Word: edens
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...eminently multicultural; it addressed a well-founded Native American grievance regarding the law's treatment of Indian minors; and it dovetailed nicely with the public misgivings about the criminal justice system's inability to rehabilitate. By contrast, James offered up the Alaskan islands as a type of Rousseau's Eden where, he enthused, the boys' "attitudes can be affected by nature and nature's god. By beholding ((nature)) you become changed...
...just three films, Dean took America along with him. He walked into Hollywood and with East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant created a trilogy of youthful alienation. Then, at 24, he crashed his Porsche Spyder 550 on a California highway and died. That was nearly 40 years ago, and it marked the birth of Saint Jimmy, Punk Martyr. His life and death have inspired films (September 30, 1955), plays (Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) and dozens of songs. Visits to Dean's Fairmount gravesite have become as much a part of celebrity...
Dean was not, as Alexander posits, the first movie star to project androgyny. (See the early films of Gary Cooper and Cary Grant.) It's true that in East of Eden a whore calls out to Dean, "Hello, pretty boy." And yes, he was pretty: slight and muscular, his body compact, his face beautiful, seraphic, smudged, sleepy-eyed and quite American. Yet his appeal was not the girlish winsomeness of a catamite. It was the lost soul of the postwar teen, glamourized for the movies. In '50s film, that looked revolutionary. Today it just looks brilliant. Dean was important...
...moment when the Australian military police burst in on him and his future wife Yvonne after he went AWOL from army camp. It finds its most complete form in Boyd's painting of Adam and Eve, 1947-48, their bodies like a pair of white tubers, embracing in an Eden that is also the Australian bush, while a huge patriarchal angel glares inquisitively at them from behind a tree and a curly horned ram -- the libido in Boyd's iconography -- stares back...
That's where our most famous alumnus comes in. And remember, he'll punish you if you spurn His Cantabridgian Eden for the Purgatory in Connecticut...