Young Love Rebellion:
Fight Against Capitalism While You Still Can

“Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower, we will grieve not; rather find strength in what remains behind.”-William Wordsworth
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Since the science of filmmaking was first put to use, we have looked to the movies for inspiration, entertainment, and adventure. At the movies we can become different people and see the world in which we live in from numerous angles, all without leaving the comfort of a plush seat. All over the world films are seen as a mirror of the societies we call home as well. Films from genres spanning horror to drama and everything in between, become much more than moving pictures on a screen; they morph into vital looking glasses which, when gazed upon, can reveal often unsettling truths about our world.

For this piece, in homage to our semester-long examination of “The Radical Romance”, I will take a look at romantic films which shed light upon the society we live in. Specifically, the money-making zeitgeist which is the realm of teen films reveals various elements of modern society for what they truly are. A sample of these films gives insight into the state of contemporary consumerist society and the ills which exist within it by way of romance. Ultimately, the result of these various commentaries reveals what seems to be a recurrent truth: that youth, despite passionately rebelling against it, cannot escape immersion into the pool of capitalism once adulthood settles in.

Before I begin expounding upon which films reveal this ultimate failure of youth rebellion through romance, there is something that needs attending to. Films are snapshots of the time periods which they come from. A film from the 1960s will not fully shed light upon circumstances from an era prior to or after it. However, myriad facets of the human condition explored in film tend to be universal connectors when analysis of movies across decades comes into the fore. Young people are rebellious regardless of the time period they live in. Being in their most formative years, teenagers regularly rebel as they experience the difficulty of transforming from childhood ease to the adult responsibilities and concerns which await us all (Barker, 408). Young people are also rebellious regardless of class, race, religion and place. From “Rebel Without A Cause” to “Superbad” movies explore the excitement and danger involved with acting against the accepted societal mores of a particular era when the agents acting against it are young people.

But let’s take a few steps back for a moment. The designation of a sector of society as “youth” is a relatively new one which came about when enormous cultural shifts took place in the world (Barker, 407). Indeed, according to sociologist Talcott Parsons, the term “youth” is a designation which only became normalized with the emergence of capitalism. Capitalism is a ceiling stratified into place by way of money-generating occupations and careers. Adults take up these trades and jobs in order to make money and supply the necessary if not accommodating things we live to consume and consume to live. Teenagers, who are too old to treat as children but not old enough to make their own money, are bred to someday occupy these professions and become little capitalists themselves.

So then, why do young people find ways to rebel against the society their parents work in and reinvigorate daily, the one they will soon supply the same spirit to? One theory makes the reason clear, in my opinion, and also stands relevant to the topic at hand. Chris Barker in his book, Cultural Studies: Theory& Practice, points to a “sociology of delinquency” which became a study of the Chicago School (411). Here, a select group of varying characteristics of delinquency in young people are named. All of these characteristics are tied to class struggles between those who have and those who don’t. Rebellion is seen as a way to cope with the lack of power which comes along with being of the working classes. To harness some of this power which they are deficient in, teenagers invert middle-class, consumerist values of work, money-making and achievement by capitalist standards; they create their own values which are sometimes anti- goals which deviate from those of the dominating middle and upper classes; and they go about self-fulfillment, accumulating wealth and gaining power in deviant ways to those used by the middle and upper class because they are regularly excluded from these methods by way of strict class stratification. In essence, working-class youths create sub-cultures and deviant values to those of society in order to reach what is perceived as virtual “success” by all.

Since films are a great way to watch the world through all kinds of eyes, it seems fitting to analyze youth rebellion via romance through this medium. It is a time-old concept: star-crossed lovers who are not supposed to be together for various reasons based in societal values, going against parents and the entire world as they wag collective fingers at them. The movies are enthralled by this dynamic as evidenced by the recent success of a certain vampire romance and, indeed, countless other more human romances put on film before that. To reveal how movie-makers see youth rebellion through romance and its ultimate effectiveness, though, a variety of films from the past and recent cinema will be analyzed. Specifically, the camera will be set fully upon the films Splendor in the Grass, Flirting, and Summer Palace.

Elia Kazan’s 1961 film Splendor in the Grass is considered by most movie hounds to be a landmark film. Made during a time when sexual frankness was not particularly in fashion within the entertainment realm, this film more dutifully addresses the topic. Don Willmott, in his review for Filmcritic.com, calls it Kazan’s “most notorious” in that it places sensuality on the screen in a more flagrant way than any of his other works. Just to express this movie’s level of importance in the history of film all the more, it is ranked number 47 on the American Film Institute’s top one hundred most passionate romances of the century list.

The film centers on Wilma Dean, portrayed by Natalie Wood, and Bud, played by Warren Beatty. They are a young high school couple living in a rural Kansas town during a time when America was on the precipice of entering the Great Depression. They first meet us in Bud’s car kissing, having to stop before they go any further because Wilma Dean is “afraid”. Bud moves on towards frustration and resorts to declaring, “I better take you home”, thus beginning a rather vicious cycle between the two: intense passion coming to a climax which is never realized because both of them are too “afraid”.

Although this observation might sound too simplistic, to say that neither of these characters has the guts to consummate their romance is a fact. However, I do not say this in a sneering way. Bud and Wilma Dean do not live in a literal bubble where being influenced is an unknown terror. Indeed, Bud is the son of a wealthy oil man who has invested a great deal of stock in the American market and seems to be riding high on the wave this success brings at the start of the film. The family business will be passed on to Bud (whose flapper sister as an heir is out the question not just because she is female, but also “too low for the dogs to bite” since she is sexually active). Daddy’s plan for Bud is a nice four-year stint at Yale University before he takes over, and, therefore, no marriage until those years are up. This means he should not have sex with Deanie (the nickname everyone in the film has given Wilma Dean). What if he were to impregnate her? Well, if that were to happen Bud would have to marry her, and that is not the plan his father has made for his oil field heir.

Deanie, on the other hand, is from a much more working-class family who owns stock in Stamp Oil, ironically. Her mother is the parent who makes the plans for Deanie’s particular life, which also does not involve pre-marital sex. The plan for Deanie is to get married a virgin to someone just like Bud Stamper, if he himself cannot be wrangled. She doesn’t want her child “spoiled” by sex and actually goes so far as to deem Deanie’s sexual desire to be unusual for a woman and unusual usually means wrong. At one point she tells her daughter, “A woman doesn't enjoy those things the way a man does. She just lets her husband come near her in order to have children.” Feeling that she is abnormal for wanting Bud as a woman does not, Deanie resorts to steadily allowing her desire to change her.

Here, I mean really change her. Deanie soon suffers a nervous breakdown following the pivotal break-up between her and Bud. He decides they are not managing their lust well, that things are getting much too hot and heavy for two people whose futures are all planned out and do not involve the complications of pre-marital sex. She is sent to a rehabilitation facility for two years. When she seems to be cured of her desire for sex, Deanie is released only to find that Bud is married with children to take care of, running his father’s oil fields. His father is dead now, having committed suicide after finding out that his stocks had not just plummeted in value, but dissolved. He did not finish those four years at Yale.

With nothing left to do, Deanie resolves to accept a marriage proposal from a fellow rehabilitated person from the facility she called home for two years.

Many things are afoot here. Societal mores and values all create frustration between these two people solely based on their desire for one another. The rebellion was in being together despite the risk of someday losing their will to resist and consummating their passion. The rebellion would have been all the more pronounced had they consummated it at all. This was their rebellion at a time when sex was for the private realm of life, unlike how we deal with it today (aka, the porn industry and cinematic romantic works from “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” to “The Piano”). All of this passion left unreleased resulted in the dissipation of their romance and thus, the beginning of their induction into the capitalist society which their parents had so thoroughly planned for them to enter. Bud finds himself married anyway, despite his father’s admonishment to keep from doing so before college life had spent itself. He isn’t married to Deanie, though we hear him repeat over and over how much he loves her, how much he wants to marry her. He is living in a tiny cottage of a house on his father’s oil field when Deanie comes to visit him, having succumbed to the continuation of the family business, awaiting an upturn in the economy and resurgence in the success of Stamper Oil in the clobbered American stock exchange. Deanie will become a wife as her mother planned, probably a housewife like her mother. She will have children who will someday do the same: follow in their parents’ footsteps, depending on their sex. It turns out that their parents wanted them to keep from having pre-marital sex because that was not a road which any productive citizen would have wanted to take at the time. A woman would have been deemed unfit for marriage, her primary goal in life obliterated, and a man would be possibly saddled with an unwanted pregnancy and an unwanted marriage before he could get the education necessary to acquiring a good profession which would pay for a family’s maintenance. Deanie’s mother’s words sum up this phenomenon. Children from good homes make a prolific labor force. Capitalism needs more workers to be maintained, and at the time, one went about making more workers in the most socially accepted way: through marriage unions. Unions, from Deanie’s mother’s view, which were more contract than the passion which this young couple felt between themselves.

Foucault puts it beautifully in “The History of Sexuality” when he goes on about saying that we speak of sex all the time, as repressed as we are in action. To speak of it, even in an admonishing way rather than frankly, shows that we are repressed as Deanie and Bud were. This is cultivated, this societal shunning of sex-talk in the most frank sense, in the search for an establishment of power. Power is necessary in the maintenance of a regulated, consumerist- led, capitalist society where government tells us what is good and bad in law and society does the same in practice and discourse. These rules reinvigorate capitalist societies in that they maintain status quos and order: women are for the production of children, the next consumerists and money-generators, and men are the workers, the present money-generators which capitalism needs to remain intact. Foucault puts it this way by asking the question: “All of this garrulous attention which has us in a stew over sexuality, is it motivated by one basic concern: to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations… in short to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative?” Though he does not put an answer to his question to keep from being stuck in one mode of discourse about our treatment of sex, I will say the answer is: yes.

Another film I like to consider when thinking about the way youth’s are thwarted in romance when adulthood settles in to place them in the world of capitalism is Flirting, directed by John Duigan. This 1991 film explores a very radical romance between two students attending two boarding schools separated by a lake in 1970s Australia. A philosophically inclined boy named Danny whose classmates do not understand him, is white. The girl, another very philosophical and intelligent teen, is a black Ugandan girl named Thandiwe. Both are attracted to one another because they are so different from their peers, both rebelling against their own generation as well as that of their parents and teachers. Throughout the film they experience all kinds of funny, touching, life-altering situations which cultivate intensity in their relationship which more superficial romances would not have.

Then, fighting in Uganda breaks out under the terrorizing rule of Idi Amin and Thandiwe, whose father is a diplomat for this country, must return with her family there. The two, deciding to make their love count, break every rule in place at their two schools by running away together. They find a motel where they do the deed and are found in bed by the headmaster and headmistress of their two respective schools. Danny is kicked out and sent back to his rural hometown. Thandiwe returns to Uganda, loses both her father and stepmother to the violence there, but sends him a letter which describes her hopes for the future in the closing, visually stunning final scene.

Danny and Thandiwe’s romance is clearly of a different time than that of Bud and Deanie, and the difference shows. The fact that they are not of the same race profoundly points to the changing climate of the world. Globalization and civil rights were profoundly dominating the agents of this change. They are rebelling all at once against capitalist ideals such as racism and order simply by being together. Prejudices form in capital-driven societies, I believe, based on the need to compete. Many times, though not always, we are made prejudiced because we fear our neighbors, who might look, act, or speak differently from us, will surpass our success in this race we run towards accumulating more wealth. They rebel against order by breaking the rules of their respective schools time and time again to see one another, culminating in their ultimate rebellion in completely abandoning the two campuses to have a private time together before Thandiwe leaves. Order is necessary in schools which, according to Barker when he cites a study in which British working-class boys were the subject, “promise personal and social advancement in return for compliance and docility” (417). This growth will make them acceptable to the society they live in, one in which capitalism is king. Danny is thrown out of school for this deed, thus, he won’t be made ready for this induction.

However, the couple is torn apart, despite their persistent rebellion. Despite its successes as well, the dissemination of their romance occurs and we at last see Danny alone and Thandiewe victimized by political unrest which jilted Uganda and continues to cause major quakes throughout the continent of Africa to this day. Conflicts which, I dare say are spawned by this quest for capital which has become a global one.

Our final film and one of the primary texts viewed and discussed during this semester of “The Radical Romance” is the Lou Ye film Summer Palace which takes place in China during the late 1980’s and follows its characters on into the early years of the most recent decade. Released to the viewing public in 2006 (not in America until 2008) without the blessing of the Chinese government, this film revolves around a very unique and resilient young woman named Yu Hong as she is moved from her rural home to the bustling streets of Beijing when she is accepted to the university there. She meets a few good friends and soon falls in love with a fellow student named Zhou Wei. Theirs is a turbulent romance nearly from its inception riddled with infidelities, misunderstandings and the clashing of forces when gender roles and stereotypes are brought thundering down upon the two of them (and expertly resisted by Yu Hong). To add all the more insult to the injuries this internal conflict causes, the Tiananmen Square incident takes place and further distances the two while also augmenting the longing harbored between them.

Unlike with Splendor in the Grass, Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are not exactly repressed by societal rules against sex outside of marriage. For this is a different time and rules change. This time, rules have changed on a global basis, though, more closely reflecting the current state of societal mores in our world. And unlike our young lovers in Flirting, these two characters are only partially separated due to the outside insanity surrounding them; instead, they are torn apart because they cannot reconcile the differences between them. Yu Hong is not a girl who accepts being led, nor the kind of woman who greets her life sitting, waiting for parents, teachers and society to tell her how to live it. That is, she is not this way when she is young, but I’ll save that bit for later. Zhou Wei feels intimidated by her and the expressed goal she has to, “live and live more intensely.” Her determination to reach this goal ultimately creates a power struggle between the two which they cannot resolve. The uproar and following mayhem which takes place at Tiananmen Square serves as the catalyst, the breaking point in their relationship. Yu Hong leaves because she simply cannot take any more violence when a war has already been raging between her and Zhou Wei.

The film follows these two young people into adulthood. All of the optimism, the passion, the deep feeling which consumed their relationship and youth slowly dims to darkness. A close friend of theirs from the colorful days of their stint in college commits suicide. Zhou Wei works jobs here and there around China, goes away to Germany, comes back to work in China. Yu Hong continues to passionately seek the intensity she yearns for in life with high hopes for her future, all while having various affairs with the men she meets. In the end, we find that she is married and working at a gas station in the early years of the new millennium. She and Zhou Wei reunite again, but the passion they felt as teens is gone. The last scene finds them separating, unable to re-harness the urgency and vigor of their youth.

These two succumb to the now global capitalist society we live in simply by growing up. I believe the fact that director Lou Ye placed Yu Hong at a gas station is a very pivotal and intentional decision on his part. She has succumbed to the dull existence she did not want as a teenager, now occupying the roles of society which perpetuate the generation of capital. She is married, thus, children might be in her future. She is working with her husband to make money which will someday provide the bare necessities of life for the children they have. Maybe Zhou Wei will also marry. He is already working, making money. All that is left is to make more capitalists someday.

Their loss of the fight against society is riveting here and I think it is the connector between all three of these films. To “live intensely” as a teenager means losing that intensity as an adult. One might lose this rebellious fight due to being defeated by the accepted social and moral codes of their particular society and era as Bud and Deanie did. Others might not lose their fervor immediately and, indeed, it might be so strong that they never will. However, greater forces, forces as powerful as the determinants for life or death, might separate them. The separation of these kinds of young people, young people like Danny and Thandiwe, seems to speak to more broad phenomena. They are torn apart by outside forces too powerful to resist as young people might be torn from their passion due to the same or vastly different, yet just as earth-shattering forces. On the other hand, the internal conflict which comes with age might be the shredding force, as it was with Yu Hong and Zhou Wei. Maybe it is innate. To lose the vigor of youth, materialized in rebellion, once reality and responsibility settles in. Essentially, all of these youths, regardless of how, lose. Their rebellions are not agents in battles that are won.

I believe these directors, spanning fifty years of filmmaking, are trying to tell us something: the idealistic outlook, the passion, the sheer excitement it is to be young (and in this case in love) comes to an end with age. Even if we do not see their characters into adulthood sometimes, as with the couple in Flirting, we can still assume that this romance was one moment in their lives, the one filled with the passion youth holds. The fact that these romances come to an end is akin to declaring the passion of youth ended. Surely joy does not end with youth and neither does a person stop “living” when they grow older. But, if we take the message of these three directors’ films to heart, one might assume that the same joy and the same kind of living which takes place during the teenage years cannot be replicated once a person must become a bread-winner in this society, a capitalist society. What these films end up doing is coming to a certain risk: they might influence the public to believe youth is the prime of life and no other can be.

One fact is certain though: capitalism has created a general, though not at all total, uniformity of the human experience, just as it spawned the creation of the term “youth” itself. We all experience the things these six young people experience in the realm of the movies, magnified or lessened in intensity, manifesting in various forms depending on time and place. We resist by dying our hair purple or having sex in our parents’ car or latching on to trends such as anorexia and rock n’ roll and consuming cough medicine to get high. Then, we grow up. We make money. We have children who rebel as we did and the cycle continues. We are in an age of relative uniformity because capitalism calls for it in order to succeed. It has led to, “the effacement of [the] individual and cultural difference”, in the words of Susan Bordo in her piece “’Material Girl’: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture”, an age in which our society tends to, “circumscribe our choices”. But I think there is a ray of hope. If we can retain the passion of our youth and continue to inspire little rebellions in our individual spheres to keep us living intensely, maybe some of that rebellion will regenerate the importance of being and remaining unique in our homogenized society. I will do this, find a way to, my own little way. And I hope you will too.

Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality.
Bordo, Susan. ‘Material Girl’: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture.
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory & Practice, 3rd Edition. Los Angeles: Sage Publications,2008

Kazan, Elia. Splendor in the Grass. VHS. 1961
Duigan, John. Flirting. DVD. 1991
Ye, Lou. Summer Palace. DVD. 2008
The Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com/title/tt0106677
The American Film Institute. www.afi.com
“Splendor in the Grass: A Film Review by Don Willmott”. Don Willmott. Filmcritic.com. 2000
“Those Chaotic College Years in Beiging”. A.O. Scott. The New York Times. January 18, 2008