,” “A Knight’s Tale,” and “Brokeback Mountain” were thrown into shock. The news spread remarkably fast by text message, email, and Facebook post, and for days the actor’s tragic passing featured prominently in almost all of my conversations with friends.

A recurring theme of these conversations was how strangely significant the loss had been to us—this was the first time in our memory that we had lost a movie star. Heath Ledger was our Marilyn Monroe, our James Dean. He had joined the regretful ranks of stars immortalized by their premature deaths.

Why is it, one of my friends wondered the other night, as we passed around the issue of Entertainment Weekly whose glossy cover featured Ledger’s face, that he is sure to be remembered decades from now while he might have slipped into obscurity had he lived a full life?

That question got me thinking: Ledger only performed a few critically acclaimed roles (“Monster’s Ball,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Candy,” “I’m Not There”), and yet all those who now remember him recall a unique if not unparalleled talent. Rob Reiner’s reflection best captures the feeling of loss: “It’s a real tragedy when someone so talented dies, because you don’t know on the early part of their career what more they could offer us.”

James Dean only had three movie roles before he died at age 24 (two of them released after his death), and yet he was quickly canonized as a transcendent talent: He was nominated posthumously for two Best Actor Oscars, and The American Film Institute ranked him 18th on their list of the greatest stars of American cinema — ahead of legends like the Marx Brothers and actors like Burt Lancaster and William Holden, who won Oscars and earned many more nominations.

The common thread of these losses is that of potential. We don’t know whether Dean would ever have replicated his early success, or whether Ledger would have turned in another performance like his turn as Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain. Early death solidifies an actor’s trajectory at the beginning of its upward arc—we are a culture obsessed with what could have been—and so it is no wonder that James Dean’s face adorns many dorm room walls.

Ledger’s death unexpectedly helps explain a seemingly unrelated phenomenon: the meteoric rise of Barack Obama’s popularity amongst my generation. Why is it that droves of young voters (and kids too young to vote) flock to Obama?

Much like James Dean’s reputation rests on three great movies, Obama’s rests on three (arguably) great years in the Senate. He is young and, as his opponents charge, relatively inexperienced. But in addition to being a potential liability, this freshness is also his greatest asset. For the masses of formerly apathetic youth looking for a clarion call of hope—voters unlikely to educate themselves about policy positions—the worst thing a candidate can have is baggage. The absence of baggage allows us to project whatever we want onto the candidate: he believes what I believe, he will make the change that I want made. And why not? I have no evidence to the contrary.

The key issue of “baggage” pops up again and again on Facebook pages and YouTube videos in support of Obama. On the message board of the Facebook page where students declare that they are a “supporter” of Obama (there are almost 600,000), Towson University student John Kyriacou wrote recently “You fail to notice that both senator[s] have basically the same platform and ideas to improve our country. The only difference is that Sen. Obama has a lot less baggage.”

“No Baggage” is a good euphemism for lack of concrete data on which to pass judgement. Because Obama is a relative unknown, he can represent all forms of hope and change to all people. As a poster commented on Obama’s YouTube response to Bush’s last State of the Union Address: “Lets all remember that it was Obama that brought about the campaign of Hope and Change. I have never been this excited about the posibility of true political change. It’s time to fundamentally change this country’s government, to have have it working for its people again! Viva la Revolution!! Viva la Revolution indeed. The change Obama represents to this commentator likely does not resemble the change he represents to his upper-middle class, highly-educated supporters (his most reliable voters in the primaries) who are, I imagine, not looking for revolution. But because of our collective charitableness towards unknown quantities—be they movie stars who died too young or politicians with scant records (and, in the case of John F. Kennedy, both)—Barack Obama may be able to ride the James Dean Effect all the way to the Democratic nomination and the White House. And, in the meantime, he’ll find himself on dorm room walls to boot.

Ryder B. Kessler ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Quincy House. His column runs on alternate Wednesdays.