James Dean, the Eternal Youth

As an exploration of the young male psyche, the film  A Portrait of James Dean: Joshua Tree, 1951, gives a lot of insightful information.  The storyteller begins with his meeting and being befriended by Jimmy Dean at UCLA.  Starting with acting class, the young men and women are trying to make it big in Hollywood.  They are exploring what appears to be the sexual path to stardom.  We see the development of James Byron Dean, an incredibly talented actor, who embodied the bad boy, who smoked cigarettes, drank a lot of alcohol, and explored the dark side of the psyche.  Involved in SM, bondage, gay sex as seduced and seducer, young James is an artist, like the French poet Rimbaud, who is portrayed in the opening scene of the film, as living the sensual life to its fullest.  Jimmy’s best friend describes their meeting as a transcendent moment, he says, “my life was black and white until I met Jimmy.  Then it turned to Technicolor.”  Jimmy Dean sketched the images he saw in his mind, disclosing the sexual and sensual contours of his inner world. He used his charm and beautiful body to his advantage.  He had secrets too.  He was into Bull Fighting, Hemingway, and Matadors.

Slowly the image of the troubled youth emerges.  Jimmy’s mother died when he was eight.  She named him after the Scottish poet Lord Byron, who was wounded from birth with a club foot, and, interestingly enough inspired Mary Shelley’s monster in her book (1818) Frankenstein.  Lord Byron had lovers of both sexes whom he used and abused.  One wonders about such parents, whose psyches gift their children with such heavy burdens.  Jimmy longs for his missing mother and thinks his roommate is lucky to have a mother, no matter how abandoning and addicted she is to alcohol.  At least he has relationship.  Violet, the actress who didn’t make it, works for Jimmy’s agent as an assistant.  She watches and advises the agent’s stable of young actors.  That is her role, although Jimmy tells his roommate they are her chaperones.  They drive to Joshua Tree and that is where much of the psychological information flows out in dialogue.  Violet is the incestuous daughter, who is willing to be abused by her lovers.  She tells Jimmy that he will never recover from the loss of his mother and points out that, like it or not, he is a prostitute.  He will do anything it takes to be a success.  He’s already admitted having his cock sucked, playing the passive role with men, as well as actively fucking men and women, whatever helps him feel something passionately.  And his agent has turned him on to a special book (1951) The Little Prince  by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, which figures prominently in his relationship with his roommate, who eventually succumbs to Jimmy’s charms and becomes his lover.

I found this connection to Saint-Exupery’s work fascinating and went rummaging through my Jungian book collection to find my copy of Marie-Louise von Franz’ The Problem of the PUER AETERNUS.  The book is a transcription of von Franz’ winter semester lectures at the C. G. Jung Institute, Zurich, in 1959-60.  She quotes extensively from The Little Prince and uses the illustrations to explain the author’s psychological problems.  She knew quite a lot about Saint-Exupery’s mother, his wife and his lover, his relationships with these women, his addictions, his moodiness, and his disappearance flying his airplane in 1944 over the Mediterranean Sea.  The lectures illustrate and discuss the archetype of the eternal youth (puer eternus), which von Franz says can be characterized as

“a certain type of young man who has an outstanding mother complex and who therefore behaves in certain typical ways.”  There are two basic forms, homosexuality and Don Juanism.  In the former “the heterosexual libido is still tied up with the mother, who is really the only beloved object, with the result that sex cannot be experienced with another woman.  That would make her a rival of the mother, and therefore sexual needs are satisfied only with a member of the same sex.  Generally such men lack masculinity and seek that in a partner.”  The Don Juan form is a slight variation, “in this case, the image of the mother—the image of the perfect woman who will give everything to a man and who is without any shortcomings—is sought in every woman.  He is looking for a mother goddess, so that each time he is fascinated by a woman he has later to discover that she is an ordinary human being.  Once he has been intimate with her the whole fascination vanishes and he turns away disappointed, only to project the image anew onto one woman after another.  He eternally longs for the maternal woman who will enfold him in her arms and satisfy his every need.  This is often accompanied by the romantic attitude of the adolescent.  Generally great difficulty is experienced in adaptation to the social situation and, in some cases, there is a kind of false individualism, namely that, being something special, one has no need to adapt, for that would be impossible for such a hidden genius, and so on.  In addition there is an arrogant attitude toward other people due to both an inferiority complex and false feelings of superiority.”  (pp. 7 & 8)

James Dean apparently was a composite of these two basic forms of the eternal youth.  He certainly projected the arrogant, special person, the “too deep to really be understood” moodiness, which pushes intimacy away.  The one night stands are signs of lack of relatedness.  The fox is trying to teach the Little Prince that one makes an ordinary person special by “taming them”, by developing feelings for them and hence making the relationship meaningful.  This in turn “ties one down” to the tamed fox or, in the Little Prince’s world, the rose.  (Rosa was the name of Saint-Exupery’s wife.)  There is a natural tension which should be felt by the connectedness between the Little Prince and the fox.  But the puer doesn’t move toward responsibility for the fox.  Rather, he moves backwards into the past, to what he has left behind, to the rose on his asteroid.  This regression is symbolized by the poisonous snake, which offers to solve his problems, i.e., to kill the Little Prince and hence transport him, through death, to the beloved object of the past.  That is what happens in the end, to James Dean and others with the problem of the puer eternus.  They choose Death over life.  Rather than being tied down to family and friends, to an ordinary human existence, they fly up to heaven, leaving their lovers and children behind to fend for themselves.

If anything I have said above makes sense to you, I highly recommend seeing Matthew Mishory’s great glimpse into the psyche of the puer eternus.  Rent A Portrait of James Dean, Joshua Tree, 1951.  James Preston gives a very believable performance as Jimmy.

James Preston

James Dean