by Spitz, Marc
Dean only comes into focus as a hero, like all Twee godheads, when confronted with bullies. Then and only then does he stiffen and shine.
“I thought only Punks fought with knives,” he taunts the local hoods in Rebel Without a Cause. Both Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo adore him, but it’s no solace.
The adults, who were put on alert by the work of Salinger and Seuss, are literally choked by Dean. Eloise retreated into a private dream world, Holly simply ran away, but Dean threw his body into it. He became the martyr for the new generation’s dismissal of their parents’ cowardice and shell shock.
“Stand up!” his character begs his father, played by Jim Backus. It’s as if he’s speaking to the entire World War II generation. But the parents are cowed, broken, and shattered. Dean can’t find peace with that, so he must negate the adults, one by one. It is easy to see why Dean remains, to this day, a talisman.
This is where Dean and another great 1950s rebel hero cross over and meet in a world that is entirely youth-invented: the adults are literally voiceless. The only other rebel of the late ’50s with the same power to express grief at the weakness, hypocrisy, and utter futility of the Eisenhower era in the manner of Dean is a boy named Charlie Brown.
Yes, I am drawing a comparison between James Dean and Charlie Brown, and if you think I’m crazy, I should point out that thousands of American college students did the same in the late 1950s. In that decade, the Peanuts antihero was the most popular character in college newspapers across the country; like Dean, Charlie became a sort of existential hero in an age of helplessness and horror, brokenhearted but still hopeful. He will try to kick the ball every time, just as Dean’s Jim Stark will never give up his secret faith that people, especially his old man, have virtue in them. He will die trying to conjure it.
“I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel,” Charlie Brown sighs, and there’s no cigarette-smoking French philosopher in a beret who could articulate it better. He is a Twee hero because he, like Dean, confronts a cold world with idealism. In a strip from the early ’50s, as Dean is reinventing the matinee idol, Charlie says to Lucy, “You don’t like me.”
She replies, “Sure I do, Charlie Brown.”
“Well, maybe you like me a little,” he responds, “but you don’t think I’m perfect.”
Charlie Brown hates school, is puzzled by girls, and finds his dog, Snoopy, to be trouble. He is a new kind of loser: one who sees his fate as unjust and, in the age of analysis, is happy to kvetch. He doesn’t hate himself, but rather quietly rages at the status quo that doesn’t recognize his genius. He is Hannah Horvath, a half century beforehand; a model for Generation Y and, I suppose, even Z as he inhabits a postwar baby boomer realm.
“Look at those two, I bet they’re talking about me,” he mutters in another strip from the era while passing two chatting girls. “It always worries me when I know people are talking about me.” (They are discussing a cowboy movie.)
He is Twee or proto-Twee because he is an aesthete, a perfectionist. He constructs, one winter, what he considers the perfect snowman, only to return to find Snoopy has eaten the carrot nose. Drawn simply by Schulz, like children’s book characters, the Peanuts gang (Linus, Lucy, Schroeder, even Snoopy) are given blood and soul by weight of their neuroses. They’re all messes. Linus can’t go anywhere without his blanket and Schroeder can’t even lift his head. Lucy, who tends unrequited love for the slumped pianist, is compulsive and type A while completely oblivious to her own psychic flaws. Pig Pen doesn’t wash. Let’s not even get into Peppermint Patty and Marcie.
When asked to name his favorite filmmakers, Wes Anderson included Bill Melendez, Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz’s chief animator and the man responsible for the perennial A Charlie Brown Christmas, which showcases in heart-shaking blues and wintry whites the character’s wounded ennui during a time when most are spilling over with goodwill.
“Drats! Nobody sent me a Christmas card today,” Charlie Brown complains. “I almost wish there wasn’t a holiday season. I know nobody likes me. Why do we have to have a holiday season to emphasize it?” And yet he will check the mailbox again tomorrow. Like Disney and Dean and Seuss and even the cynical J. D. Salinger, he has not lost hope even as most around him have grown hard from their pain and fear.
Dozens of Peanuts homages lurk in Anderson’s oeuvre, from the use of Vince Guaraldi’s signature melancholy tinkling in both the Bottle Rocket short and The Royal Tenenbaums to the placement of a (doomed) beagle in the latter and making Max Fischer’s father a barber, like Charlie Brown’s, in Rushmore. “Chuck” finally got his long-belated due in the summer of 2013 when a Tumblr page by graphic artist Lauren Loprete called This Charming Charlie went viral. Combining Peanuts panels with well-chosen Morrissey lyrics, it was akin to Dangermouse’s Gray Album, which synched Jay Z’s Black Album perfectly with the Beatles’ White Album. This connection seemed obvious, something that had been hanging in the zeitgeist forever, simply waiting to be brought together and shared. It was also subversive. One panel featured bespectacled Marcie staring longingly at Peppermint Patty and confessing, “I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice.” Morrissey approved of the mash-up, at a time when the great man approved of very little. Shortly thereafter, a Peanuts reboot was announced, to be helmed by Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig.
Peanuts all but erased the generation that came before it in a way that Disney, Eames, Salinger, and any number of idealistic futurists could not, literally stripping them of their voice. In the animated television specials the sound of an adult speaking (or scolding) had no assonance or consonance. It was a muted and moot bleat: a blah-blah-blah.
The end of the postwar 1940s and the start of the modern era would see a different kind of Twee Tribe hero, one with a stronger, surer sense of his outsiderism. These heroes would wear their nerdiness and insecurity a bit more proudly and achieve great work not only in spite of it, but also, for the first time, because of it. Musically, chief among them was the great Buddy Holly. If Brando was the hard man to Dean’s soft boy, Holly was the fastidious and ambitious workaholic to Elvis’s loose and easy rockabilly cat. He looked like a school nerd, but he was as much a rebel as Brando’s Johnny, willfully dispensing with gospel and country in favor of “race music.” He was also as control freakish as Brian Wilson and the Beatles would later be, insisting on producing his own self-penned music and incorporating odd (for rock and roll) instruments like the glockenspiel (on “Everyday”) for an unsuspecting teenybopper’s aural enjoyment.
His influence on Wilson, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks is singular.
He is also, like so many Twee heroes, forever young. Holly died in a small-plane crash over Iowa in the frigid early morning of February 3, 1959, at just twenty-two (along with tour mates the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens). He left behind a dozen and a half perfect pop songs simultaneously tough (“That’ll Be the Day,” a line borrowed from John Wayne in The Searchers and stripped of just enough menace), lusty (“Peggy Sue”), and breathlessly romantic (“True Love Ways”) but always, always, pure.
For all the genius of his music, Holly’s greatest contribution may have been his style. He was the first hip nerd, riding motorcycles and, sartorially, inventing “geek chic” almost singlehandedly with his bow ties, slim suits, horn-rimmed glasses, neat hair, and toothy, eager smile. It’s a look that David Byrne, Morrissey, the Feelies, and Weezer would appropriate, but not before the young, prefame Beatles and Stones.
“Normally [John] wore the horn-rim specs,” Paul McCartney remembered of his late friend and partner, John Lennon, in a BBC documentary on Buddy Holly. “But he always took them off onstage. [After Holly] he was now able to put them on and see the world.”
Chapter 2
Younger Than That Now
1963–1972
In which the eldest children of the modern world take off on their own, soar, crash, and then, once again, in the midst of a war, attempt to make something o
f all the broken parts. The 1960s, the quintessential Twee decade, begins, and a sense of whimsy is employed in everything from recording studios to the anti–Vietnam War protests.
Poor, poor Sylvia Plath. Today the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and millions-selling novelist is both a literary and feminist icon and a too-easy punch line. Her outsize sadness and shakiness sometimes upstage her magnificent writing. Even those who have never read Ariel or The Bell Jar know she was a mess.
“Now I know why Sylvia Plath put her head in a toaster!,” Julie Delpy groans midargument in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (the final installment of his celebrated Sunrise Trilogy). Plath, of course, asphyxiated on gas from a proper English oven in February of 1963.
“You’re hardly the authority on happiness, Sylvia,” Patton Oswalt chides Charlize Theron in the script for Jason Reitman’s 2011 black comedy Young Adult, penned by Diablo Cody.
In the film Fight Club, Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden quips, “In the Tibetan philosophy, Sylvia Plath sense of the word, I know we’re all dying, but . . .”
In Annie Hall, Woody Allen browses Diane Keaton’s bookshelf and plucks off a copy of Ariel. “Aha, Sylvia Plath,” he muses. “Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality.”
And yes, anyone who has read Plath’s perfectly detailed and prolific journal knew that she was something of a Debbie Downer in her short life, but she also possessed a deep ambition, a sense of humor, and creative energy that surged with life. Life simply overwhelmed her, even as she never seemed to leave her private world and remained terrifically productive. “I fall on the bed, drugged, with this queer sickish greeny-vinous fatigue. Drugged, gugged, stogged and sludged with weariness. My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing. My writing,” she writes in her journal.
Plath too is a child of World War II and its horror; many of her poems allude to the Holocaust either directly or metaphorically, aligning her psychic suffering with that of an actual victim of Hitler’s death camps, a device deemed controversial by some who saw only a relatively privileged and beautiful young woman, safely encased in academia. Still, Plath provides war-haunted voices for those who never served, and if anything enables a kind of suffering by proxy that is deeply empathetic and, yes, would be extremely tacky in less capable hands.
The Bell Jar, her masterpiece of prose, posthumously published in America on the twentieth anniversary of the original publication of The Catcher in the Rye, stands alongside that book and Anne Frank’s diary in a kind of three-headed urtext of Twee. To call them bibles or designs for living would not be far off base. Like Catcher, The Bell Jar begins as a snapshot of New York City in the 1950s. Beautiful and ambitious Esther Greenwood seems, like Holden, within reach of success and opportunity, but she just can’t stop ruminating or gird the raw nerves that cause her to obsess and eventually stop writing and break down. We, as readers, feel not only that these narrators (both are first person) live, as much as Anne Frank lived, but that their pain is our own, the key to any book one reads more than once and displays on subways or in cafeterias. They are books and they are prescriptions for a kind of temporary cure for pain.
Plath knew she had a gift. Like Salinger, she sent off poems to the key periodicals and journals of the day and was met with much rejection. “A day of misery,” she writes in the spring of 1957, “New Yorker rejection.” She is almost a Salinger character herself: beautiful, New York sophisticated (although she was born in Boston and studied at Cambridge, she knew the “jazz and push” of Manhattan), consumed with neuroses and a quiet, persistent suffering—Franny Glass made flesh. It’s no accident that Gwyneth Paltrow was drawn to play her in the 2003 biopic after she adopted a crisp Plathian look as the fictional Margot Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. Hardworking and determined as she was, there was something ghostly and unreal about Plath, a quality that loans itself to pastiche.
A wife (of eminent poet Ted Hughes) and a mother, Plath was not alone, of course, but that didn’t spare her from feeling utterly isolated in life. “I have children but few friends,” she wrote; a sort of call out from beyond to the lonely, bedroom-bound Twee Tribe member. Twees don’t like their writers happy. It won’t do.
Though the jokes about her make her seem humorless, Plath possessed wit, and the key Twee component: whimsy. “Then that red plush,” she writes of accidentally slicing off the top of her thumb in “Cut.” “Little pilgrim, / The Indian’s axed your scalp. / Your turkey wattle.”
When she took the gas in her London kitchen, Plath led a kind of march of the war-scarred into oblivion that would both seal her as a Twee heroine (tragic, beautiful, damned) and afford her followers a vacuum to fill. She was not alone in clearing this colorful, Seussian path. James Dean died in a car accident. Salinger disappeared into a New Hampshire bunker. Even the garrulous, attention-seeking Truman Capote walked away from writing—perhaps because he looked too deeply and clearly into the abyss with his chilling “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood, about a random robbery and the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas on November 15, 1959. Following the publication of the book and a strange but intense intimacy with one of the two convicted killers, Perry Smith, Capote launched into one long celebration and avoided the hard thoughts he required to create. He was no longer boyish as he bloated and blurred into something of a tragedy himself. The middle-aged Capote was almost a specimen suggesting what a Dean or a Plath or a Holly might have become had they not died so young: a pure and raw-eyed creature battered and simply dragged around too long by life.
At this time, cinema moved once again to the forefront of a great cultural change where mischief and rebellion reigned (at least until the arrival of the Beatles and the Stones). The auteurs of what has come to be called the Nouvelle Vague—Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Malle, Rohmer (and the later auteur who would come to worship them, Wes Anderson)—were all students in one way or another. They weren’t novices who happened to pick up a camera and swing it around. They studied film. Truffaut and Godard both contributed to the prestigious film quarterly Cahiers du Cinéma. They shared an admiration for the classics but also weariness with the establishment that wouldn’t permit love of American pulp, especially the gangster films of the 1930s and ’40s.
Truffaut’s debut, 1959’s 400 Blows, is the story of a sad, queasy child, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud, who would also play the character in a series of sequels), and his bickering, somewhat pathetic, Parisian working-class family. The success of this film enabled these new, cool cinema gods with their Gauloises and their dark sunglasses entry into institutions such as the Cannes Film Festival (where the film was nominated for the Palme d’Or). Antoine is beleaguered (“I just can’t concentrate,” he complains. “I want to quit school . . .”), but his main function is that of a Trojan horse sneaking a new kind of uncool-cool into the pop consciousness. Out of Truffaut’s success we eventually get 1960’s Breathless, which he championed and cowrote, and out of Breathless we get Jean-Paul Belmondo, who, gangly and swarthy, with the face of a sexy duck, looks nothing like the era’s standard-issue leading men—but it doesn’t matter. He acts all the more cocksure for it. Who knows what he sees when he looks in the mirror, but it’s not what we see. Regardless, he’s proud of the vision staring back. Preceding Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate by a good seven-plus years, Belmondo is, in his way, the first Twee leading man; godfather to everyone from Hoffman and Bud Cort to Zach Braff, Jason Schwartzman, Michael Cera, and Jonah Hill.
The doomed Jean Seberg, the film’s heroine, blond and beautiful, resembles all of the era’s leading women, but in collaborating with Godard and Truffaut and in clinches with Belmondo (all cheekbones, nose, pursed lips, and tilted hat) she is given depth and strangeness, anger and frustration, that continue to speak to Indie culture. She is also given a haircut.
Seberg’s wardrobe in Godard’s Breathless is the big bang of female Twee fashion—strip
ed shirts, trousers, and Mary Janes with no socks—but it’s the hair that is most atomic and eternal. From Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby to Isobel Campbell of Belle and Sebastian to Natalie Portman in Hotel Chevalier (the moody short that prefaces Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited) to the postfame Lena Dunham, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Lawrence, and even orange-skinned, ’90s Playboy Playmate and B-movie actress Pamela Anderson, the Seberg cut, short on the sides and in back, a bit longer and boyishly parted in front, has become an icon and a sort of cultural signal for women. “I am a certain way. I read this type of book. I like these bands. I buy this handbag.”
For all of her wholesome, Iowan beauty, Seberg the actress was something of a Dumbo figure herself when Godard and Truffaut (who cowrote the script) cast her as Patricia, an American in Paris selling the New York Herald Tribune (wearing a Tribune T-shirt that itself has become a fashion classic), living in a small apartment on the Left Bank and trying to decide if she is in love with her hoodlum boyfriend, Michel. The aging Hollywood director Otto Preminger had conducted a highly publicized cattle call of thousands of actors before settling on Seberg, who was just seventeen at the time, to play Joan of Arc in his epic Saint Joan in 1957. The film was the director’s dream project and was intended to be Seberg’s big break: Graham Greene wrote the script, and Sir John Gielgud was among the cast. And yet the critics savaged it, and Seberg, who had beaten out more than three thousand other actresses for the role, was cast aside. Ambitious and progressive, she left Hollywood for Europe, where she fell in with Godard, and together they made film history and built an archetype. That Seberg would later, like Plath and so many other Twee heroes, die by her own hand in good-bye-cruel-world fashion only strengthens her standing among the Twee. Indie culture has never taken its eye off her.
