The Wild One Analysis

in a way, modernist art followed the rudimentary progression of general modernity, which involved the “creative destruction” in all spheres through the “negation of the old and the creation of the new.” Towards the 1950s, enervation took hold as modernity failed to deliver on its historical promise to deliver an unprecedented future of prophetic works of art.

Reactionaries like Dwight MacDonald hated these changes. In his 1952 Theory of Mass Culture, he likened contemporaneous art as akin to chewing gum, in that you use it and throw it away. However his demarcation of the rise of popular culture holds weight; arguing that education and political democracy broke down the upper-class monopoly of culture, with business enterprises finding profitable markets in the awakened masses. The prerequisite for this postmodern turn, as Clement Greenberg argued, was “the availability close at hand of a fully matured
Gary Cooper was the first star to wear denim on screen in High Noon, and then more famously Marlon Brando in the 1953 film The Wild One, before James Dean appeared denim clad in the film Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. Dean and Brando both represented a bohemian counterculture that pre-empted the movements of the 1960s: they played young GIs who returned from war, not to move into the suburbs, but to ride around on motorcycles and live as outsiders. Dean and Brando had a decisive function in the popularisation of jeans and the popularisation of mass culture, the fact that they wore the same clothes on and off screen adding to the impression of authenticity. Dean and Brando’s subversive style had mass appeal to a generation of mostly white youths, whose identity was obscured and complicated by the wars that interspersed their formative years. Government, corporate expansion, and mass society came to be the focus of counter-culture