Volume 5, Issue 1: Spring 2009

Death by Discourse, or The Fate of Jimmy in The Wild One

Michael Chappell  

The Wild One embodies a new discourse of speed in American culture not just one of the speeding motorcycle, but one of linguistic change. There are, in effect, three discourses at work in the film—the discourse of speed, represented by the bikers; the discourse of law, represented by the town sheriff and the troopers near the beginning and near the end of the movie; and the discourse of commerce, represented by the various businessmen in town. These discourses conflict with one another throughout the film, but their tensions are most vividly acted out in the café/bar scenes that precede the arrival of Chino and his club. The action in these scenes switches between the two halves of Bleeker’s Café & Bar—the bar side, which is full of bikers, and the café side, where Johnny is trying to get Kathie to go out with him. During a few minutes of action, we see the discourse of speed enacted and the impact of this discourse on this small town microcosm of society at large, representing an inability to communicate.

A key figure in this part of the film is Jimmy, the white-haired old man who works for Frank Bleeker, the café owner. Jimmy moves at a slow pace, always methodical, never rushed, not caught up in the new world of speed that the bikers represent. He speaks slowly and deliberately, never getting excited. He represents an older, slower world, a world that, at least in the popular imagination, existed prior to the acceleration of life that occurred between and after two world wars and the creation and detonation of the atomic bomb, prior to the overtaking of time by the motorcycle and modern jazz.

When Jimmy brings beer glasses to the bar, an irritated Frank tells him to put more beer on ice and that he’d asked for the glasses an hour ago. Frank speaks fast—his focus is commerce and his goal is to profit by satisfying his customers’ needs, which in this case means keeping the beer flowing. His speech represents the business class in town. He may not understand when he is being mocked by the bikers, but he does understand that they have money, and he knows that if he provides a product the bikers want, quickly and efficiently, he will profit. Frustrated with Jimmy’s slowness, Frank tells Jimmy to take care of the bar while he goes to get more beer. The bar is in a happy uproar with beer-drinking bikers and pretty town girls sitting at the bar, milling around, listening to the hot jazz on the jukebox.

A handful of bikers sitting at the bar ask Jimmy if anything ever happens in town. Seemingly unaffected by the raw energy projected by the men and the music Jimmy responds slowly: “Oh yes. Roses grow; people get married.” Jimmy’s answer represents a picture of the idyllic, traditional American life. Jimmy’s diction is simple, easily understood by all. When asked specifically how he spends his time, he says, “listen to the radio; music that is—news no good—excites people.” He also rejects television, which he calls “pictures”: “Everything these days is pictures, pictures and a lot of noise. Nobody even knows how to talk. Just grunt at each other.” The camera then cuts to a close-up of a spinning record in the jukebox and the incomprehensible “ba doodly doodly doo baba she dop.”

This scene with Jimmy is significant because it establishes three generations communicating: Jimmy, the slow, deliberate working-class old man who has always worked; Frank, the middle-aged bar owner, fast, focused on satisfying his customers and building his profit; and the young bikers, whose youth and joy for living invade and ravish the sleepy quiet of the town. The bikers represent the younger generation for whom the profit-focus of the bar owner is not important; nor do they find Jimmy’s idyll of roses and marriage to be desirable. Their focus is on the minute, of experience lived right now, and their penchant for modern jazz—not the Glenn Miller big band smoothness that the bar owner grew up with, but the blaring bebop horns, the scat singing signifying nothing but joy, joy, joy—takes physical form in their need to ride, and to ride fast. This is established at the beginning of the film after the initial warning about the shocking story about to be unleashed on the movie-going audience. Far on the horizon there are motorcycles, then the sound of speeding motorcycles approaching, then they roar past; the viewer’s perspective is from the center of the road, and the bikes fly past in a blur of speed motivated by an excited desire to go. Thus speed is established from the beginning of the film as key to this young generation, and motorcycles and modern jazz both reiterate and codify speed as important in the new discourse of youth.

From the scene of the spinning album, the scene shifts to the café section of the business. Kathie asks Johnny, “Where you going when you leave here?” and when he doesn’t respond right away, but finally says, “O man, we just gotta go,” she says, “Just trying to make conversation. It means nothing to me.” This scene immediately follows Jimmy’s statement about nobody talking anymore. Kathie’s attempt to initiate conversation and Johnny’s vague response shows that Jimmy is right: nobody knows how to talk anymore, and the rest of the scene between Kathie and Johnny shows that inability in its inarticulate painfulness. Johnny tries to explain to Kathie that the reason they ride is not to go to a single, specific destination, but just to go. Movement is the necessity, and his words simply restate the visual presentation of going established in the opening scene of the film. Kathie says she understands and that her father had promised to take her fishing in Canada, but they didn’t go. Johnny, aware that she still does not understand what he is trying to communicate, says with no small amount of sarcasm in his voice, “Crazy.”

Here, as in the prior scene in the bar, the biker language is not understood, and that language carries with it meanings that the non-biker is unable to comprehend. For Kathie, to “go” requires a destination to go to—a family vacation, for example, to Canada—so linguistically and culturally she can only comprehend the need to go as the need to go to a specific place with a specific activity in mind once that place is reached. If that place or activity is not attained, then one has not truly gone anywhere. For Johnny, however, to “go” is exactly that, to go, to be in motion, and the destination is unimportant. To be going is to escape the week’s labor and responsibility, to attain some sense of freedom, no matter how brief, before returning to the demands of work. Johnny’s “Crazy” carries within it what one could call the Beat meaning of “far out, wild,” but as applied to Kathie’s tale of the vacation that did not occur, it must be read ironically or sarcastically. But it can also be read as one is crazy (but especially the young) to see life only through the lens with which Kathie views life. From Johnny’s perspective, then, Kathie is crazy to be so “square”— another word used frequently by the bikers to refer to the citizens of the town. One might also think of confinement in this provincial town as equivalent to confinement in a madhouse where dissent is not tolerated and the “roses and marriage” picture of life that Jimmy sees is clouded by the verbal and physical violence of the townspeople who want the bikers either thrown in jail or beaten.

The scene cuts back to the bar, where a biker is playing fast jazz harmonica. Another biker joins him after he finishes his tune and compliments him on his playing. The harmonica player, cooler than cool, thanks his buddy, then says to Jimmy, “Hey, Pops, give me one of those crazy beers, will ya, man.” The two bikers look at each other and a playful energy passes between them as the word play begins. One biker says to another, “Pop me, dad,” and they slap hands in a noisy high five; the other biker responds, “I popped you, dad.” “Pop” here serves differently for Jimmy and the bikers. First, as applied to Jimmy it is an old time term of endearment for an elderly man. However, “pop” signifies for the bikers as an onomatopoeic verb representing speed and physicality. It carries many biker uses that Jimmy is unaware of—pop the clutch, pop a wheelie, the pop of an open-pipe motorcycle exhaust. Jimmy only registers “pop” as a playful noun used by the young to address the old; the bikers register “pop” as noun and verb, signifying a more complex linguistic state that connects them to speed, to the physical activity of controlling the bike, and to the sound of the biker experience. The bikers appropriate “pop” and invest it with meanings that are outside of Jimmy’s discursive field.

The bikers then ask Jimmy to “thumb” them, then say to him “skin me, Pops,” and one biker says do it “slow, ooze it out.” Jimmy, after being “given some skin” looks bewilderedly at his hand. Is he looking for signs of oil or beatification? The stigmata? The physical contact between the hip bikers and the square old man seems to have some impact on him, but viewers can only speculate on what it is. The harmonica player then asks Jimmy about the music he’d just played—“do you pick up on this jive, man?” Jimmy replies, “what?” and the bikers ask him “did you dig the rebop?” Again Jimmy says, “What?” The two bikers then engage in the scriptwriter’s idea of hip jargon, of jive talk, that simply deepens Jimmy’s confusion—the jive rhythmic hipster talk baffles him and his face betrays an increasing lack of understanding and frustration at the biker chatter. Then the scene closes with a cut to the fast-spinning album in the jukebox and the soundtrack blasts hot jazz horns.

This scene plays out the diversity of social speech types clearly. Jimmy’s simple and direct speech is overwhelmed by the fast-talking, complex, multi-leveled word play of the bikers. Jimmy complained earlier that people are more concerned with pictures and noise than with conversation, but here conversation is shown to be impossible. The bikers speak the same words as Jimmy, but those words are perceived as part of a different language. Though Jimmy and the bikers might be of the same class, language fails them in their attempts to communicate.

Ultimately, Jimmy dies a victim of the new discourse of speed that jazz and motorcycles represent; or, perhaps, it is that jazz and motorcycles symbolize the new world that is becoming fast and heteroglot, not unitary. Jimmy’s discourse is unitary and centripetal; it attempts to control the linguistic scene and it exemplifies the worldview in which he has lived. But the new discourse of speed is centrifugal; it spins outward from the old unitary center and contributes to a heteroglossic world in which viewers of film enter into multiple discourses. In the end, when Johnny’s riderless Triumph runs into Jimmy and kills him, it is the ultimate triumph of machine over man, of a slower generational world view run down by a new, young, fast generation’s world view, one that will accelerate and eventually replace laborers with other machines imbued with the ethos of speed—robots, computers, and satellites. Jimmy leaves a heteroglot world in which the discourse of speed baffles and ultimately destroys him.  

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